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Folktales and Fabulation in Lucrecia Martel’s Films

Joanna Page

Unannounced transitions, ellipses, openings in medias res, truncated dénoue-


ments: examples from Lucrecia Martel’s films would fill a textbook on the
subject of the disruption of narrative linearity. Their apparent rejection of the
codes of storytelling creates an uncertainty and an ambiguity that confound
conventional modes of critical interpretation. This has certainly been the expe-
rience of many of Martel’s critics, who have found her films – in particular, La
ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) and La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004) – stub-
bornly resistant to attempts to tease out deeper meanings or to place them
within their socio-political context (see, for example, Aguilar 2006: 24; Varas
and Dash 2007: 198; Gundermann 2005: 241; Page 2009: 182–94). To add to
the confusion, at different times Martel has variously sanctioned or rejected
allegorical readings of her films. She has been more consistent in describing La
mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008) as an allegory of society’s com-
plicity in Argentina’s most recent military regime (Enriquez 2008); however, as
I will argue below, this reading may occlude a more radical understanding of
the film’s politics.
Martel’s films steer us unequivocally away from transcendental modes of
criticism which would seek an ideological or political ‘meaning’ for the text,
and towards the immanent approaches advocated and practised by Deleuze,
which refer us always to relations rather than essences, construction rather
than interpretation, and to the text as assemblage rather than a set of signify-
ing codes to be cracked. I wish to focus in this essay on these films’ participa-
tion in the creation of stories, not their interruption. My intention is to take
these films, largely consigned by their experimental aesthetics to elite film-
festival circuits, and to read them – with the help of Deleuze and Martel
herself – as texts which nevertheless trace ‘lines of flight’ towards the popular.
Drawing on Deleuze’s notion of fabulation, I will suggest that Martel’s films
imagine and forge new relationships between the artist and the people in the
construction of an alternative form of political cinema. Her use of folktales,
popular beliefs and the structures of oral narration, together with her under-

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standing of fabulation as both an artistic and a political act, reconfigure the


relationship between the elite and the popular, and the intellectual and the
people. They relocate the political in the activity of creation, not in the ideo-
logical ‘message’ of the text, nor primarily in its status as either hegemonic
or counter-hegemonic, the categories that underpin most critical approaches
to uses of the popular in cultural texts.
In their discussion of La ciénaga, Varas and Dash observe the absence of
flashbacks or explanations that would allow the viewer to tie up the film’s many
loose ends, to the extent that ‘a veces toca al espectador adivinar, llenar los si-
lencios o simplemente aceptar la desconexión como parte de la narrativa o del
estado de ánimo y ambiente de los personajes’ [‘it sometimes falls to the spec-
tator to make guesses, fill in the silences or simply to accept disconnections as
part of the narrative or the characters’ state of mind or the environment they are
in’] (2007: 203). Although Varas and Dash read this demand placed on the
spectator as evidence of the film’s lack of narrative coherence, their reference
here to the spectator’s role in making guesses and filling in the gaps allows us
to glimpse an alternative approach to Martel’s films. What happens if we view
the function of these narrative disruptions, not primarily as testifying to the
fragmentary nature of reality, but to the processes by which we construct con-
tinuities between disconnected perceptions, the way we insert events and objects
into imagined frameworks and narrative arcs to try to make sense of them? The
emphasis would then move from questions of interpretation to questions of
construction. In fact, when she talks about her own work, Martel nearly always
refers to it as a kind of experimentation with narrative organization inspired by
oral narration, a way of telling stories that does not correspond to a strict linear
development but is certainly far from unstructured. Although quite different
from the structures with which she was taught to organize material in cinema,
Martel finds the patternings which govern extended speech – even that of peo-
ple with no formal education – to be a rich source of structures for her filmmak-
ing: ‘La deriva, la repetición, la sobreimpresión de temas: todas estas cosas que
suceden en el habla son estructuras que nos sirven para el cine’ [‘Digressions,
repetition, the superimposition of ideas: all those things that take place in speech
are structures that we can use in filmmaking’] (2009a).
Rather than disrupting linearity, Martel’s films are more accurately understood
as creating a polytemporal framework in order to express the associative and
performative nature of recollection and re-enactment. For Martel, polytemporal-
ity is a hallmark of oral narration, a layering of times in which the past is often
seen with the hindsight of the present, or the present and future are prefigured
and anticipated. This leads to a state in which the speaker ‘se disuelve como
sujeto’ [‘dissolves as a subject’] (2009b). While the subject may be speaking at
a particular time, at a particular point in the trajectory of his or her life, and in a
particular place, the complex play of past, present and future tenses dissolves the
boundary of the speaking subject in time and space. Martel gives an example:

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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 73

cuando alguien evoca cosas de su infancia – es la forma más fácil de observar


esto – se puede ver que hay formas de organización de las frases, tonos,
incluso hasta gestos en el cuerpo, que remiten mucho más a la infancia que
al momento o edad en que la persona está diciendo eso. (2009b)

[when someone recalls things from their childhood – and that’s when it’s
easiest to see this at work – you can see that there are ways of structuring
phrases, tones, even bodily gestures, that refer much more to their childhood
than to the moment at which the person is speaking.]

