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Abstract
This essay studies the abrupt mutations of social spaces that suffuse Albertina Carri’s La rabia (2008) through the presence, expressiveness, and art of an autistic child's subjectivity. In depicting such mutations, the film becomes a narrative on gender-based violence, especially in socially isolated settings in Argentine society. The key setting in the film – the airy and open pampas – is not, therefore, just a physical dimension with its culturally encrusted attributes but a terrain for the complexities of domestic violence, struggles with undiagnosed autism, and sexually crude co-dependencies. As the film progresses – tinted with rigid patriarchal ways of life – the immensity of the represented landscape grows increasingly more claustrophobic with each social interaction. The intricate role of the child’s cognitive otherness – her simple, candid yet stirring autistic familial ethnography – ultimately expounds on complex manifestations of interpersonal abandonment within a diegetic locale shaped by patriarchal structures in ruins.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
* I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies for their remarks on the first draft of this article. This essay was submitted for review in July of 2014. Much of that submission appears in the present essay. At the time of my revisions in November of 2014, I received Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014), a collection of 12 essays, and reviewed it for the Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos. The collection contains two insightful articles by Alejandra Josiowicz and Sophie Dufays on Alberina Carri’s films in general and La rabia in particular. The articles address several themes, which my essay had engaged as well, especially in regard to autism, violence and children’s agency. I have made note of these, when appropriate, throughout this final version, while also going a step further by underscoring the link between gender violence and the autistic subjectivity’s intricate – and vengeful – involvement in mutations of social spaces.
1. See Carri’s 2009 interview entitled ‘Palabras más, palabras menos’ (last accessed October 22, 2014).
2. Much of Carri’s cinematographic work has been linked scholarly to those films that privilege experiences from childhood and adolescence as ways to express mordant critiques toward patriarchal ways of domination. The two recent collections of essays edited by Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet prove essential in this context: Representing History, Class and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) as well as Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014).
3. See Carri’s interview during the Berlin Film Festival in 2009. In addition, Carri’s films (La rabia, Los rubios and Géminis) have been comparatively studied in Josiowicz (Citation2014), Andermann (Citation2012), Page (Citation2009) and Aguilar (Citation2008), to mention just a few.
4. The emergence of estancias also signifies the birth of the complex relationships men from the Argentine interior faced at the outset of the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Garrels puts it insightfully in her introduction to Sarmiento’s Recollections of a Provincial Past: ‘[a]s the estanciero became the gaucho’s patrón and, during the civil wars, often his caudillo, these two individuals, of starkly different social class, were bound together in a hierarchical and authoritarian relationship, which could be – and was – used politically and militarily to challenge the authority of centralized and – at least nominally – representative government.’ Oxford: Oxford University Press, Citation2005: xxxix.
5. Two indispensable studies prove helpful here: Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984) on love stories in the foundational novels as metaphors for nation building and Masiello’s Between Civilization and Barbarism (Minneapolis: University of Nebraska Press, Citation1989) on counter-masculinist discourse among women, which ‘acquired a new symbolic value in building the nation’ (23). In addition, see Carolina Rocha’s discussion on the reformulation of the discourses about masculinities in Argentine cinematic representations in the 1990s onward. Rocha draws attention to the competing masculinities during the foundational era of the nation: ‘[t]he presence of numerous foreign-born males created a certain anxiety among nationalist intellectuals who resorted to exalting the rural male inhabitants of the pampas – the gauchos – as a defining element of national identity’ in Masculinities in Contemporary Argentine Popular Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 5. Rocha also reminds us that Ernesto Gunche and Eduardo Martínez de la Pera’s Nobleza gaucha (1915) as well as La guerra gaucha (1942) by Lucas Demare come to mind immediately when recalling early cinematic representations of raw masculinities in conjunction with the foundational national identity.
6. See Ana Laura Lusnich’s El drama social-folcólrico: el universo rural en el cine argentino (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos Artes y Medios, 2007) and Estela Erausquin’s Héroes de película: el mito de los héroes en el cine argentino (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2008).
7. Witnessing violent acts in their familial and social surroundings instills in them both quiet (Nati’s drawings) as well as vociferous (Ladeado’s act of murder) forms of violent behavior.
8. See Sophie Dufays, Citation2014: 27.
9. In this way, we are also reminded of the first Argentine films, from the turn of the twentieth-century, yet with a significant twist. While Mario Gallo’s El fusilamiento de Dorrego (1908) represented the violent past of the nineteenth century through gaucho-like male and mostly docile women characters, Carri’s La rabia focuses on the darker side of early cinematic idealization of the pampa by overtly critiquing patriarchal modes of socialization.
