Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies

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Death of a Subaltern: Melodrama, Class and

Victimhood in Muerte de un ciclista (Juan Antonio
Bardem, 1955) and La mujer sin cabeza (Lucrecia
Martel, 2008)

Daniel Mourenza

To cite this article: Daniel Mourenza (2023) Death of a Subaltern: Melodrama, Class
and Victimhood in Muerte de un ciclista (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955) and La mujer
sin cabeza (Lucrecia Martel, 2008), Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, 7:1, 15-42, DOI:
10.1080/24741604.2021.1974761

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Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, Volume VII, Number 1, 2023

Death of a Subaltern: Melodrama,

Class and Victimhood in Muerte de
un ciclista (Juan Antonio Bardem,
1955) and La mujer sin cabeza
(Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
DANIEL MOURENZA
Trinity College, Dublin

When La mujer sin cabeza (dir. Lucrecia Martel) premiered at Cannes in May
2008, Spanish critics quickly made a connection to Muerte de un ciclista (dir.
Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955).1 The similarities in the plot are many. Both
start with a car accident and revolve around the protagonists’ behaviour

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]).

ISSN 2474-1604 print/ISSN 2474-1612 online/23/01/000015-28

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
https://doi.org/10.1080/24741604.2021.1974761
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16 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

after leaving the crime scene without helping the victim. When Lucrecia
Martel was asked by Spanish critic Carlos Reviriego about the potential
influence of Muerte de un ciclista on her film, Martel acknowledged that she
had seen Juan Antonio Bardem’s film, although only after writing the first
draft of the plot.2 She recognized that there were some similarities. None the
less, the basic premise, she said, was different. According to Martel, the
couple in Muerte de un ciclista let the cyclist die for personal reasons, so that
their extra-marital affair is not discovered, whereas in her film the problem
is class-ridden: the crime is not covered up, but rather diluted in the
solidarity of the bourgeois class. What makes such a crime ‘perfect’, in
Martel’s view, is that it does not aim to efface its traces, but to deny its very
existence. I disagree, however, with Martel’s reading of the class
implications of Muerte de un ciclista. It is true that the first reason María
José (Lucia Bosè) flees the scene of the accident is to keep her love affair
secret, but the main reason, as she admits later in the film, is that, if caught,
she would lose everything, meaning her privileges as an upper-class woman.
Her reasons are, therefore, as much based on class as Vero’s (María Onetto),
the protagonist of La mujer sin cabeza, even if the latter’s may be more
unconscious. In this article, I will offer a comparative analysis of Muerte de
un ciclista and La mujer sin cabeza and I will argue that both films use the
accident as a standpoint to criticize the ways that the upper classes
maintain and push for class difference.
The hit-and-run motif has often been used in films as a metaphor for class
difference and the unequal access to justice available to different classes.3
Furthermore, both films relate the accident to national armed conflicts and,
especially, to the mechanisms of silence and impunity which permeated the
post-conflict societies of their respective countries.4 In Muerte de un
ciclista, the accident is compared to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939):
the location is the same as that in which Juan (Alberto Closas) fought an
important battle against the Republicans and his guilt about the accident
is confused with his involvement in the armed conflict. La mujer sin cabeza
functions more obviously as an allegory on the desaparecidos and the

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]).
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 17