Given the common use of prolepsis and analepsis, and the recovery of earlier
voices in oral narratives, we would be misguided to reserve for elite cultural
forms the temporal complexity that is also characteristic of popular storytelling.
This polytemporality pervades Martel’s films, in which sights and sounds in
the present trigger memories and shape a character’s interpretation of the past,
and, conversely, remembered images and noises can affect a character’s percep-
tion of the present. Such techniques often have the effect of reinforcing the
exteriority of our perspective as viewers, as we do not always immediately grasp
the associative links made by the characters. In La niña santa, for example, we
are unaware of an encounter that has taken place many years before the film’s
present, between Helena, the hotel owner, and Dr Jano, one of her guests; we
cannot therefore initially make full sense of a subjective camera shot showing
Helena flexing her feet, which marks the point at which Dr Jano starts to iden-
tify her with the diver he used to know as a younger man. Left to construct the
meaning of this shot retrospectively, we become aware of spectatorship as an
act of creating links by moving forwards and backwards through what we have
seen of the film so far, relying on our memory of previous scenes to help us
make associations. As Daniel Quirós suggests,

lo que nos revela la película, es nuestra incomodidad ante la falta de claridad,


ya que somos nosotros como espectadores los que buscamos y tratamos de
crear un sentido cronológico de los eventos. Ante las ‘ausencias’ o ‘espacios’
entre las tomas, nosotros somos los que establecemos conexiones lógicas
que organicen nuestra experiencia como espectadores, tan acostumbrada a la
claridad temporal. (2010: 249)

[what the film reveals to us is our discomfort, faced with a lack of clarity,
as it is we as spectators who search for and try to create a chronological
order of events. Faced with ‘absences’ and ‘gaps’ between shots, it is we
who establish logical connections that organize our experience as spectators,
accustomed as we are to temporal clarity.]

The effect of polytemporality in Martel’s productions, then, is perhaps not so


much to leave us disorientated, wandering among the ruins of narrative, but

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more insistently to draw our attention to our own activity in constructing stories
from the visual and auditory fragments before us, an activity we see modelled
repeatedly for us by the films’ characters themselves.
Martel’s films, despite an apparent refusal to tell a story, are themselves full
of stories. In La ciénaga, one of the girls recites a folktale about a woman who
finds a stray dog in the street. She takes it home and feeds it in the yard, along
with her cats, but the next morning she discovers the dog covered in blood and
the cats nowhere to be found. When she takes the dog to the vet and explains
what has happened, the vet seizes an axe and chops the dog in two. It is only
then that the woman sees the dog’s double row of sharp teeth. This is no dog,
the vet tells her. It’s an African rat. This story, which seems to come from no-
where and to be unrelated to the diegesis of the film, turns out not to be acci-
dental to the plot at all: it becomes the cause of Luchi’s probably fatal fall as he
climbs a ladder against the patio wall, fearful that the neighbour’s dog may be
an African rat with ferocious teeth, ready to attack him.
Luchi’s accident throws into relief the contrast between the prevailing
critical approach to these films – which focuses on interpretation and finds a
lack of narrative coherence – and the alternative I wish to suggest here, which
explores the films’ construction and finds instead a wealth of narrative pat-
ternings. Aguilar, drawing attention to the common figure of the accident in
contemporary Argentine cinema, argues that Luchi’s fall at the end of La
ciénaga represents the irruption of chance which destroys any sense of nar-
rative order: as an absurd and arbitrary event, ‘ingresa en la historia para
hacerla añicos, con todo su desconsuelo, su poder y su injustificación’ [‘it
enters the story only to shatter it, with all its grief, power and lack of reason’]
(2006: 49). This sense of absurdity and the unexpected is, without doubt, what
first strikes the spectator. When Martel speaks about the same event, how-
ever, she emphasizes the extent to which the accident has been prefigured in
the narrative of the film. A number of scenes refer to possible or actual acci-
dents, and at one point Luchi plays dead on the patio in a game with other
children. Frequent insert shots of his troubled face during scenes in which
teeth are mentioned, or dogs are heard to bark, clearly indicate the extent to
which the African rat story plays on his mind, producing a fear and a curios-
ity which ultimately lead to his fall. Martel understands this prefiguring as a
hallmark of oral narration:

La muerte de Luciano, que está anunciada un montón de veces, es algo


típico de la narración oral: cuando se narra un hecho que ya ha ocurrido, se
ven antecedentes de eso que se remontan al nacimiento, como si la persona
estuviera condenada desde el comienzo. Frente a lo terrible o lo inesperado,
surge siempre una voluntad que procura incluirlo dentro de un plan. Me
parece que ésa es la estructura de la oralidad. (Oubiña 2009: 68)

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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 75

[The death of Luciano, which is heralded many times, is something which


is typical of oral narration: when an event that has already happened is
recounted, precedents and causes are found which go right back to the
person’s birth, as if he or she were condemned from the very beginning.
In the face of the terrible or the unexpected, a desire always rises to find a
scheme in which to place it. That, to me, is the structure of orality.]

