Lucrecia Martel's La Mujer Sin Cabeza: Cinematic Free Indirect Discourse, Noise-Scape and the Distraction of the Middle Class.

In the period between the first Peron presidency and the last military dictatorship (1955 to 1976), Argentine political opposition privileged the protagonism of the popular masses over that of the intellectual as agent of social change. But the intended audience of opposition cinema--such as that of the Grupo Cine Liberacion--was often what populist historical revisionism referred to as the intelligentsia, the middle-class intellectual it intended to inspire to commitment to the mobilization of the masses. As Fernando "Pino" Solanas, co-maker of La hora de los hornos (1968), said in a 1969 interview, his work addressed "the imperious necessity for the militant intelligentsia to root itself in Argentine reality and to contribute to the process of internal liberation of the movement of the masses." (1) In the years since the politically polarized 1960s, the military dictatorship's repression and the ensuing imposition of neoliberal economic policy--which produced the illusory boom in the 1990s under president Carlos Menem--have fragmented the collective struggle and destroyed the "militant intelligentsia," rendering more current (or "modern") the individual struggle for prosperity. Lucrecia Martel's La mujer sin cabeza illustrates the predicament of an Argentine opposition politics that has largely lost the middle class, by demonstrating the functioning of the mechanisms that depoliticize and prevent individuals from acting in solidarity with the concerns of other, more exploited sectors of society.