No headless woman

I saw Lucrecia Martel's La Mujer Sin Cabeza and was blown away by its simple power. Martel's story borders on the mysterious yet its power lies in its simplicity and her skillful attention to imagery and sound.

She is one of the few filmmakers who values the aural experience to complement the tensions of the narrative.

Here is an excerpt of her interview from theauteurs:

DANIEL KASMAN: Perhaps more than any other film in recent memory, it is hard to separate your movie into what was written in a script and what was visualized and created aurally in the final product. Did this film exist more as a written story about this woman, or did you envision it cinematically and formally? When you come to a scene in the movie, are you envisioning what you have written down or conceptualizing an audio/visual expression first and foremost?

MARTEL: What happens to me is that before I start out to write, I already know how the film is going to sound. To me, what really matters is sound. In a way, images are what I strictly need to frame the sound.

PHELPS: [Portuguese director] Pedro Costa says something similar to that, as well as of course Robert Bresson. I kept thinking of Bresson—despite obviously some differences—in his concentration on faces, and holding faces, and letting the whole world exist outside of the frame—on the outskirts of the frame sometimes—and almost swirl around the main character. There’s a stable anchor, a head or a face in the foreground, in the middle of the frame, but there are whole scenes that happen, and they are happening in the background! Could you talk about why you hold onto the back of people’s heads in a way; it’s almost like the audience is kept from the people’s thoughts…

MARTEL: What I find really fascinating about cinema is how it allows you to get very close to people but not actually know anything that’s going on inside of them. I find this very sexy, in a way—being so close but not know what’s going on.

A lot people think that shooting this style of film turns out to be cheaper, because you are just following one person around. Actually it’s not at all, because you still have to pay all kinds of actors off the camera; it’s not cheaper at all! Actors who are not at the center of attention want to be paid more, so in the end you are paying a fortune!

PHELPS: Would it be alright if we talked about a specific scene that occurs mostly in the background?

MARTEL: For example, the scene where Vero [played by María Onetto] walks into the [hospital] bathroom and hides, it is an example of a scene where everything that’s going around is around her, it is not on her. Actually, in that scene, I had to film some people in the action, but the voices are other people’s voices, so I had to pay double! This is because sound is so important to me; and for the voices in that scene I needed a different texture than the ones the actual actresses had, I wanted for the overall sound I wanted to convey what I had in mind, so that’s why I had to use other people.

KASMAN: How do you work with your sound designer? How hands-on are you in finding the sounds, creating the sounds, and placing the sounds in your film?

MARTEL: I’m very hands-on. I used the same mixer I used with my earlier film, La Ciénaga (2001); the sound director is the same guy for all my films, and he also records the direct sound. We work very well together, but having said that it is not like we understand each other immediately. We actually talk a lot, do a lot of tests, and experiment on a lot of things. He is very open to trying new things. We actually go out inside the city and record a huge amount of material that we can use as archival records.

Actually, it [the focus on sound] must run in the family, as one of my brothers who works in this area [in which the movie was filmed] and knows a lot about it went to see The Headless Woman, said “actually I liked the sound of the film, but when the actress is close to a window, there’s a bird and that’s not a bird from the area.” And what was amazing was that I knew that too! I was really excited to put a bird sound that was not from the actual location in the film.