Journal of IberIan and latIn amerIcan StudIeS, 2015Vol. 21, no. 3, 205–219http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14701847.2015.1179850

Establishing the female gaze: narrative subversion in Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa (2004) and La ciénaga (2001)

Katy Stewart

department of Hispanic Studies, university of Sheffield, uK

ABSTRACTThe films of Lucrecia Martel have provided a locus for academic debate about Argentine art cinema, counter cinema, and the “female/feminist gaze” (Slobodian 2012, The Comparatist 36: 160). This article will build on this scholarship in order to consider the ways in which Martel’s films negotiate the problems of constructing a female gaze through the layering and subversion of multiple, transnational, cinematic conventions. While drawing upon Laura Mulvey’s “negative aesthetics” (Butler 2002) and concepts of “slow cinema” (de Luca 2014), this article will not attempt to define or analyse Martel’s aesthetics through a single set of conventions or within a particular cinematic movement. Rather, it will explore how Martel’s filmmaking operates within interstitial spaces, and indeed creates spaces of contestation between and within mainstream, counter, and art cinemas, in which female cinematic expression can be asserted. This will be demonstrated through analysis of the visual and aural aesthetics within La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004) and La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001).1

Introduction

Films can elicit all kinds of emotions in their spectators; profound discomfort and alienation, however, are not among the most common. What is striking about the films of the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel is that this is precisely what they provoke and, rather than binding the spectator to the filmic narrative through conventions of genre designed to produce particular responses, both La niña santa (2004) and La ciénaga (2001) in fact create a distancing effect. Much of the existing scholarship on and criticism of these two feature films has been dedicated to interpreting Martel’s cinematic language, a language Deborah Martin describes as one of “dislocation, alienation and anxiety” (2011, 62). The sense of incoherence and discomfort that Martel creates has been widely recognised and conceptualised, with analyses of the disorienting use of close-ups (François 2009; Lange-Churión 2012), the confusing layering of sound (Russell 2008), and the emphasis placed on sensory, haptic expression (Martins 2011). Such dislocating and distancing techniques have been widely understood as subverting the norms of classical cinema and its dominant patriarchal gaze.

© 2016 Informa uK limited, trading as taylor & francis Group

KEYWORDSargentine cinema; female gaze; feminist film; lucrecia martel; spectatorship

CONTACT Katy Stewart katyjanestewart@gmail.com

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Jennifer Slobodian, for example, posits that Martel shows a distinctly “female/feminist gaze” (2012, 160) in her filmmaking.

Building upon existing scholarship, this article will interrogate the concept of a female gaze within Martel’s work, with a focus on La niña santa, and drawing upon La ciénaga for comparison. Through analysis of Martel’s use of visu al and aural expression, it will be argued that Martel’s films locate themselves in interstitial positions, which allow for the appropriation and subversion of both classical cinema tropes and the realist conventions which defined the Third Cinema movement in Argentina and across Latin America. I will propose that by working within the interstices of global and local influences in this way, Martel not only breaks down classical form, but also re-forms and remodels cinematic conventions to create distinctly female expression in film. I will contend, however, that the female gaze of Martel’s films remains a problematic one, but that the techniques she employs open up new, con-testable spaces in which female cinematic expression can be negotiated, employing a trans-national network of influences.

Martel and the aesthetics of realism

In his influential work, Questions of Cinema, the film theorist Stephen Heath emphasises the need for films to have a coherent narrative structure in order to provide an intelligible ren-dering of reality. Quoting Lawson, he says: “Narrative is there immediately in film, in cinema, to lay out the images, to support the frame against its excess […] (thus for Lawson, ‘the total rejection of a story, and the accompanying denial of syntax and arrangement, can only lead to the breakdown of cinematic form.’)” (Heath 1981, 12–3). In alignment with some of the conventions of what Tiago de Luca has termed “slow cinema,” that is, contemporary art cinema in which “realities [are] highlighted in their sensory, phenomenal and material plen-itude” (2014, 11, 13), a deliberate undermining of coherent narrative structure is present in both La niña santa and La ciénaga, leading to just such a “breakdown of cinematic form” (Heath 1981, 13), or at least of classical form.2 In both films, Martel constantly disrupts the linear narrative structure, using distancing mechanisms to prevent the spectators from iden-tifying with her characters and becoming absorbed in the story. Critics have repeatedly noted the lack of plot, particularly in La ciénaga, Martel’s debut feature film. Indeed, rather than a clear, linear arc to follow, the spectator is led on a series of narrative dead-ends con-cerning the dysfunctional life of Mecha, a middle-aged matriarch, and her extended family at their Salta summer home. events seem to unfold at random, and every time there is a moment of narrative tension and potential forward-motion of plot, it is quickly subverted, and the narrative redirected. The visual focal point of the film, if there is one at all, is a dirty swimming pool around which the adults get drunk, representing the “swamp” of the title. The children are left to roam unsupervised, sometimes armed with shotguns, and they often end up at an actual swamp, in which a helpless cow is stuck. every element of every shot seems designed to saturate the film with a sense of “stagnation,” as Pedro Lange-Churión puts it (2012, 473). This makes for uncomfortable viewing, creating a dense atmosphere in which not only the characters, but also the spectator, feels trapped.

