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Abstract
This article provides a comparative analysis of Muerte de un ciclista (dir. Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955) and La mujer sin cabeza (dir. Lucrecia Martel, 2008). It argues that both films use the hit-and-run motif to address class difference, but also to reflect on key historical events such as the Spanish Civil War and the desaparecidos during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. The article analyses how both films adopt and rework conventions of melodrama to produce a critique of the bourgeoisie from within. Finally, it contends that each film negotiates differently its affiliation to the melodramatic mode.
Notes
1 Carlos F. Heredero described the film as a ‘[v]ersión adulta de Muerte de un ciclista pasada por el filtro de David Lynch y situada en la frontera del fantástico’ (Carlos F. Heredero, ‘Lo siniestro invisible’, Cahiers du Cinéma. España, 12 [2008], 25), and Carlos Reviriego argued that Martel ‘parte de una situación argumental muy similar a la que manejó Juan Antonio Bardem en Muerte de un ciclista (1955) para hurgar de nuevo el dedo en la llaga de la burguesía argentina’ (Carlos Reviriego, ‘Radical nuevo cine argentino’, El Cultural, 5 June 2008, <https://elcultural.com/Radical-nuevo-cine-argentino> [accessed 1 July 2021]). When La mujer sin cabeza was released in Spain, with the title La mujer rubia, in November 2008, critics also stressed that affiliation. Jaime Pena, for example, wrote that we could ‘relacionar el punto de partida de La mujer rubia con el de Cronaca di un amore (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950) y Muerte de un ciclista (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955)’ (Jaime Pena, ‘Mirar sin querer ver. La mujer rubia, de Lucrecia Martel’, Cahiers du Cinéma. España, 17 [2008], 24–25 [p. 25]); while Sergi Sánchez wrote: ‘Las desnortadas peripecias de esta dentista abúlica tras atropellar por accidente a un chico (o a un perro) remiten a la Muerte de un ciclista de Bardem pasada por el tamiz del Antonioni más tópico’ (Mirito Torreiro & Sergi Sánchez, ‘La mujer rubia. La polémica del mes’, Fotogramas, 24 November 2008, <https://www.fotogramas.es/peliculas-criticas/a250726/la-mujer-rubia/> [accessed 27 August 2021]).
2 Carlos Reviriego, ‘Mirar por una rendija. Entrevista Lucrecia Martel’, Cahiers du Cinéma. España, 12 (2008), 26. Lucrecia Martel says that she drafted a first plot of La mujer sin cabeza as early as 1997. However, she saw Muerte de un ciclista only after shooting La niña santa (released in 2004).
3 Recent examples are the Argentine films Sin retorno (dir. Miguel Cohan, 2010) and the episode ‘La propuesta’, from Relatos salvajes (dir. Damián Szifrón, 2014).
4 Maria M. Delgado has already made this connection in her chapter on La mujer sin cabeza: ‘Like Juan Antonio Bardem in Muerte de un ciclista/Death of a Cyclist (1955), Martel uses the hit-and-run narrative to comment on a society in denial’ (Maria M. Delgado, ‘La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman [Lucrecia Martel, 2008]: Silence, Historical Memory and Metaphor’, in Spanish Cinema 1973–2010: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory, ed. Maria M. Delgado & Robin Fiddian [Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2013], 195–211 [p. 204]).
5 Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 54–86.
6 See Diana Roxana Jorza, ‘A Neorealist Melodrama’s Problematic Contention with Hollywood: Calle Mayor (1956)’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 7:2 (2010), 117–32; and Daniel Mourenza, ‘Nothing Ever Happens: Juan Antonio Bardem and the Resignification of Hollywood Melodrama (1955–1965)’, in Global Genres/Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema, ed. Elena Oliete Aldea, Beatriz Oria & Juan A. Tarancón, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 71–86.