Jerome Bruner, for whom ‘Narrative is profoundly a folk art, trading in com-
mon beliefs about what people are like and what their world is like’, argues
in a similar manner that story-making is a means for coming to terms with the
unpredictable: ‘Stories render the unexpected less surprising, less uncanny:
they domesticate unexpectedness, give it a sheen of ordinariness’ (2002:
89–90). The premonitions of Luchi’s death reveal an attempt to reformulate
the unexpected as part of a hidden destiny. The insistent presence of these
prefigurings in the film should lead us to understand the text not so much as
a narrative representation of events, but a representation of how those events
might be narrativized.
This approach is also suggested by Martel’s identification of La niña santa
as ‘una fábula’, ‘un cuento de esa gente que vive en La Ciénaga’ [‘a fable’, ‘a
story told by those people living in La Ciénaga’]: the film does not relate a
series of events so much as a story that its characters might tell about those
events, and for that reason ‘Le falta un grado más de realidad’ [‘it is another
degree away from reality’] (Oubiña 2009: 68, 78). Martel is not so much in-
terested in portraying the senselessness of the accident, but the processes through
which we protect ourselves from that senselessness. In La mujer sin cabeza
the temporal thrust of La ciénaga is reversed, as the accident takes place at the
beginning of the film and other sights, phrases or sounds – a boy lying uncon-
scious on a football pitch, the ringtone of a mobile phone – seem to return the
protagonist to that earlier time. Whether premonitions of an event to come or
echoes of an event that has (or may have) already taken place, however, both
techniques reveal the process through which we construct stories to connect
perceptions or events. This process is thrown into relief if the films’ narratives
remain inconclusive or characters come to conclusions that are clearly errone-
ous. In La mujer sin cabeza, for example, the finding of a boy’s body in the
canal near to the place where Vero’s car hits something, or someone, may prove
that Vero did run over more than a dog, or it may not: in either case, we are
witness to the mental associations which gradually build into a coherent story
and which make sense of a series of unexplained or disparate events. Simi-
larly, in La niña santa, the girls attending their catechism classes are taught to
listen for the voice or call of God, which will reveal to them their individual
role in God’s plan. It is her search for this ‘call of God’ that allows the young
protagonist, Amalia, to interpret Dr Jano’s sexual touching as a divine message
that her role in life is to save him.

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This desire to locate the terrible or the unexpected within a broader narra-
tive, and Martel’s understanding of religion as precisely such a narrative,
brings her interest in stories and folktales to resonate with the concept of
‘fabulation’ developed by Bergson. For Bergson, fabulation – the bringing
forth of spirits, gods and other forces – has the purpose of supporting the
function of religion in society. Human intelligence gives us a considerable
amount of social autonomy, and left to our own devices we might conclude
that self-interest should prevail over the common good (Bergson 1935: 100–
1). But religion, underpinned by fabulation or myth-making, is there to instil
a sense of social obligation in us and to knit societies together, protecting us
against ‘the dissolvent power of intelligence’ (105). It also prevents us, Berg-
son claims, from succumbing to the despair our intelligence might lead us to
as it makes us aware of our own mortality: it protects us against a sense of the
inevitability of death (109) and allows us to think of a life beyond. Unlike
animals, we are not absolutely sure of ourselves because the end we have in
view is more remote; intelligence leads to a sense of risk, as between our ac-
tion and the result ‘there is more often than not, both in space and in time, an
interval which leaves ample room for accident’ (115–16). By fabulating, an-
thropomorphizing events of nature, looking for intention where there is sim-
ply a mechanism at work, or seeking connections between disparate events
that lend meaning to them we protect ourselves from the unforeseen and the
lack of continuity between our actions and their consequences (117).
In one of the examples Bergson gives to illustrate how fabulation works, a
woman is about to take a lift down to the ground floor of a hotel. Normally, the
lift doors would not have opened unless the lift had stopped at that floor, but in
this case a malfunction had caused the doors to open even though the lift had
stopped at a floor below. As the woman walks towards the lift, she feels herself
suddenly thrust backwards, and senses that the lift operator had pushed her away.
When she recovers herself she discovers that there is no operator there. As
Bergson states, ‘a miraculous hallucination had saved her life’ and stopped her
from stepping into the void (1935: 99). Fabulation for Bergson acts in pre-
cisely this way to protect us. As Ronald Bogue explains, ‘It counters the despair
created through an awareness of one’s death by inducing belief in immortal
spirits, and it checks the depressing recognition of one’s impotence by positing
supernatural intentions in nature that individuals can attempt to utilize, placate,
defer, overcome, and so on’ (2007: 93).
A story told by one of the girls in La niña santa bears a remarkable resem-
blance to Bergson’s anecdote. A man driving a truck at night is stopped by a
woman desperately crying for help. She tells him that an accident nearby has
left a couple dead but their baby is alive and can still be saved. When the firemen
pull the car out of the ditch, the truck driver sees that the woman – dead but still
clasping her breathing baby to her – is the same woman who had stopped him
on the road to beg for his help. The girls terrify themselves with their own