A plot structure is more discernible in La niña santa, though its structure too is subverted at every opportunity. The protagonist, a Catholic teenager called Amalia, lives in the hotel which her mother, Helena, manages. During a medical conference at the hotel, one of the attendees, Dr. Jano, touches Amalia inappropriately, provoking within her a simultaneous

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sexual and religious awakening, which manifests itself as she undertakes what she believes is her mission to set the doctor on a path of enlightenment. Helena, meanwhile, is attracted to Dr. Jano and begins to try and seduce him. The tension between these three characters is sustained throughout the film, in contrast to the frequent breaks and forks in narrative direction of La ciénaga. However, nothing is ever quite as it seems in La niña santa. By employ-ing techniques of excess which overwhelm both visual and aural expression, Martel once again breaks down clear linear narrative structure and destabilises a secure spectatorial position.

If Martel’s films constitute an undermining and destabilisation of classical cinema’s form, it is due, at least in part, to the way in which she applies realist aesthetics. Classical narrative cinema, emanating primarily from Hollywood, has long concerned itself with creating the illusion of realism: the whole purpose of the rules governing the framing, suturing, and montage of shots is precisely to produce, according to Christian Metz, “the strong impression of reality” (1974, 7). The objective in narrative cinema is therefore to generate the “closed system” that Gilles Deleuze refers to (1986, 12), a central point in his concept of movement-im-age, in which the linear narrative is prioritised, and anything which threatens the coherence and continuity of that narrative is cast out of the frame. Given that this is the system which governs dominant cinema, counter cinemas have long used techniques to disrupt it, and to break the illusion of realism, preventing the spectator from suspending disbelief.

While no film, by the very limitations of the camera’s eye, can represent reality in its full-ness, film can draw attention to the fact that a great deal exists outside of the frame, rather than enclosing itself in its own, complete world. In Argentina, such realist aesthetics have been particularly associated with Third Cinema, the Marxist-influenced manifesto advocated by octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas (1969). Viewing film as a tool for social change rather than an untouchable work of art, Third Cinema films are often shot on low budgets, with grainy film reels, using non-professional actors. Background noise may disrupt speech; shots may not be perfectly composed. In this way, the artifice of the creation of a “realistic” narrative film is revealed. Nevertheless, Third Cinema, born from an intellectual, political manifesto, has a strong purpose which is easily understandable for the spectator. It is a cinema in explicit opposition to Hollywood cinema, and many Third Cinema films, as exem-plified by those of Solanas, are didactic in nature – their point is to convey an urgent message to the masses which will inspire active change in society.

Martel’s films do not subscribe to Third Cinema principles any more than they do classical conventions. While there are, undoubtedly, political elements to her work, as demonstrated by Joanna Page (2009, 180–94), on the level of aesthetics, her realist techniques diverge entirely from either set of conventions. If, as Christine Gledhill proposes, “the notions of realism and genre are totally opposed” (2000, 67) – and by realism we understand coun-ter-cinema’s realist project, rather than classical cinema’s illusion – then Martel’s films locate themselves within the interstices somewhere between the two, drawing together elements of both realist aesthetics and genre conventions in deliberately problematic and uncom-fortable ways. The films do use some of the tropes of de Luca’s slow cinema – the filming of “observational scenes devoid of dramaticity” (2014, 11), for example – but again, these are appropriated in a non-binary manner which frustrates attempts at definition. Where de Luca cites common tropes of slow cinema as “solitary characters and empty environments” (2014, 11), Martel over-fills her scenes with claustrophobic, domestic spaces and too many bodies. one of the distinctive features of Martel’s work is the way in which she considers the camera:

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“[it] is like another character, so I cannot put it in the place of somebody who’s already in the film” (interview with Taubin 2009, para. 29), and this becomes clear in the lack of either establishing shots or subjective shots. Instead, the camera regularly sees things from odd angles, or from behind obstructions to the view. In the aural domain, Martel’s films are rather more aligned with slow cinema characteristics, in which “sounds are sensory components whose heightened physicality stands out in their own right” (de Luca 2014, 12). In La ciénaga, ambient, diegetic sounds are the only soundtrack, and sounds such as a phone ringing or the clattering of dishes have the same auditory privilege as the dialogue.