7 Jo Evans reads the film as a ‘neorealist/film noir hybrid’ (‘Sex and the Censors: The Femme Fatale in Juan Antonio Bardem’s Muerte de un ciclista/Death of a Cyclist [1955]’, Screen, 48:3 [2007], 327–44 [p. 329]). Rob Stone recognizes Kinder’s analysis of the film as a contrast between the aesthetics of neorealism and melodrama, but claims that its aesthetic and psycho-sexual tension ‘demands the film be appreciated and analysed as noir’ (‘Spanish Neo-Noir’, in European Film Noir, ed. Andrew Spicer [Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2007], 185–209 [p. 195]). Robert Koehler argues that the film ‘incorporates many aspects of Hollywood-influenced noir (particularly [Nicholas] Ray and [Jacques] Tourneur)’ (‘A Second Look: Death of a Cyclist’, Cinéaste, 34:3 [2009], 72–74 [p. 72]); and Jesús Urda suggests that ‘Death of a Cyclist replicates genre motifs of Hollywood film noir’ (‘Images and Voices from Beyond the National: How the “Trans” Affected Spanishness in the Cinema of J. A. Bardem’, Studies in Arts and Humanities, 1:2 [2015], 25–38 [p. 27]).
8 Deborah Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2016), 7.
9 Cecilia Sosa, ‘A Counter-Narrative of Argentine Mourning: The Headless Woman (2008), directed by Lucrecia Martel’, Theory, Culture & Society, 26:7–8 (2009), 250–62 (p. 253).
10 Delgado, ‘La mujer sin cabeza: Silence, Historical Memory and Metaphor’, 200.
11 Pena, ‘Mirar sin querer ver’, 24.
12 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1976), 11–12.
13 Christine Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’, in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 5–39 (p. 9).
14 Laura Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, in her Visual and Other Pleasures (New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 41–46 (p. 46).
15 Scott Loren & Jörg Metelmann, ‘Interview with Christine Gledhill’, in Melodrama After the Tears: New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood, ed. Scott Loren & Jörg Metelmann (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U. P., 2016), 297–310 (p. 297).
16 Agustín Zarzosa, ‘Melodrama and the Modes of the World’, Discourse, 32:2 (2010), 236–55 (p. 237).
17 Jackie Byars, All That Hollywood Allows: Re-reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991), 12–13.
18 Zarzosa, ‘Melodrama and the Modes of the World’, 245.
19 The prize was given ex aequo with the Mexican drama Raíces (dir. Benito Alazraki, 1955). Bardem’s success in Cannes also allowed both Muerte de un ciclista and Cómicos to be released in France, which contributed to his international recognition.
20 Rob Stone, Spanish Cinema (Harlow: Longman, 2002), 49.
21 Stone argues that Bardem creates a political discourse by juxtaposing, and thus antagonizing, the political implications of neorealist aesthetics and ‘the dialectically opposite aesthetic of lush Hollywood melodrama’ (Spanish Cinema, 48). See also Evans, ‘Sex and the Censors’, 329 and Kinder, Blood Cinema, 28, 36, 39–40 and 74.
22 I also contend that the analysis of Muerte de un ciclista as a noir film sheds light on its social commentary, especially on gender politics, as Jo Evans (‘Sex and the Censors’) and Silvia Guillamón Carrasco (‘La representación de la femme fatale en el universo narrativo de Muerte de un ciclista’, Área Abierta, 17:3 [2017], 313–31) have done.
23 Juan Francisco Cerón Gómez, El cine de Juan Antonio Bardem (Murcia: Ediciones de la Univ. de Murcia, 1998), 26.
24 Kinder, Blood Cinema, 26.
25 Koehler, ‘A Second Look’, 74.
26 Emiliano Morreale, Così piangevano: il cinema melò nell’Italia degli anni cinquanta (Roma: Donzelli Editore, 2011), 215.
27 Juan Antonio Bardem, ‘Guionista contra director’, Índice de Artes y Letras, 49 (1952), 1–2 (p. 1); quoted in Cerón Gómez, El cine de Juan Antonio Bardem, 57.
28 ‘Lo de Salamanca’, Film Ideal, 201–04 (1966), 660–61 (p. 660).
29 Juan Antonio Bardem, ‘La crisis del cinema americano (II)’, La Hora, 39 (1949), 10; quoted in Cerón Gómez, El cine de Juan Antonio Bardem, 61.
30 Matías Antolín, ‘Entrevista a Juan Antonio Bardem’, Cinema 2002, 44 (1978), 40–47; quoted in Cerón Gómez, El cine de Juan Antonio Bardem, 62.