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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 77

story and run shrieking through the undergrowth. But if such stories incite a
frisson of fear or mystery, they also give a reassuring glimpse of an order that
exists beyond our own perception, a plan that gathers up the accidents and
anomalies of life – and there are plenty of those in Martel’s films – into a coher-
ent narrative of judgement and redemption. If her characters’ fabulations do
nothing to explain the mysterious, they ultimately have a consoling effect by
suggesting that, at some (supernatural) level, there is a purpose that holds eve-
rything together. Neither endorsing this belief nor coldly deconstructing it as a
false illusion, Martel allows us to understand the power of such fabulatory nar-
ratives to protect us – in the way that Bergson suggests – from coming face-to-
face with mortality and the cruelly indifferent workings of chance.
Bergson’s fabulation is largely a self-preserving force, operating in what he
refers to as ‘closed societies’, in which certain individuals are included and
others are excluded (1935: 229). This is clearly the scenario of Martel’s films,
which expose the exclusions of race and class on which her conservative pro-
vincial society is founded. The role of religion in preserving the social fabric is
rehearsed with unwitting comicality by the character in La mujer sin cabeza
who welcomes family and friends to a gathering in her house with the words
‘después del heladito, vamos a rezar el rosario’ [‘after we’ve had our icecream,
we’re going to recite the rosary’]. The darker, exclusionary function of fabula-
tion is evident when Aunt Lala seems to refer to the indigenous servants in the
house as ghosts, flitting silently from room to room with the occasional creak
of a floorboard: ‘No los mires y se van’ [‘Don’t look at them, and they’ll go’].
But fabulation in Martel’s films is not restricted to this self-preserving func-
tion. Her emphasis on the creativity of oral narratives also brings her close to
the much more positive associations that fabulation acquires in Deleuze’s re-
working of Bergson’s concept. Deleuzean fabulation is associated with the
creative potential of art, which thrusts into the world images and sounds that
have such power that they can change our understanding of old truths and fab-
ricate new ones. This potential is epitomized, Deleuze suggests, in the docu-
mentary cinema of Pierre Perrault. In the making of Perrault’s films, both film-
maker and subjects (re)invent themselves in the process of storytelling. Perrault
captures his subjects in the act of making legends, but is also implicated in the
same transformatory process of telling stories: ‘He too becomes another, in so
far as he takes real characters as intercessors and replaces his fictions by their
own story-telling, but, conversely, gives these story-tellings the shape of legends,
carrying out their “making into legend”’ (Deleuze 1989: 147).
Unlike Perrault’s, Martel’s films are neither ethnographic nor collaborative;
nor are her characters’ stories – as actors rather than documentary subjects – so
evidently located on a point of tension between reality and fiction. For Deleuze,
however, if the process of fabulation is particularly salient in Perrault’s work, it
is common to all narrative art. Like Perrault, Martel also accords prominence to
the stories of her characters within her own narratives; she also privileges the

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spoken word in her films, and positions herself more frequently as a listener to
stories than a teller of them. That is why her films contain many stories, told by
one character to another, but may not themselves always constitute a fully coher-
ent narrative. Martel has conducted a series of workshops in which she recorded
oral narratives in order to analyse the use of language and the inscription of tem-
porality in particular. She refers to her interest in introducing realistic colloquial
spoken Spanish into her films as very much part of her political commitment as
a filmmaker (Martel 2009a). But crucially, she does not attempt to ‘give a voice’
in a simplistic manner to the subordinated ‘other’ in her films. The perspective
remains firmly that of the white, middle-class protagonists. Her cinema is not
ethnographic in its treatment of race; neither does it construct place with reference
to local customs. Martel deliberately avoids trying to explore marginalization from
within – because ‘esa no es mi vida’ [‘that’s not my life’] (Rangil 2005: 103) – and
instead turns a critical eye on to her own class. Folktales, popular beliefs and
stories are not placed at the service of representing the other, but of allowing us
to see the lines along which identity is constructed, and how it may be dismantled.
That is why these tales are always articulated by Martel’s white, middle-class
characters, and not by the indigenous servants and labourers:1 assigning these
discourses to the ethnic ‘other’ would have an essentializing effect.
Deleuze offers here a way of reconceptualizing the inescapable quandary of
the intellectual whose self-appointed role of ‘speaking for’ the people ulti-
mately reinforces the hierarchical relationship of subjugation, however revolu-
tionary that discourse may be. Not everyone can be an artist, but the artist’s
creativity is an extension of the fabulation in which all people engage. As Philippe
Mengue explains, fabulation ‘is the common element that can connect art with
the people. The people that does not make art can fabulate so as to join (partake
of) artistic fabulation, while art fabulates by addressing itself to a people yet to
come’ (2008: 226).
Martel’s cinematography would seem to respond to Deleuze’s call for ‘Nei-
ther identification nor distance, neither proximity nor remoteness, for, in all
these cases, one is led to speak for, in the place of […]. One must, on the con-
trary, speak with, write with. With the world, with a part of the world, with
people’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 39). This act of creating ‘with’ or ‘alongside’
is evident in the camera’s frequent rejection of the usual role of narrator in
Martel’s films. As she explains,