These films, then, neither create an illusion of reality nor draw attention to the realism of film in a purposeful way, and because of this, they in fact come closer to reality as it is expe-rienced, beyond the confines of cinema. The paradox is that, given the limits of film, this is less comprehensible and more disturbing for the spectator. This brings to mind Alain Badiou’s assertion that “the truth is solely constituted by rupturing with the order which supports it, never as an effect of that order” (2006, xii). Since it is the truth of reality, rather than its illusion being sought, the films break with narrative order and intelligibility. The images on-screen become too close, negating necessary spectatorial distance which usually facilitates com-prehension; something Metz refers to as the “gulf” between voyeur and film (1982, 60). Yet at the same time, as Martel herself maintains: “I think what I do is really ‘false.’ For me, a film is not just storytelling but an attempt […] to share some perceptions with the viewer” (inter-view with Taubin 2009, para. 21). It is this enigmatic blend of falseness – exaggeration, allu-sions to magical realism, satire – and the close realism of the camera and soundtrack (the individual elements of which are so interwoven that they are impossible to separate or sometimes even locate) that creates so much disturbance in Martel’s films.

Theorising the female gaze

The paradoxes alluded to above, which characterise both La niña santa and La ciénaga, can be understood in terms of establishing a female gaze within cinema. Laura Mulvey first put forward the concept of cinema’s “male gaze” in her seminal and polemical paper “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975, 11), and argued for a “decisive break” (Butler 2002, 8) with mainstream cinema in order to allow for the construction of a female gaze. Mulvey identifies three “looks” of cinema: “that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion” (1975, 17). In recent years, it is the gaze of the audience which has been most critical to the feminist film debate, and Williams claims that: “what is missing from Mulvey’s influential analysis […] is any discussion of the position of the female viewing subject” (2000, 483). However, there is a body of research demonstrating that within a patri-archal system, female identity is cast only in its relativity to that of the male, and is composed of negative elements in comparison to the male positives. It stands to reason, therefore, that cinematic form, created within such a system, can only be encountered from the perspective of a male gaze. As Ann Kaplan clarifies: “the gaze is not necessarily male (literally), but to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious, is to be in the masculine position” (2000, 130). Mulvey’s argument for a fundamental break from the accepted male gaze and the construction of a radical alternative, by means of highly experimental, avant-garde cinema is thus understandable. Yet this in itself leads to one of

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the key problems in the theorisation of a female gaze: how can a female gaze be satisfactorily conceptualised if its very definition is one based on negation, and on what it fails to do?

Alison Butler provides a cohesive overview of the criticism of Mulvey’s “negative aesthet-ics” (2002, 6), pointing out that Mulvey herself saw such negation as a starting point in the development of the female gaze, rather than its resolution. Butler posits that contemporary “women’s cinema” in fact succeeds in “re-inflections of its practices rather than opposition to the mainstream” (2002, 8). This is where Martel’s films may offer new insights. Given the Argentine context and the influence of “slow cinema” aesthetics, these films are not neces-sarily operating within the mainstream, but are not simply opposing it either. Instead, Martel draws upon and refracts prismatic influences from different cinematic codes in order to develop a more nuanced, complex way of looking, and a richer vocabulary for a female cinematic language.

In some ways, the social and economic context in contemporary Argentina has provided a fertile ground for filmmakers like Martel to establish distinct female forms of expression. The 2001 economic crash propelled filmmakers to find new ways of working, producing a rupture with old methods and styles, and as Page says, “new directors often deliberately chose to inhabit the interstices, making ‘small’ films that signal in their form the interrelations between production, politics, commerce, and aesthetics that become much more marked outside First World centers of filmmaking” (2009, 33). It is within this context that Martel has emerged as one of the most critically acclaimed filmmakers of her generation, and has taken the opportunity to subvert the patriarchal gaze differently to models of negation or opposition.

Martel’s films are located in the interstices of global, rather than just national cinema. Shaw (2013) explains the complex transnational funding situations of both La niña santa and La ciénaga which relied on european as well as Argentine co-producers and grants, complicating the concept of these films as “national” cultural products. Furthermore, on an aesthetic level, Martel’s films work within global systems of cinema, but in creative, transna-tional ways, which are crucial to the development of female cinematic expression. Martel’s cinema, as we have discussed, is neither a counter-cinema nor a cinema which operates solely from within the mainstream model. Rather, she knowingly appropriates and subverts classic genres, allowing her to layer elements from different cinematic practices. It makes her films a unique blend of experimental avant-gardism, Argentine political cinema, and the subversive use of genre from Hollywood’s classical cinema. While such a practice does dest-abilise the spectator’s usually secure position, it does not necessarily negate satisfaction altogether, since multiple facets of meaning and perception are created within every shot. Thus the spectator, while disoriented, can nevertheless find ways of engaging with these films. By understanding the interstitial positions they occupy, a broader, more inclusive understanding of female expression and the potential for the establishment of a distinctly female gaze of cinema may be realised.

Female subversion and the visual domain

Classical cinema theory, influenced as it is by psychoanalysis, has a preoccupation with Freudian castration anxiety and female lack. As Mulvey (1975) and Heath (1981) both point out, classical film must overcome this trauma by safely objectifying and fetishizing the female presence. The woman becomes, as Heath puts it, “theatre […] for the male gaze” (1981, 160).