complicity of the dominant classes in Argentina during the last military

dictatorship (1976–1983). As an allegory, the accident avoids making that
reference explicit, focusing instead on how the same dynamics are still at
work in present-day society, especially in the psyche of the upper classes.
Both films explore, therefore, the behaviour of the bourgeoisie in covering
up and denying their own liability in order to maintain their privileges.
The similarities in plot and the social critique behind the hit-and-run motif
should be sufficient reasons to justify such a comparative analysis. None the
less, my analysis will not be based solely on plot. I will argue that both films
use and re-work conventions of melodrama to produce this criticism. Neither
Muerte de un ciclista nor La mujer sin cabeza can be easily classified as
melodramas. Considered as a dissident auteur, Bardem’s films were first
associated with the more political Italian ‘neorealism’. The melodramatic
elements present in his films were for many years criticized as a mere
bourgeois relic. It was not until the 1990s that his films, and more
specifically Muerte de un ciclista, were analysed as melodramas. Marsha
Kinder has recognized the use of melodrama in the film, but she presents
Italian neorealism and melodrama as antithetical.5 Only recently has
Bardem’s use of melodrama been read as an inherently subversive
potentiality of the genre.6 Other authors have also read Muerte de un ciclista
in the light of film noir, a genre that draws from crime fiction but which has
been categorized as such only retrospectively, since at the time of classical
Hollywood cinema these films were often identified as melodramas.7
Although the cinema of Lucrecia Martel clearly belongs to an arthouse
aesthetic, it has often been read in relation to film genre. Deborah Martin,
for example, has analysed Martel’s cinema as a ‘re-working of genre film

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]).
18 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

including conventions of the horror, the thriller and the melodrama’.8 Cecilia
Sosa argues that La mujer sin cabeza ‘could be classified as a Latin American
thriller, an existentialist reflection, a murder mystery, a social satire, or even
as a middle-aged woman’s psychodrama’.9 Maria M. Delgado reads the film as
a ‘hit-and-run contemporary thriller where plot gradually gives way to
metaphor’.10 While Jaime Pena, in his review of the film’s release in Spain,
claims that it could be analysed

[…] como un melodrama social que denuncia la inmoralidad de la

burguesía argentina, como una metáfora de la dictadura y los
desaparecidos, como una mera pesadilla o como un film fantástico
habitado por muertos, posibilidades, estas dos últimas, que no negarían
las dos primeras.11

In short, the films defy easy classification vis-à-vis film genre. I argue that
both films resort to the conventions of melodrama, but that they negotiate
their generic ascription differently. Whereas Muerte de un ciclista exploits
melodrama’s Manichaeist world-view, placing Juan as the innocent victim-
hero, La mujer sin cabeza refrains from recognizing Vero as a victim and
obstructs our identification with her. This article will first discuss the affinity
of both films with melodrama in light of current debates about their aesthetic
affiliation; second, I will examine the position from which the two films address
class difference; third, I will analyse how these films portray victimhood; and,
finally, I propose to determine how each of the films negotiates the spectators’
identification with the protagonists. The aim of this article, therefore, is not to
classify both films as melodramas, but to understand how both films use,
negotiate and work through some of melodrama’s conventions.

Melodrama
Because of its connotations of strong emotionalism, Manichaeanism, extreme
situations, exaggerated acting and its association with a female audience,
melodrama has often been addressed pejoratively and thus assessed
against more ‘serious’ realism.12 In the 1970s, however, Marxist and
feminist film scholars started to look at the family melodramas that
Douglas Sirk directed for Universal Pictures in the 1950s and praised the

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.
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 19

stylistic excess of his mise-en-scène for unveiling the contradictions of

bourgeois ideology. Sirk’s excessive mise-en-scène was read as the symptom
of the repressed and uncontrollable tensions that could not be
accommodated within the ideological constraints of the bourgeois family,
thus breaking ‘the reassuring unity of classic realist narrative’.13 The
‘melodramatic excess’ of these films was understood as an ironic and
critical commentary on the normative tradition of realism. Melodrama’s
ideological function was thus seen as playing out the contradictions of the
bourgeois family and patriarchy, raising them ‘to the surface and re-
presenting them in an aesthetic form’.14
The existence of a series of films in the 1950s with similar stylistic and
thematic characteristics made it possible to address melodrama as a
coherent genre. However, melodrama had been characterized by Peter
Brooks as an epistemological and aesthetic mode and, as such, appears on
most occasions in combination with other genres. For that reason,
Christine Gledhill has described melodrama as ‘cross-generic’.15 The two
films analysed in this article, for example, blend melodrama with noir and
thriller, among other possible generic influences. Although the concept of
‘mode’ has been criticized by Agustín Zarzosa as vague—an empty noun to
complete the process of substantivizing the adjective ‘melodramatic’—it is
useful to think of melodrama in comparison with other aesthetic modes,
such as realism and modernism.16 In this sense, we should not think of
melodrama and realism as binary opposites. Like realism, melodrama is
rooted in everyday life, in lived experience. However, realism assumes that
social reality can be adequately explained using rational and scientific
methods and that a suitable representation is possible.17 On the contrary,
melodrama, like modernism, has no such confidence and acknowledges that
our representational systems may be inadequate to represent the social
world. Melodrama is therefore neither the opposite of realism nor of
modernism, only another mode to represent the world with which it may
converge or diverge, depending on the self-awareness of the melodrama in
question.