1 In using the term ‘indigenous’ to describe the community from which the servants in
Martel’s films are drawn, I am avoiding the pejorative overtones of ‘indio’ (‘Indian’) which would
be the more usual name applied by the middle-class, European descendants living in north-western
Argentina. The term ‘indígena’ is frequently used in more formal speech in relation to this com-
munity and does not denote any kind of purity in racial heritage; it does, however, mark the clear
social, cultural and racial divide that separates this group from the wealthy ruling class. The term
‘mestizo’ is not used in this region.

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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 79

La cámara es un personaje con el que me siento muy identificada. Siempre es


alguien que pertenece al mundo de lo narrado. Difícilmente, entonces, podría
mirar como mira una steadycam, o desde arriba, como lo hace una grúa, o
con esa movilidad que puede tener una travelling. Lo que se ve no puede
ser algo mirado por nadie; aunque no es ningún personaje en particular, la
cámara es alguien. Tanto en La ciénaga como en La niña santa, el personaje
que observa es menor que un adolescente y tiene una curiosidad que le
permite suspender el juicio moral. (Oubiña 2009: 77)

[The camera is a character with whom I identify very closely. It is always


someone who belongs to the world of the narrated. It would not be easy, then,
for it to see in the way that a steadycam does, or from above like a crane-
shot, or with the mobility that a travelling shot can have. What it sees can’t
be something that no one could see; although it isn’t a specific character, the
camera is someone. Both in The Swamp and in The Holy Girl, the character
who looks on is younger than an adolescent and has a curiosity which allows
him or her to suspend moral judgement.]

Examples of this technique abound in her films. It is evident, for example, in


the opening sequence of La ciénaga, in which the camera moves with the oc-
casional drunken roll and pitch around the swimming pool. What is significant
here is that we are not afforded a typical point-of-view shot associated with a
specific character: the camera simply acts as if it were another character, present
but unseen, neither an objective onlooker nor identifiable as one of the cast.
Likewise, at the close of the lecture at the medical conference in La niña santa,
the camera moves slowly through the crowd, pausing as if by chance to overhear
conversations before shifting and hovering elsewhere, as if it were just another
delegate unsure of which group to join for coffee. The camera’s role as charac-
ter rather than narrator can also be seen when it gives the impression of having
arrived a little late to scenes, once action has already started, or is placed in the
midst of the action rather than at a distance, too close for a perspective that might
include the full set of interactions between the characters on- and off-screen in
any particular sequence.
If we are to agree with Deleuze that all art partakes in fabulation, then it is
not necessary for an artist explicitly to experiment, as Martel does, with stories-
within-stories or cinematographic modes that suggest a listening role as much
as a narrating one. But by a loosening of plot and a dispersion of narrative
perspective, Martel’s films insist on the important presence in her texts of
stories told by others, and lay bare the co-authoring processes that shape all
narrative art.
Martel links her interest in how we construct a framework for understanding
the world to her loss of religious faith. As she says, ‘Religious education doesn’t
just mean a lot of repressive nonsense that is so readily associated with Ca-
tholicism, but a real vision of the world. If you abandon it, you need to construct

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another vision’ (Wood 2006: 168). Her films may testify to this loss of a central
narrative, but they also dramatize this construction of alternative visions and
stories. For Martel, ‘Quizás ése sea el más primitivo uso de la narración: cu-
ando se cuenta, hay una intención de volver a armar el mundo de otra forma’
(‘Perhaps this is the most primitive use of narration: when someone tells a
story, there is an intention to reconstruct the world in a different way’) (Oubiña
2009: 70). And again,

A mí no me interesa en absoluto contar historias. Pero sí me interesa percibir


un proceso. Cuando uno ve una película, no está durante dos horas frente
a una historia: está frente a un proceso complejo en donde otro pretende
revelarte su percepción del afuera. (Oubiña 2009: 81)

[I am not at all interested in telling stories. What I am interested in is


perceiving a process. When someone watches a film, they do not watch a
story for two hours: they are watching a complex process by which another
person tries to reveal to them his or her perception of external reality.]