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If voyeuristic distance is maintained through a strong, coherent narrative, in which an invi-olable space exists between spectator and image, then the female lack poses no real threat to the security of the male gaze. It stands to reason, then, that in the development of a female gaze for cinema, such constructs must be challenged. Inhabiting an interstitial position allows Martel to appropriate and subvert the signs and meanings of classical cinema, and in doing so, the male gaze is destabilised.

In La niña santa and La ciénaga, the familiar is estranged and visual narrative arrangements are deliberately misleading in terms of our expectations of classic cinematic signs. The spec-tator is prevented from determining the significant elements of a scene, and thus spectatorial expectations are inverted. La niña santa opens with a scene of a young woman singing. The camera focuses on her, interspersed with shots of a crowd of girls who are listening to her. She is the archetypal “good” woman of classical cinema: in a clear soprano voice, she sings a hymn, delicate tears spilling onto a face that seems free of make-up. Her purpose is to be an object of adulation for her audience. She appears untouchable, virginal, fragile: a safe position to satisfy the male gaze without posing any threat to it. Given the framing of this scene, and the focus of her within it, we would expect her to be a significant character. However, it is quickly made apparent that the protagonist, Amalia, is one of the sullen-looking girls in the crowd, while the woman we take to be a significant character has only a minor role. It is a subtle shift of normal, classical perspective, with just a little too much emphasis on a minor character, but it is a powerful one, because not only are the spectator’s expecta-tions of the narrative upturned, but also the female protagonist exerts an active control of the gaze, rather than being the object of it, and she continues to be the owner of the gaze throughout the film. This imbues the film with a deep irony, based on our expectations of it from the title and how this early scene is set up, and it only becomes increasingly disturbing for the male spectating position.

While in La niña santa it is the trope of the good woman that Martel plays upon in the opening scene, in the early scenes of La ciénaga, the main character, Mecha, represents the bad woman in need of saving. According to Mulvey, one of the ways in which the female threat can be contained and controlled within the male gaze is by the “re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object” (1975, 13–4). Mecha is a guilty woman in need of saving: after spending the day getting drunk by the pool, she rises from her chair and trips, sending glasses flying and cutting her chest on the shards. She lies sprawled on the ground, embodying the trauma of the female object, yet she is ignored by the other adults, including her husband, who simply continue to sit and drink. In the end, it is the children and the maid who come to Mecha’s aid, showing up the men as impotent and incapable of resolving the trauma of the problematic female presence, and disempow-ering the male gaze.

It is not only the female characters who pose problems for the male gaze in Martel’s films, but also the lack of linear narrative development, as discussed earlier, and this asserts itself powerfully in the visual domain. Heath discusses Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory on the importance of language in establishing the (male) ego, once it has recognised itself as sep-arate from its mother – the origin of alienation from, and awareness of, the other’s lack. If language functions as a way of creating a secure, coherent sense of self, then this is also the function of classical cinematic language: its purpose, as Heath indicates, is “the effacement (or filling in) of the absence, the suturing of the discourse” (1981, 87). By undermining the

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coherence of shots and sequences of shots, Martel opens up the absences which haunt language.

In both films, most of the action occurs within domestic spaces, settings which are enclosed and gendered. Beds and bedrooms form the central spaces, foregrounding and making public those spaces which are usually private, and in which women dominate. Wider patriarchal society is reduced to near-invisibility, and the cinematic narrative is therefore physically confined to, and restricted by, feminine space. This provides opportunities to further destabilise and subvert it. Within these domestic spaces, close-up shots are used frequently in order to add to the sense of claustrophobia and to inhibit perception. As mentioned earlier, numerous analyses of the films have examined Martel’s unusual compo-sition of shots and, particularly, the disorienting effect of close-ups; the aim here is to show how these shots work to deconstruct the male gaze.3 Close-ups have an alienating power because they represent, as Mary Ann Doane, explains, the image’s “uncontainable excess” (2003, 105). The significance of this for destabilising the language of classical cinema is clear, given language’s purpose to hold and contain the ego. Martel’s disorienting use of these shots in domestic, female spaces prevents secure spectatorial identification, leading to a situation of both distance from the filmic narrative, and the suffocating closeness of the image.

The use of close-ups is compounded by the lack of establishing shots. The effect of this is to render the spectator unable to build a coherent picture of the more general geographical layout, creating a sense of entrapment within the image. Furthermore, the angle of shots is often deliberately off-centre, and characters wander in and out of shot, often with only parts of their bodies within the frame. The spectator is also prevented from seeing things from the physical point of view of any of the characters, frustrating classic identification with the protagonist, and once again there is an awareness of the fictive world of the film.