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.
20 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

Understanding melodrama in this way, however, runs the risk of

generalizing and abstracting its own conventions and, indeed, its own
specificities. Trying to find a common ground for a definition of the
melodramatic mode, Zarzosa argues that melodrama explores the problem
of coping with suffering. Thus, for him, ‘melodrama is an aesthetic
operation […] that tests the efficiency of ideas and their role in suffering’.18
In other words, melodrama puts on stage how social ideas—such as
patriarchy, traditional family values, capitalism—make people suffer.
Melodrama does so by translating social issues into private conflicts and
giving them a narrative and aesthetic form that can be easily understood
and felt by the audience. Through pathos, spectators feel and suffer with
the protagonist.

Muerte de un ciclista: A Noir Melodrama

Muerte de un ciclista stands as one of Juan Antonio Bardem’s most acclaimed
films. His third solo feature film after Cómicos (1954) and the comedy Felices
Pascuas (1954), Bardem gained international fame after the film won the
FIPRESCI award at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.19 The film begins with
the car accident. María José and Juan run over a cyclist on a minor road.
The two lovers get out of the car to rescue the victim, who is still alive.
María José, however, changes her mind, insists that they should leave and
runs back to the car. Hesitantly, Juan decides to return to the vehicle and
leave. Later, Juan finds out from a newspaper that the cyclist has died.
The death of the cyclist increases his sense of guilt—a sentiment mixed
with the fear of being caught—especially after they come to believe that
Rafa (Carlos Casaravilla), an art critic who is blackmailing them, knows
about the accident. Eventually, though, they find out that he only knows
about their affair. At the end of the film, Juan decides that they should
turn themselves in to the police, as a way of expiating their crime. María
José, however, does not want to lose all her privileges and kills Juan with
the consent of her husband, who is now aware of her infidelity, to prevent
her lover from telling their secret to the police. In a double twist of fate,
however, María José dies in another car accident while trying to avoid
hitting another cyclist. After a brief hesitation, this anonymous cyclist
(Manuel Alexandre) goes for help, in what Rob Stone has read as ‘Bardem’s
testament to the moral superiority of the working class’.20

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.
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 21