To search for other forms of seeing, to construct alternative visions of the world,
is an inherently political activity. In Deleuze’s work, fabulation plays a crucial
role in envisioning new modes of collective life, of bringing forth something
which does not yet exist in actuality. To draw on Ronald Bogue’s summary,

The goal of fabulation is to break the continuities of received stories and


deterministic histories, and at the same time to fashion images that are
free of the entangling associations of conventional narratives and open to
unspecified elaboration in the construction of a new mode of collective
agency. (2007: 106)

Whether they are true or not, the stories characters hear and tell incite them to
make life-transforming (or life-ending) decisions. This power is what Martel
identifies as the most political aspect of her cinema (Guest 2009); it is in fabu-
lation that we are best able to see the immanence of the aesthetic realm to the
world in which it functions.
For Deleuze, the question of what constitutes ‘popular literature’ or ‘mar-
ginal literature’ can only be settled by appeal to ‘a more objective concept – that
of minor literature’. If Deleuze rarely approaches texts we would more readily
classify as belonging to ‘popular culture’, it is because he defines minor, or
minoritarian, literature as ‘a minor practice of major language from within’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 18). As such, he effectively bypasses the question
of whether popular culture is conservative or contestatory by redrawing the
boundary somewhere else: there is not popular art or elite art, but art which is
minoritarian and art which is majoritarian; art which is creative and art which
simply reproduces old perceptions. Indeed, the whole Deleuzean project militates

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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 81

against any kind of stable taxonomy according to which we might assign texts
to the categories of ‘popular’ or ‘elite’, in favour of an unfixing of such identi-
ties expressed by the idea of ‘becoming-other’, or ‘lines of flight’, which allude
to ‘the paths along which things change or become transformed into something
else’.2 If this process of ‘becoming-other’ is common to all art – indeed, for
Deleuze it becomes the definition of art – then Martel’s films, somewhat like
Perrault’s, merely illuminate the fabulatory function of all art, as that which
marks its radical potential for political intervention.
The difference between this understanding of political cinema and that which
underpins a more conventional approach to analysing the politics of a text be-
comes clear if we turn in more detail to La mujer sin cabeza. To interpret the
film as a straightforward allegory of societal complicity in covering up disap-
pearances under dictatorship would be to assign a meaning in the form of ex-
ternal referents, to find fixed correlations between the parts the characters play:
the boy Vero may have run over in her car becomes the disappeared victim, and
Vero’s family represents wider society, which colludes in covering up the crime,
maintaining a veneer of civilization and normality while all traces are erased
and all consequences eliminated. This reading quickly becomes difficult to
sustain, however: the ‘crime’, if it did indeed take place, is an accident, and in
her psychological and emotional distress and disconnection, Vero effectively
cycles through the whole gamut of roles in dictatorship narratives, becoming
irreducible to any one of them: the killer never brought to justice, the amnesiac
victim of trauma, the truth-telling witness. This, of course, is the source of the
film’s rich suggestiveness: far from presenting a simple condemnation of the
complicity of an individual or a family, it uncovers a complex web of unbidden
acts of loyalty in which the truth cannot always be heard, and demonstrates how
the intensely symbiotic relations that bind a community together often obscure
the lines that ostensibly divide it.
To probe La mujer sin cabeza for evidence of potential allegorical meanings
is to assume a hierarchical relationship between the film’s signs and symbols
and a ‘deeper’ political meaning somewhere beyond these. This is the assump-
tion made by symptomatic readings in general, which plunge beneath the
‘surface’ of the text to discover repressed meanings, or to expose hidden ideo-
logical investments that either reproduce or challenge the prevailing power
structures of society. This approach, with its dual Freudian-Marxist heritage,
has dominated the study of popular culture. Many of the most sophisticated

2 Paul Patton provides a concise summary of the different ‘lines’ which compose both indi-
viduals and collectives in the work of Deleuze and Guattari: ‘molar lines that correspond to the
forms of rigid segmentation found in bureaucratic and hierarchical institutions; molecular lines
that correspond to the fluid or overlapping forms of division characteristic of “primitive” territo-
riality; and finally, lines of flight that are the paths along which things change or become transformed
into something else’ (2000: 86).

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82 latin american popular culture