According to Ana Forcinito, “el cine de Martel reflexiona acerca de la mirada patriarcal […] y acerca de la posibilidad de las mujeres de apropiarse de esa mirada” (2006, 110). I would say that, with the techniques Martel applies in the visual domain, she is deconstruct-ing, rather than appropriating, the male gaze. It is not that patriarchal systems are altogether negated: Shaw’s “queer cinema” reading of La niña santa, for example, demonstrates that the patriarchal system of the Catholic Church is ever-present in the film, and is the guiding force behind Amalia’s “desire to save [Dr. Jano]” (2013, 172). But through the subversion of this system, not least through the complexity and ambivalence of Amalia’s character, making her anything but the “holy girl” suggested by the title, such a patriarchal system is constantly questioned. Character development is one level at which Martel destabilises the male gaze; perhaps an even more profound threat to it lies in the way in which she uses the camera and composes each shot. By prioritising confusing, layered space over narrative time and by estranging the familiar, a powerful sense of absence and lack is brought to the fore. In Deleuze’s theory of cinema, the cohesion of movement-image, the linear narrative, is con-stantly threatened by time-image, that is, “the measureless, the gigantic, the immense” (1989, 46) aspects of time, which cannot be contained by classical cinematic discourse. It could be argued that Martel exploits the vulnerabilities of the movement-image structure and opens up the ambivalences and absences of time-image. These are unstructured spaces in which the male gaze can be deconstructed. This allows for a process of self-questioning within the spectating subject, who no longer is in a position of control, and the possibility emerges for new, female, expressions of cinematic language.

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Aural effects on the gaze

While the visual is the most salient domain in which to deconstruct the gaze, the aural has an equally profound impact upon maintaining or destabilising narrative structure and the security of spectatorial satisfaction. If we are to accept that, as Kaja Silverman says, “film theory’s preoccupation with lack is really a preoccupation with male subjectivity and with that in cinema which threatens constantly to undermine its stability” (1988, 2), then we need only turn to dominant discourses of aural objects within film theory in order to understand how destabilising an influence this domain can have. Metz proposes a difference in a spec-tator’s comprehension of the aural versus the visual; for him, the visual presents something concrete, while the aural signifies uncertainty: “if I have distinctly and consciously heard a ‘lapping’ or a ‘whistling,’ I only have the feeling of a first identification, of a still incomplete recognition” (1980, 25). According to Heath, in order to overcome this lack or uncertainty, cinematic conventions dictate that the aural should be subordinated to the visual, and that non-speech sound be subordinated to speech, while speech itself should be meaningful, visible, and supportive of narrative coherence (1981, 199–202). In dominant classical cinema, the coherent synchronisation and subordination of sound to image reasserts a sense of certainty and complete identification. Silverman argues that within classic cinema, the male subject is far more privileged to speak from extra-diegetic spaces, framing the narrative, while the female subject is normally constrained to speaking from within that frame. In doing so, “classic cinema’s male viewing subject sustains what is a fundamentally impossible iden-tification with authoritative vision, speech, and hearing” (1988, 54). At a stroke, the male fear of lack is overcome, and the female is doubly subordinated.

Martel astutely manipulates these aural conventions. Firstly, as touched upon earlier, she dismantles the hierarchy of sound that Heath discusses by not prioritising speech over back-ground noises. Dominique Russell describes her treatment of sound as “a tendency […] to relativize speech, mostly through proliferation, ad lib, loss of intelligibility and decentering” (2008, sect. 1, para. 13). Indeed, in La ciénaga, for example, dialogue regularly takes place beneath a cacophony of ringing telephones, scraping chairs, and squabbling children, making it hard for the spectator to follow what is being said. on one level, this can be read as an application of realist ethics within the Argentine tradition; a similar lack of subordination of background noise can be found in Fernando Solanas’ documentary, Memoria del saqueo (2004). Yet Solanas also privileges an authoritative, authorial male voiceover, thereby re- establishing the security of the male gaze. In Martel’s films, the spectator is cast adrift in a fictive world, with an utter lack of any such stabilising narration. Thus Martel subverts both classical and neorealist conventions, leaving no option for secure spectatorial identification.

The potential of Martel’s aural manipulation for destabilising the male gaze (in terms of the spectatorial position) becomes even more significant if we apply Julia Kristeva’s concept of the chora. Kristeva defines the chora as “an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases” (1984, 25–6), which characterises the pre-oedipal, and therefore pre-symbolic, stage of development. She elab-orates on the concept, outlining that the chora is “analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm [and] effectuates discontinuities by temporarily articulating them and then starting over, again and again” (1984, 26). For Kristeva, this is the pre-language through which a mother and child bond and communicate, and which provides a distinctly female, abstract space unbounded by patriarchal rules of language. The chora therefore exists outside of the

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semiotic system and resists the establishment of a meaningful series of signs which would create a coherent narrative. It can also support the concept of gendered difference in the concept of time, something which Cynthia Tompkins (2009) discusses. For Tompkins, mas-culine time is linear, as the dominant movement-image structure of classical cinema would suggest, while feminine time is cyclical, corresponding both to Kristeva’s chora, with its repeated pulsations, and to the Deleuzian theory of time-image, in its similarly ambivalent and abstract nature.