31 Cerón Gómez, El cine de Juan Antonio Bardem, 49 & 122.
32 Louis Bayman, ‘Melodrama As Realism in Italian Neorealism’, in Realism and the Audiovisual Media, ed. Lúcia Nagib & Cecília Mello (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 47–62 (p. 47).
33 Bayman, ‘Melodrama As Realism in Italian Neorealism’, 53.
34 Domènec Font, Del azul al verde: el cine español durante el franquismo (Barcelona: Avance, 1976), 161.
35 Miguel Marías, ‘El melodrama reprimido’, in Las generaciones del cine español, ed. Juan Cobos (Madrid: España Nuevo Milenio, 2000), 115–23 (p. 118).
36 Kinder, Blood Cinema, 28.
37 Jorza, ‘A Neorealist Melodrama’s Problematic Contention with Hollywood’, 120.
38 Koehler, ‘A Second Look’, 74. José María Caparrós Lera also notes the difference and argues that Muerte de un ciclista is closer to the ‘critical realism’ of Antonioni than to neorealism (Estudios sobre el cine español del franquismo [1941–1964] [Valladolid: Fancy Ediciones, 2000], 98).
39 Koehler, ‘A Second Look’, 72.
40 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 30–31.
41 Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field’, 45.
42 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 102.
43 Jens Andermann, New Argentine Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 156.
44 Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, 156.
45 Deborah Shaw, ‘Intimacy and Distance: Domestic Servants in Latin American Women’s Cinema: La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman (Martel, 2008) and El niño pez/The Fish Child (Puenzo, 2009)’, in Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics, ed. Deborah Martin & Deborah Shaw (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), 123–48 (p. 134).
46 Shaw, ‘Intimacy and Distance’, 127.
47 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 7.
48 David Oubiña, ‘El realismo insidioso’, in his Estudio crítico sobre ‘La ciénaga’. Entrevista a Lucrecia Martel (Buenos Aires: Picnic Editorial, 2007), 9–14 and, by the same author, ‘Un realismo negligente: el cine de Lucrecia Martel’, in Tránsitos de la mirada: mujeres que hacen cine, ed. Paulina Bettendorff & Agustina Pérez Rial (Buenos Aires: Libraria, 2014), 69–82 (p. 79).
49 Oubiña, ‘El realismo insidioso’, 12.
50 Oubiña, ‘El realismo insidioso’, 11. It is interesting that, in this study, Oubiña develops an argument to differentiate the cinema of María Luisa Bemberg and Leonardo Flavio, two directors associated with melodrama, from that of Lucrecia Martel, as if needing to ‘rescue’ her films from a potential contamination with the popular (and feminine?), even if it was Martel herself who had made the connection (13–14).
51 Anon., ‘Cine: ayer se vio “La mujer sin cabeza”, en Cannes. Lucrecia Martel, en competencia’, Clarín, 22 May 2008, <https://www.clarin.com/espectaculos/lucrecia-martel-competencia_0_SkmG77p0pYx.html> (accessed 7 July 2020).
52 Mariana Enríquez, ‘La mala memoria’, Página 12, 17 August 2008, <https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/radar/9-4766-2008-08-17.html> (accessed 7 July 2020).
53 Dominique Russell, ‘Lucrecia Martel—A Decidedly Polyphonic Cinema’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 50 (2008), <https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/LMartelAudio/index.html> (accessed 7 July 2020).
54 Russell, ‘Lucrecia Martel’.
55 Juana Suárez, ‘El decline del melodrama: cineastas contemporáneas latinoamericanas y la transformación del género’, in Femmes de cinéma, ed. Amanda Rueda, Cinémas d’Amérique Latine, 22 (2014), 114–27.
56 Geoffrey Novell-Smith, ‘Minelli and Melodrama’, in Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. Gledhill, 70–74 (p. 71).
57 Quoted in Cecilia Sosa, Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina’s Dictatorship: The Performances of Blood (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2014), 64.
58 Quoted in Sosa, Queering Acts of Mourning, 71.
59 Mulvey, ‘Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home’, in Visual and Other Pleasures, 66–81 (p. 77).
60 Mulvey, ‘Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home’, 77.
61 Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, 44.
62 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 93.
63 Morreale, Così piangevano, 217–18.
64 Louis Bayman, ‘Melodrama As Seriousness’, in Popular Italian Cinema, ed. Louis Bayman & Sergio Rigoletto (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 82–97 (p. 84).