10. See Tompkins, 2012: 195.
11. See Poéticas en el cine argentino (Buenos Aires: Comunicarte Editorial, 2005).
12. Gonzalo Aguilar ‘El estado y la narración cinematográfica’ (paper presented at LASA, Chicago, Illinois, May 22, 2014). Several scholarly works come to mind immediately in terms of this contemporariness and New Argentine Cinema: Aguilar’s New Argentine Cinema (2008) which studies how ‘film has transformed itself in recent years into the place in which the traces of the present take shape’ (2). In Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema Joanna Page traces the ways New Argentine Cinema straightforwardly ‘often resists symbolic and allegorical interpretations’ toward the past (Durham: Duke University Press, Citation2009), 26. Andermann’s discussions of the 2001 economic unrest and uprising underline the ‘collapsing politics and the politics of the image into one, the December of 2001 events would remain a point of reference for Argentine cinema in years to come’ (New Argentine Cinema, London/New York: I.B. Tauris, Citation2012), 28. In ‘The Aesthetics of New Argentine Cinema’ Sergio Wolf (Citation2009) underscores that New Argentine Cinema directors choose to present bits and pieces of local and everyday destinies, adding that ‘to this date the works of the new directors have not tried their luck with the model of period films’ (1). Deborah Shaw draws attention to cinematic foci on the contemporary among both commercial and what Tamara Falicov calls ‘artistic’ contemporary Argentine films. The Argentine economic crisis in 2001 has served as a stimulating element for several Hollywood-appealing (as well as independent) films. See Shaw’s ‘Playing Hollywood at Its Own Game?’ in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market, ed. Deborah Shaw (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, Citation2007), 68. In Tamara Falicov’s The Cinematic Tango (London/New York: Wallflower Press, Citation2007) we are reminded of how New Argentine Cinema directors ‘create overtly polemical statements or march under the banner of a political movement, they are working to expand the notion of Argentine citizenship to include subjects and characters who have traditionally been invisible or excluded from Argentine screens’ (133).
13. See Carri’s views on autism in preparations for this film as brought together in Josiowicz’s essay, Citation2014: 41.
14. See Josiowicz, Citation2014: 36.
15. According to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, domestic violence against women continues to be pervasive in Argentina, despite the fact that in 2009 the Argentine Congress passed a law providing comprehensive protection to prevent, penalize and eliminate violence against women. For more information see: http://www.refworld.org/docid/47ce6d7ca.html (last accessed July 22, 2014).
16. La rabia’s rural characters are not in search of ‘an alternative way of life’ (Dieleke Citation2013: 61) as is the case with the lead characters in Alonso’s films on rural Argentinean topographies.
17. Carri has refused to connect La rabia emblematically with any one historical period, stating at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008 that her film principally tackles ‘la naturalización de la violencia en la vida del campo donde poco o nada se analiza’ (‘the naturalization of violence in rural life where little or nothing is scrutinized’). Yet the film’s figurative echoes are certainly multivalent in terms of Argentina’s sociocultural and political history of patriarchy. Two recent and interconnected remarks come to mind immediately. Jens Andermann observes in New Argentine Cinema (New York/London: I.B. Tauris, 2012) that La rabia contains symbolic undercurrents regarding the post-2001 revival of the ruralista movements in Argentina, and Cynthia Tompkins similarly underscores the film’s political undertones, explaining that ‘el 2008 es el conflicto entre el oficialismo y el campo’ (‘2008 is the conflict between the countryside and the representative of the governing party’), Citation2012: 194. The film’s excess as well as manifestations of violence also may be suggestive of (or inspired by) the social and political upheavals the country endured during state terror (1976–1983). This, in particular, is possible to envision, as the subjects in the film are brutally beaten, harshly penetrated, tied up, physically and verbally abused, silenced, and in some cases killed either arbitrarily, wrongfully, or for having challenged repressive orders. This political period is close to Carri, professionally and personally, for her own parents were disappeared during state terror in Argentina. Carri’s first documentary, Los rubios (2003), fundamentally explores the complexities behind the disappeared, memory and identity. This film symbolized a shift in the way cinema approaches the recent past and the issue of generational transmission aesthetically and politically.
18. Her father misinterprets her drawings, thinking that Nati draws Pichón as her rapist. This is the reason for Poldo’s decision to kill the neighbor.
19. See Tompkins, Citation2012: 202.
20. See Mark Osteen, ed., Autism and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–48.
21. See Inela Selimovic. 2010. “Mapping Urban Sites of Resistance in Diamela Eltit’s Los vigilantes (1994).” Confluencia 25, no. 2: 122–130.
22. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Deleuze considers the importance of the ‘descriptive power of color and sound’ in examining how it helps to ‘replace, obliterate and re-create the object itself’ (12).
23. See Ann Kaplan’s Women and Film (New York: Routledge, 1983).
24. The pig is ultimately roasted and served in a quiet feast for all involved.
25. See Josiowicz, Citation2014: 36.
26. Molloy’s text reads as follows: ‘She begins to write a story that will not leave her alone. She would like to forget it; she would also like to give it a shape, and, in shaping it, find revenge: for herself, for her story. She wants to exorcise that story as it was, in order to recover it as she would like to remember it’ (3).
27. Sartre’s ‘What is Literature?’ And Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988: 240.
28. Marx and Engels expressed this notion in Chapter 1 of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (1848).
29. See Tompkins, Citation2012: 197.
30. See Sutton’s Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women’s Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010).
31. Eduardo Archetti quoted in Rocha’s Masculinities in Contemporary Argentine Popular Cinema, 2012: 5.