In La ciénaga, even when character dialogue can be heard, it does little to progress any meaningful narrative; in fact, it regularly obstructs linear progress. The ambient sounds, meanwhile, have a repetitive and almost cyclical rhythm: the firing of shotguns, the splashing of water and the ringing of phones are sounds which return throughout the film, without the plot having advanced in any meaningful sense. Much of the aural in Martel’s work, then, could be understood as the embodiment of Kristeva’s chora, since the non-speech sounds are emphasised, discontinuous, and repetitive. Such aural expressions are repeated and layered frustrations of classical cinema’s semiotic order. By using them, Martel is able to construct feminine notions of cyclical time, something which directly challenges the dom-inant, male, spectatorial position.

More disorienting still for the spectator is the way in which the aural is frequently and knowingly disassociated from the visual. If the synchronisation of sound exists to anchor the aural to the visual, and thereby to maintain a strong narrative flow, the subversion of this synchronisation is prolific in Martel’s work, particularly in La niña santa. Russell describes much of the soundscape of this film as “enigmatic and unlocatable” (2008, sect. 3, para. 21), which directly and profoundly challenges the dominant conventions. early in the film, Amalia and her friend Josefina converse in whispers about forbidden topics, such as their bible study teacher’s supposed romantic relationship. These whispered conversations continue as the camera’s gaze turns to different objects, dislocating the voice from the image. This technique is further amplified in a scene by the pool at the hotel, in which Amalia, lying on a lounger on a level above the bathers, recites catechisms relentlessly in whispered tones while the gaze of the camera turns first to Dr. Jano, the object of Amalia’s focus and desire, then to her mother, Helena, who suffers with tinnitus. Briefly, the spectator hears the world as Helena perceives it, which adds a layer of disorientation by further distancing the aural perception of Amalia’s whispers from her visual character. There is a moment of silence as the water affects Helena’s hearing, which leaves the spectator in a state of confusion, before the ambi-ent sounds and whispered catechisms return.

This scene creates an intense feeling of disorientation and discomfort, which can be understood in terms of Silverman’s theory. She says: “to allow [a female character] to be heard without being seen would […] disrupt the specular regime upon which dominant cinema relies: it would put her beyond the reach of the male gaze” (1988, 164). Martel sep-arates Amalia’s voice from her bodily presence and simultaneously disempowers the gaze of Dr. Jano by allowing Amalia to gaze at him. Shaw points out that subject/object roles are not simply reversed, however; “he is not the ‘bearer of the look,’ to use Mulvey’s terminology in her analysis of Hollywood models, rather ‘he cannot bear to look’” (2013, 172). This again highlights the complexity of Martel’s cinema, which is not an oppositional counter-cinema, but works to deconstruct the male gaze on multiple levels. By connecting the spectator’s inability to look, through the disassociation of the aural from the visual, with Dr. Jano’s inability to look, female voice and female gaze are liberated as one, inducing a powerful

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sense of lack in the spectator. Following patriarchal cinematic convention, the spectator seeks the female within the frame, but because both her voice and gaze have been placed outside of this space, the search is ultimately unsuccessful. Thus, by first exploring the poten-tial of expression beyond language, which occupies a feminine space, then by liberating both the female voice and gaze within this space, which exists, like time-image, in vast abstractness beyond the frame of classical cinema, the male gaze becomes impossible to sustain.

Establishing a female gaze

According to Jennifer Slobodian, “Martel’s use of multiple senses to produce a reaction from the viewer operates as an alternative cinema that subverts the clear boundaries” (2012, 171). Corporeal communication in both films can be understood as one of the senses that Martel activates within her cinema. Within feminist critical theory, women’s bodies figure both as a central site of communication and as a signifier of female lack. Luce Irigaray advances the idea of distinct, corporeal, and problematic female communication. In “Sexual Difference,” she says: “each self-discovery [of women] takes place in that area which cannot be spoken of, but that forms the fluid basis of life and language” (1987, 128), and in This Sex Which Is Not One she cautions that: “If we don’t invent a language, if we don’t find our body’s language, it will have too few gestures to accompany our story” (1985, 214). This recalls Kristeva’s con-cept of the chora as feminine space of expression inextricably linked with the maternal body. If, as Irigaray suggests, women are unable to fully express themselves within the linguistic and semiotic systems of patriarchal society, including those of classical cinema, then perhaps haptic expression can form a basis of feminine communication, which exists outside of that dominant system.

of course, the female body already occupies a central place as an object of desire in classical cinema, but it is a safely fetishized object, in which Metz’s voyeuristic distance is carefully preserved. Within cinema, however, exploring the kind of corporeal language that Irigarary proposes is no easy task. As mentioned above, one of the fundamental problems for theorising the female gaze is precisely the position of the female body as an object of desire within dominant cinema. This creates a situation in which, as Doane indicates, “for the female spectator there is a certain over-presence of the image – she is the image” (2000, 423). The female spectator therefore lacks the kind of distance required for the type of scopo-philic voyeurism to which Metz refers.