65 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 82.
66 Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, 158.
67 Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, 159.
68 Leon de Kock, ‘Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa’, Ariel. A Review of International English Literature, 23:3 (1992), 29–47 (p. 45).
69 Peter D. Thomas, ‘Refiguring the Subaltern’, Political Theory, 46:6 (2018), 861–84 (p. 863).
70 Thomas, ‘Refiguring the Subaltern’, 875.
71 Thomas, ‘Refiguring the Subaltern’, 872.
72 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 37.
73 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 91.
74 Amy Taubin, ‘Interview: Lucrecia Martel. Shadow of a Doubt’, Film Comment, 45:4 (2009), <https://www.filmcomment.com/article/shadow-of-a-doubt-lucrecia-martel-interviewed/> (accessed 6 July 2021).
75 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sounds and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. Gledhill, 43–69 (p. 64).
76 Scott Loren & Jörg Metelmann, ‘Introduction’, in Melodrama after the Tears, ed. Loren & Metelmann, 9–32.
77 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Melodrama and Victimhood: Modern, Political and Militant’, in Melodrama after the Tears, Loren & Metelmann, 35–51 (p. 40).
78 Cerón Gómez, El cine de Juan Antonio Bardem, 133.
79 Cerón Gómez, El cine de Juan Antonio Bardem, 127.
80 Patricia M. Keller, Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2016), 97.
81 Keller, Ghostly Landscapes, 97.
82 Jorza, ‘A Neorealist Melodrama’s Problematic Contention with Hollywood’, 123.
83 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 36.
84 Andrés Lema-Hincapié, ‘Existential Crossroads in Muerte de un ciclista’, in Burning Darkness: A Half Century of Spanish Cinema, ed. Joan Ramon Resina with assistance from Andrés Lema-Hincapié (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 27–41 (p. 35).
85 Linda Williams, ‘Melodrama Revised’, in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998), 42–88 (p. 62).
86 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 86.
87 Sosa, ‘A Counter-Narrative of Argentine Mourning’, 256.
88 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 98.
89 Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, 65.
90 Inela Selimović has compared this ending with La historia oficial: ‘Unlike Alicia in Luis Puenzo’s La historia oficial (1985), who manages to dismantle the rhetoric of the official history despite and against her dominant husband, Vero ultimately embraces the official story her male family members enforce’ (Affective Moments in the Films of Martel, Carri, and Puenzo [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018], 123).
91 Vero conforms in this way to the role of the mother/wife as accomplice that Judith Filc associates with the ‘nation as family’ metaphor promoted by the Junta. According to the traditional family model defended by the dictatorship, the mother had to submit to the authority of her husband and his word, accepting his businesses ‘en silencio o con impotente complicidad’ (Judith Filc, Entre el parentesco y la política: familia y dictadura, 1976–1983 [Buenos Aires: Biblos, 1997], 142–43).
92 I employ pathos here in a literary sense to describe the pathetic quality of a work to move the spectator emotionally by identifying with a character through sorrow, pity and compassion as distinct from its more rhetorical sense of an experience or instance of suffering.
93 Williams, ‘Melodrama Revised’, 49.
94 Williams, ‘Melodrama Revised’, 49.
95 Taubin, ‘Shadow of a Doubt’.
96 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 94.
97 Delgado, ‘La mujer sin cabeza’, 207.
98 Delgado, ‘La mujer sin cabeza’, 96.
99 Cecilia Sosa similarly argues that by positioning ‘the director outside the fortress of denial’, the ‘film also shows how there is still a chance to reverse the path of complicity and silence’ (Queering Acts of Mourning, 73).
100 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 95.
101 Taubin, ‘Shadow of a Doubt’.
102 Delgado argues that ‘[t]he 1970s infiltrates the ostensibly contemporary world of the film largely through [the] soundtrack’. Apart from ‘Mamy Blue’, the film plays Fernando Arbex Miró’s 1970s songs ‘Soley, Soley’, played by the Scottish band Middle of the Road, and ‘Deja de llorar’, covered by the Argentine band Los Charros. According to Delgado, these songs ‘position Vero and her family firmly within the ideology of the dictatorship’ (‘La mujer sin cabeza’, 206).
103 Williams, ‘Melodrama Revised’, 59.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.