Scholarship on Juan Antonio Bardem’s cinema has generally understood

his use of melodrama, and Hollywood aesthetics in general, in opposition to—
or, at least, in tension with—his alleged espousal of neorealism. Marsha
Kinder and Rob Stone, for example, understand Bardem’s use of
melodrama and neorealism in Muerte de un ciclista as dialectically
opposite, whereas Jo Evans reads the film as a ‘neorealist/film noir
hybrid’.21 I argue, however, that the influence of neorealism on the film is
minimal compared to other aesthetics and that analysing the melodramatic
mode of the film allows for a better understanding of its social criticism—
significantly done from the perspective of the bourgeoisie.22 In this debate,
I side with Juan Francisco Cerón, who maintains that Bardem’s
relationship with neorealism has been exaggerated: first, because
Hollywood cinema had a greater influence on him than is usually
acknowledged and, second, because the Italian cinema that most influenced
Bardem was rather ‘post-neorealist’ and was not in opposition to, but
completely imbued with, melodrama.23 By 1955, in fact, Italian neorealism
was practically dead. In Spain, nevertheless, the movement was still
endorsed as the most valid aesthetic model for Spanish cinema by Objetivo,
the magazine that Bardem had helped to found, and the Conversaciones de
Salamanca, the film conference organized by Basilio Martín Patino that
enthroned Bardem as the future of Spanish cinema.24 An earlier event had
already contributed to the influence of Italian cinema on the critics and
filmmakers of Bardem’s generation. The Istituto Italiano di Cultura in
Madrid organized two sessions of the Semana de Cine Italiano, in
November 1951 and March 1953. In the second, Bardem saw Cronaca di
un amore (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950), a film that had a decisive
influence on Muerte de un ciclista and which also starred Lucia Bosè.
Antonioni’s film, however, is hardly neorealist. Robert Koehler defines it as
post-neorealist and argues that it marks a stark break with neorealism,
‘proposing entirely new formal concepts of how to tell a story
cinematically’.25 Emiliano Morreale describes it as a ‘mélo modernista’ and
claims that Antonioni was consciously making a melodrama, using the

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.
22 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

aesthetics of the Hollywood noir, but filming the landscape with a modernist
sensibility.26 I intend to argue that the same characterization could be made,
word for word, of Bardem’s film.
The reality is that Bardem’s theoretical conception of realism was more
concerned with its subject matter than with the relationship between
reality and film language—which was for him a given, a ‘lenguaje
socialmente dado y socialmente entendido’.27 Bardem vehemently defended
a Spanish cinema that should bear witness to its immediate reality, with
‘películas que reflejen la situación del hombre español, sus conflictos y su
realidad’.28 This ‘cine testimonio’, however, was far from documentary
cinema or a mere photography of reality. For Bardem, the director had to
intervene in reality and give it meaning. He defended, for example, the
‘objective realism’ of Elia Kazan’s Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947), because
‘el realizador no fotografía simplemente la realidad, sino que trata de
interpretarla, participando en el drama para sacar la conclusión necesaria
en el plano social y humano’.29 He also criticized the neorealist
screenwriter Cesare Zavattini for ‘su intento de desespectacularizar el
cine’.30 For Bardem, cinema was precisely a spectacle that dramatized
reality. Directors such as Orson Welles, Fred Zinnemann and Joseph
L. Manckiewicz, and films such as Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore
provided a better example for Bardem’s cinema, since their formal
stylization made it more appealing for spectators.31
The supposed opposition between neorealism and melodrama has also
been revised. Louis Bayman, for example, argues that, because realism and
melodrama are defined in aesthetic theory against each other, ‘the
relationship between melodrama and realism in neorealist films has never
been considered beyond opposition. Yet in Italian neorealism, melodrama
and realism interact and at times even combine’.32 For Bayman,
neorealism gives rein to unrepressed emotion, as melodrama does, but
gives it a working-class foundation. In this way, neorealism makes the
suffering of the popular masses more intense and proclaims ‘that the

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).
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 23