Martel’s answer to this problem is to directly confront female over-identification with the image by overwhelming the spectator’s gaze with haptic communication, thereby removing the male capacity for voyeuristic distance. Her use of close-ups for destabilising effect, as discussed earlier, is particularly applicable to corporeal shots.4 The centrality of the relation-ships between mothers and their children in both films is expressed through physical prox-imity, often on beds, with close-up shots to confuse perspective, and leave the spectator unclear as to where one body ends and another begins. In this sense, the haptic expression is a physical representation of the chora and the cyclical, corporeal aspects of feminine time. Sexual relationships are also present, whether implicitly or explicitly, in both films, and they are always transgressive. Suggestions of incestuous relationships in particular haunt them. Combined with the significance of the close-up shots, in a psychoanalytical context, such haptic expression therefore evokes oedipal trauma. This destabilises and dislocates the male

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gaze; rather than the female object being safely fetishized and available for voyeuristic desire, the required distance is encroached upon from every angle. The female image overwhelms, and it brings its traumatic potential to the fore.

As well as employing haptic expression within the visual domain, Martel applies it within the aural, once again in order to minimize the distance between spectator and object. In La niña santa, sustained close-up shots of characters’ ears reinforce the aural closeness and disorienting effect of the soundtrack. Furthermore, by disassociating the aural from the visual as she so frequently does, Martel creates a situation in which the spectator’s sight is no longer the privileged sense, and other senses are activated. This has the powerful effect of allowing her cinema to be physically felt on the spectator’s body. As Russell reminds us, “[Martel’s] sound is not necessarily experienced through the ear, but liminally, on and in the body” (2008, sect. 2, para. 21). Through this haptic communication then, which operates on multiple levels, the films open up the vastness of the chora and of female bodily expression and communication in a way which is much more elemental and abstract than language, and which interacts physically with the spectator. It is by combining visual, auditory, and haptic expression, which interact physically with the spectator, that Martel’s films have such a pro-foundly destabilising impact and allow for negotiations of distinctly female expression.

The uncomfortable position of the spectator in relation to Martel’s films has been empha-sised throughout this article, and it is perhaps expressed most clearly in critic Kent Jones’ much-cited review of La niña santa, in which he perceives “a rich sense of the utter weirdness of adolescent girlhood: equal parts tenderness and ferocity” (2007, 44). He thus demonstrates the exact good/bad paradigm of femininity which exists in classical cinema, and which Martel is manipulating. When the male gaze cannot own the female object, that object becomes deeply traumatic and “weird.” As Kaplan puts it, “[m]en do not simply look; their gaze carries with it the power of action and of possession that is lacking in the female gaze. Women receive and return a gaze, but cannot act on it” (2000, 121). In La niña santa, Amalia breaks this cinematic rule repeatedly and devastatingly. She is an active subject rather than a con-trolled object, and therefore destabilises the male gaze. Not only does she act upon her gaze in her pursuit of Dr. Jano, but she also turns the same active gaze directly upon the spectator for sustained periods of time, linking the diegetic disempowerment of Dr. Jano’s gaze with that of the spectatorial gaze.

In La ciénaga, Momi, Mecha’s adolescent daughter, exhibits a similar kind of problematic gaze. It is perhaps less developed as a technique than in La niña santa, but again, Martel gives ownership of the gaze to an adolescent female character and problematizes the female object within the film. In one scene, Momi stands in front of a double mirror, which both splits and multiplies her image, and leaves the spectator unsure as to where she is actually located. A short time later, we see Momi in the shower, and for a brief period, Martel sets up a classic scenario, showing Momi slowly undressing. Yet, this image is quickly subverted, as Momi is given ownership of the gaze. She moves from the shower to the window, where she turns her gaze on the maid outside. The spectator’s gaze is now aligned with Momi’s; rather than staring at her, we stare with her, and the object of desire is relocated. expectations of the scene are therefore subverted: Momi becomes an ambivalent figure, located between spaces and positions.

understanding Martel’s films within an interstitial position also helps to demonstrate how she employs classical genre conventions to problematize the gaze. Deborah Martin’s analysis of La niña santa points to the film’s appropriation of classic horror tropes: “Amalia is figured

216 K. STeWART

intermittently throughout the film as uncanny and demonic, in a knowing appropriation of conventional cinematic codes” (2011, 64). In the horror genre, secure male identification is threatened, but ultimately restored, in its objectification and control of woman’s unsettling otherness. In Martel’s films, the restoration of the secure male gaze is impossible, and there-fore a sense of dread and unease is induced. It is this representation of what Carole Pateman describes as the “disorder of women” (1989, 17), which creates an atmosphere akin to horror, rather than the film actually conforming to the horror genre. Pateman outlines the two separate meanings of disorder: firstly, that of some “internal malfunction” (as in the psycho-analytical view of women lacking in some fundamental way), and secondly, the capacity for social and civil disorder, leading to “a breakdown of law and order” (1989, 18). Martel’s films engage with disorder in both senses, critically playing upon female lack, destabilising the male gaze and disrupting the order it creates in classical cinema. In doing so, they use dis-order to work towards the establishment of the female gaze.

