The Headless Woman is a 2008 Argentine psychological thriller art film written and directed by Lucrecia Martel and starring María Onetto. After hitting something with her car, a bourgeois woman’s life slowly descends into paranoia and isolation, as she fears she may have killed someone. Not well-known to American movie-goers, Martel is “arguably the most critically acclaimed auteur in Spanish-language art cinema.[Paul Julian Smith]” and “one of the greatest directors in the world right now [Vogue]”.
In a 2009 interview, Lucrecia Martel explained the usual layered narration of her films, “I work with a number of elements that are tied together, and each one of them is present in each scene in different positions, different perspectives, foreground or background”. In The Headless Woman Martel ties together the personal (the protagonist personal reaction to her car accident); the sociocultural and economic world she belongs and operates into; the recent Argentine history (the genocide during the 1976-1983 military rule), and the Latin American history based upon colonial power, oppression, and racism. She creates a character of complexity and ambivalence in disarray for the audience to share and ultimately identify with.
Presenter:
Jorgelina Corbatta was born in Bahia Blanca, Argentina where she studies and graduated as Licenciada and Professor in Philosophy and Letters (Universidad Nacional del Sur). She also has a Master and Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures (University of Pittsburgh) and is an Academic Analyst (Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute). Emerita Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture and ex-Director of Women Studies at Wayne State University, and Academic Associate Faculty at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, she has taught courses on Contemporary Narrative and Film, Latin America Literature, Women’s and Cultural Studies, Literature and Psychoanalysis at universities in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, US, Sweden, France, Belgium, Austria, and Spain. In 2004 she received a Research/Teaching Fulbright Award (Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia). She has seven books on literary/film criticism – on sociology of literature, on the narratives of the Dirty War, on Feminism and Women Writers in Latin America, on Juan José Saer, on Jorge Luis Borges, on Manuel Puig, published in Spain and Argentina. Her latest book and first in English, is Psychoanalysis and Narrative. Literature, Film and Autobiography by Routledge (2024). She has also published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed Journals and is currently looking for a publisher for her Spanish manuscript on “Auto-fiction/ Psychoanalysis and Intertextuality”. In 2017 she received the IPA/IPSO International Psychoanalytic Award for her paper “The Quest for, and the Denial of, Intimacy in Luisa Valenzuela’s Dark Desires and the Others. Diaries of New York (IPA/Buenos Aires, July 2017). In addition, she has received several awards for teaching, directing graduate students and conducting research at Wayne State University. She is currently writing her autobiography and continue writing essays on literature and film through a psychoanalytic lens.