practitioners of what has been called ‘ideological criticism’ (Ernst Bloch and
Fredric Jameson are but two names that come to mind) have taught us to ap-
preciate the emancipatory and utopian impulses to be discovered even in texts
that appear straightforwardly to reinforce dominant social discourses. In its
focus on demystification and unmasking meanings that lie within texts, how-
ever, ideological criticism can be sharply differentiated from the immanent
criticism practised by Deleuze, for whom texts neither represent nor impose
meaning on an existing world, but rather project future worlds. Aesthetic
creation is not a suspect activity, a covert encoding of our most hidden psy-
chological or ideological investments and our entrapment within certain subject-
positions; instead, it is an emancipatory process in which we participate in ‘the
expression and creation of what is not yet, not present or other than actual’
(Colebrook 2001: 99), and take up ‘the challenge of no longer acting as a
separate and selecting point within the perceived world, but of becoming dif-
ferent with, and through, what is perceived’ (132–3).
How might an immanent (Deleuzean) approach to La mujer sin cabeza differ
from a transcendent (allegorical, symptomatic, or ideological) one? In some
respects, the two methods would result in similar readings of the film. An atten-
tive critic starting from either position would want to note the crucial vulnerabil-
ity the film locates at the heart of the apparently invincible hierarchies of class
and race: the potential for counter-hegemonic discourses to insert themselves
within a regime of power. As Jens Andermann observes, Vero’s car accident
initially brings a change, ‘putting her into a state of fragility and confusion that
seems to incubate a new self-awareness’ (2011: 180). The psychological and
emotional dislocation Vero experiences in the period immediately following the
accident opens her up to new encounters and perceptions, epitomized in the
scene in which she finds herself sobbing uncontrollably in the wary arms of a
nonplussed dark-skinned plumber. In the aftermath of the accident, Vero seems
to see the indigenous labourers everywhere around her as if for the first time;
her attempts to approach them are poignant as well as excruciatingly inadequate.
The counter-hegemonic impetus of the film may also be witnessed in Candita’s
intimate friendship with a lower-class girl and the sexual undercurrent of her
relationship with her aunt.
Do Deleuze’s lines of flight connote anything really very different, then, from
a resistance to hegemonic narratives which would be discovered just as easily
in an ideological reading of the film? We can discern that Martel’s films expose
and ‘undo’ hierarchies of class and race without Deleuze’s help. Ideological
criticism, however, is more likely to place emphasis on the re-establishment of
the status quo at the end of La mujer sin cabeza, and to note that the film does
not finally appear to articulate any real possibility of change. As Andermann
points out, by the end of the film Vero has retreated into domestic routine, with
a new hair colour pointing only to the absence of any real inward transformation
(2011: 180). But if Vero eventually turns her back on such opportunities for

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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 83

change, Martel’s film insistently shows us the possibilities for transformation.


Although Vero eventually colludes with the conspiracy of silence, we are left
with a sense, not just of the power of the family – with friends and relations
among the province’s authorities – to cover up the event, but of the radical
potential of the accident to crack open a fissure in the edifice: to shatter iden-
tity, to break familiar routine, to disturb the domestication of perception, to
render visible those who had existed only as shadows. We glimpse the fragility
of the status quo, which can shatter at a few seconds’ notice – with a single
moment of distraction at the wheel – and bring us into altered relations of dis-
tance and proximity with those around us as we become something other than
the self we were previously.
The difference between an immanent critique of the film and an ideological
one may appear in this respect to be one of emphasis rather than direct opposi-
tion. An immanent critique captures the act of storytelling and the subject in the
process of becoming-other rather than the fixed, essentialized identities into
which stories, once told, may coalesce. This distinction, however, makes all the
difference to our understanding of the relationship between cinema and the
political. Both immanent and ideological criticism testify to the power of stories,
but the former’s focus on their construction rather than their meaning keeps ever
before us the possibility for those stories to be constructed differently, which
for Martel becomes cinema’s most political act. In its effort to tie the text to
external (social) referents, ideological criticism is likely to find in Martel’s chal-
lenges to narrative linearity an expression of the impossibility of meaning and
a gesture towards apoliticalism. The filmmaker’s apparent refusal to impose an
illusion of order on to chaotic reality would suggest the destruction of any uto-
pian project, leading to readings such as that of Ana Amado, who declares La
ciénaga to be a key example of ‘el pesimismo y la cancelación de la idea de
futuro’ [‘the pessimism and the suspension of the future as an idea’], a theme
she identifies as recurrent in contemporary Argentine cinema (2009: 236).
Reading Martel’s films through Bergson, Deleuze and Martel’s own fascina-
tion with fabulation allows us to see them very differently: both as a reflection
on, and a participation in, the continual and creative reorderings of time, space
and subjectivity that take place whenever someone engages in fabulation.
Andermann associates the ‘world of accidents and miracles’ that Martel’s
characters inhabit with ‘a state of absolute determination’ in which the subject’s
struggle for self-determination cannot end in the mastery of his or her own
destiny. In his analysis, the ‘strange, superstitious and fatalistic universe’ of
Martel’s films marks ‘the end of history’ (2011: 164). My own reading of these
accidents and miracles points more towards their potential for becoming, for
the creation of alternative futures. If the role of Bergson’s fabulation was to
explain away accidents, in Martel accidents also trigger a more positive
Deleuzean fabulation and have a deterritorializing effect, exposing the subject
to new forms of organization.