The endings in particular offer opportunities for the spectator to engage actively with the films, and to question the cinematic experience. While both La niña santa and La ciénaga end with traumatic, life-altering events for the characters, these events are left to be expe-rienced in the spectator’s imagination, rather than being resolved on-screen. This radically shifts the boundaries of cinema, as it refuses to respect the limits of the frame. Metz acknowl-edges that some narratives “have the peculiarity of cheating on the ending,” but he says that this does not “remove [the narrative] from its basic requirement of enclosure” (1974, 17), and he explains that a film narrative’s ending is enclosed within its final image. La niña santa, in particular, does not limit itself in this way. Tension is ratcheted up throughout the film, and in the final scenes, the spectator knows, even if the characters do not, that the relationships between them have reached an explosive breaking point. But rather than allow this climax to unfold and to be resolved, Martel cuts to a shot of Amalia and Josefina in the swimming pool, both blissfully, youthfully, unaware of the devastation that their earlier actions are about to unleash. even then, the film is not contained within this final image, because the sound of the water splashing continues, without the accompanying images, as the credits roll. once again, Martel prioritises the aural over the visual, which not only promotes a fem-inine mode of expression, but also prompts the spectator to question the film long after it has ended. This can be a powerful method of enabling the spectator to rethink their own position.

The deconstruction of cinema’s dominant male gaze is by no means without difficulties, and reading Martel’s films in this way still leaves questions unanswered, particularly Doane’s problematization of the female spectator. While in their multisensory expression La niña santa and La ciénaga work towards the construction of a radically alternative female gaze, it remains one which is “too close.” Here Doane’s words are appropriate: the spectatorial gaze Martel creates still has “a problematic relation to the visible, to form, to structures of seeing” (2000, 425) which obstructs successful theorisation of the female spectator. Secondly, in subverting the dominant narrative form, problems of dismantling plot structure and the impact this has for spectatorial understanding can be far-reaching and somewhat difficult to overcome. The spectator is not only required to be an active participant, but must also shift their perspective in order to interpret as much from the absences and ambivalences within the film as from narrative meaning. This is no mean feat, and the feminist film scholar Teresa de Lauretis has argued in favour of employing coherent narrative structures, even in feminist films, “because of their capacity to inscribe desire and to direct, sustain, or undercut

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identification” (2000, 267), in line with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ belief that myths (or narratives) have the ability to resolve contradictions within society (1978). There is good reasoning behind this line of argument, since a lack of narrative structure is problematic for the spec-tator, but as this article has sought to demonstrate, that is precisely the point. Kristeva asserts that “semiotics must not be allowed to be a mere application to signifying practices of the linguistic model […] Its raison d’être, if it is to have one, must consist [of ] specifying just what, within the practice, falls outside the system” (1986, 26–7), and only by destabilising narrative structure, in the ways that Martel does, can the male gaze of the spectator be questioned. It is essential to challenge the dominant discourse, and to illuminate, rather than mask over, the contradictions which exist within cinematic practice.

Conclusion

There is not yet a fully-formed, distinctly female gaze in cinema, and there is no coherent alternative language for cinema, but Martel’s films are of vital importance in challenging and deconstructing the male gaze and patriarchal semiotic system. The theorisation of a female gaze within cinema is an ongoing process which, as Kristeva suggests, must maintain a critical approach to the dominant system, finding ways in which it can be subverted and, just as importantly, proposing alternative options. Mulvey says: “the alternative cinema pro-vides a space for the birth of a cinema which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film” (1975, 7–8). La niña santa and La ciénaga are films which fulfil these terms, though they do so not through aes-thetics of negation, but through the exploitation of interstitial gaps between and within cinematic conventions. By opening up these ambivalent spaces, Martel’s films offer examples of how cinema’s dominant male gaze can be dismantled and how opportunities for female cinematic expression can be created.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Lauren Rea and Deborah Shaw for their critical readings of earlier versions of this article and for the insights provided for its development.

2. I am grateful to Deborah Shaw for suggesting Tiago de Luca’s work on slow cinema.3. See, for example, Cécile François’ (2009) discussion of close-ups in La niña santa.4. Laura Martins (2011) offers a detailed analysis of haptic aesthetics in La ciénaga.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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