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84 latin american popular culture

An immanent approach would focus on the power of stories, not primarily


to oppress and reinforce social exclusion but to create lines of flight: it would
recognize the power of the false, not simply placed at the service of concealing
ideology or the reality of material conditions, but to create new assemblages
and to encourage a ‘becoming-other’ which is at the root of future change. As
Bogue explains,

Deleuze and Guattari reject any notion of revolutionary action as aimed toward
the realization of a plan or design of an ideal society. Rather, revolutionary
action proceeds through metamorphosis, change and becoming, through the
transformation of a present intolerable situation toward some unforeseeable
future. (2003: 84)

An immanent approach might therefore focus – as I have argued that Martel’s


films do – on the becoming-other of the majority rather than the empowerment
of the minority. It would also dispense with the embarrassment of mediation,
as the intellectual/artist is not involved in speaking for, or in place of, the racial
other or the working classes, but in creating alongside them. In Deleuze’s frame-
work, mediation does not imply a loss or distortion of reality but the potential
to unite artist and people in a collective act of creation which plays a decisive
role in political change. Here we might observe the greatest point of divergence
between immanent and ideological approaches, as the latter could not overlook
the fact that Martel’s indigenous characters are not granted a voice or an agen-
cy that would empower them to bring about that change.
Martel’s films participate in a ‘becoming’ which traces a line from the hegem-
onic/elite to the popular, using storytelling devices borrowed from oral narration,
and showing the relative explanatory power of folktales over official religion, or
popular beliefs and folk medicine over mainstream science. The apocryphal,
unattributed texts that the girls bring into their catechism class in La niña santa
syncretize Catholic doctrine; waiting near the hospital X-ray room in La mujer
sin cabeza, Vero is warned against sleeping as ‘si no, la sangre se estanca’ (‘other-
wise your blood will congeal’); Luchi in La ciénaga interprets his own X-rays,
which show the growth of an extra tooth, as evidence that he is turning into an
African rat. The filmmaker takes part in the creative act of fabulation which entails,
as Gregg Lambert describes it, ‘a “becoming” that happens from both directions
– it is both the becoming-popular of the creator or intellectual, and the becoming-
creative of a people’ (2002: 138). Martel’s participation in this ‘becoming-popu-
lar’ avoids either fetishizing the popular as a source of authenticity or resistance,
or patronizing it as a vehicle for the passive consumption of ideology.
Fabulation reminds us that the text is not a passive object lying patiently on
the couch waiting to be analysed. It shifts the emphasis away from the reader
– who has played an eminent role in literary theory since the 1960s – and back
to the writer and the act of writing: away from the deconstructive critic who is

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Folktales and Fabulation in LucreCia Martel’s Films 85

able to pronounce on the ideological meaning and function of a text, and towards
the power of writing and storytelling itself to engender new forms of being and
new experiences of the other. To read texts symptomatically – a common response
to popular cultural texts in particular – may close off their political potential
rather than opening it up. If texts do not represent life but are immanent to it,
do not contain covert or latent messages but constantly produce new perceptions,
and do not substitute signs or images for a real world beyond them, then to read
a text is not to interpret it in the light of a set of already established meanings.
For Colebrook, following Deleuze, ‘The more faithful we are to a text – not the
text’s ultimate message but its construction, or the way in which it produces
relations among concepts, images, affects, neologisms and already existing
vocabularies – the more we will have an experience of a style of thought not
our own’ (2010: 4). This is how the reader or spectator may best allow what is
not ourselves to transform what we understand ourselves to be.
If as critics we limit ourselves to making visible how a text reinforces or
challenges a dominant ideology, we ignore the fact that the function of all art is
to renew perception rather than to convey a message, that its most effective
political strategy – as Deleuze and Guattari admired so greatly in Kafka’s writ-
ing – is not ‘to protest oppressive institutions or propose utopian alternatives,
but to accelerate the deterritorializing tendencies that are already present in the
world’ (Bogue 2003: 84). Martel’s cinema intensifies the destabilizing forces
that are already at work in the social systems she depicts, heightening the
power of becoming that is inherent in the unexplained accidents, popular beliefs,
apocryphal texts and forbidden desires of her films.
And yet her work also suggests a corrective to Deleuze’s distinctly utopian
view of fabulation, as it simultaneously evokes Bergson’s original concept of
fabulation as self-preservation, a function which becomes entirely erased in
Deleuze’s reworking of the idea. These films suggest that the mere act of (self-)
invention does not necessarily involve a creative becoming-other: it does mat-
ter what stories we tell, as some stories reinforce the status quo and police
boundaries while others trace lines of flight across them; some, like Bergson’s
fabulations, produce closed societies while others open up possibilities for al-
ternative encounters. Most proscriptive of all is the story Vero eventually believes:
that nothing at all has happened. In Martel’s films we witness the power of
fabulation both to exclude and to embrace, to discipline and to liberate. By
defining all genuine art as an act of becoming-other, Deleuze conveniently avoids
having to deal with the darker side of fabulation as an act that may originate in
fear and self-protection. What is thoroughly underscored in Martel’s cinema-
tography, however, is Deleuze’s grasp of the political potential embedded in the
telling of other stories, the telling of the stories of others, and the becoming-
other in the telling of our own stories, which is the root of political change. 

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86 latin american popular culture

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