genuine pathos of social restrictions and important moral questions are found
in ordinary people’s lives’.33 Neorealism, therefore, made use of melodrama in
order to convey the suffering of the working class through pathos. If
neorealism had an influence on Bardem, it was not against or despite his
own Hollywood influences. Rather, neorealism could also have shaped his
use of melodrama. However, in Muerte de un ciclista, unlike most
neorealist films, the spectator identifies and suffers with the bourgeois
protagonist, not with the working class. Bardem’s use of melodrama did not
go unnoticed by critics. However, it was usually criticized vis-à-vis the
allegedly political discourse of his films. Domènec Font, for example,
characterized his films with adjectives such as ‘sentimental’, ‘ternurista’
and ‘blandengue’—in other words, he scorned them for being too
‘feminine’—and, in a contradicting tour-de-force, criticized his use of a
‘gimoteante y melodramático psicologismo naturalista’.34 In fact, only
recently has his use of melodrama been reviewed in non-pejorative terms.
Until then, melodrama was viewed with scorn. Indeed, Miguel Marías
argues that Bardem would probably refuse to accept that his films were
melodramas.35
The first, scholarly attempt to understand Muerte de un ciclista as a
melodrama came from Marsha Kinder in her influential 1993 book Blood
Cinema. In the book, she develops the tensions between melodrama and
realism in the film, recognizing that Italian neorealism already
incorporated melodrama. However, in her analysis of the film, Kinder
sticks to a binary opposition between melodrama and neorealism and
claims that Bardem uses neorealism to undermine the intensity of
melodrama. For her, neorealism is used ‘to rupture a glossy Hollywood-type
melodrama’ and disarticulate the discourse of Hollywood.36 Thus, Kinder
seems to suggest that melodrama, on its own, does not allow for a critical
representation of society, contradicting the authors she has previously
discussed. Furthermore, as Diana Roxana Jorza has noted, Kinder adheres
to a very stereotypical binary conception of melodrama and neorealism, in
which the former is reactionary, egocentric, individualistic and unifying,
and the latter, collective, progressive and subversive.37 Robert Koehler has
also criticized Kinder for conflating neorealism with Antonioni’s cinema.
For him, Antonioni’s post-neorealism suggests, contrary to neorealism, that
‘the most powerful, yet subtle, social critique is not melodrama pitying the

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.
24 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

poor but examining the ways of the rich’.38 Muerte de un ciclista does
something similar: exploring, and criticizing from within, the world of the
bourgeoisie. The result is, according to Koehler, ‘a kind of postneorealism
dovetailed with melodrama’, combining Hollywood storytelling conventions
with political critique and incorporating many elements of the Hollywood
noir.39 In short, Bardem does not use the aesthetics of melodrama and the
Hollywood noir in opposition to neorealism—or post-realism—but as
another aesthetic influence which allows him to ‘do’ social criticism.
Analysing Muerte de un ciclista as a melodrama offers a more critical
understanding of the film’s social critique, as well as some of its most
problematic aspects. The structure and moral outlook of the film, for
example, are clearly melodramatic. According to Brooks, early stage
melodrama used to start with the presentation of virtue and innocence.
However, in the first exchanges of such plays, a situation or a character
threatened and obscured this virtue. This menace placed virtue in danger
and evil appeared to reign triumphant for most of the play. The recognition
of evil, and then of virtue, was the necessary step for the re-establishment
of the heroine and, from there, for the final restoration of moral order or, at
least, when a happy ending was not provided, of its recognition.40
This is particularly poignant for Muerte de un ciclista since it follows a
similar structure. The accident, right at the beginning of the film, marks
the end of innocence. Juan feels guilty for leaving the cyclist to die. None
the less, he contributes to hiding the crime and making sure that there is
no evidence against them—at least, until he has a revelation when the
students protest against his unfair decision to fail their classmate and they
break a window by throwing a stone. In these students, Juan sees himself
when he was younger. In other words, he sees in them the innocence to
which he wants to return. That state of innocence relates, in fact, to a
moment before the war, as the accident acts as an allegory of Juan’s
involvement in the Civil War. That state of innocence, before his ‘primal’
crime, also coincides with the moment in which he and María José were
together. In fact, they were once engaged, but the war broke them apart
and, instead of waiting for him, María José married a wealthy man.
‘Aquello fue una equivocación y una necesidad, sobre todo una necesidad’,
she tells Juan. Herein lies the Manichaeanism of the film typical of
melodrama. It is not an opposition between the two sides in the Civil War,
since Bardem at no point makes reference to the Republicans, nor does

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.
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 25

Juan express sympathies towards them. The Manichaeanism is expressed in

the opposition of the current situation of injustice against a mythical, primal
moment of innocence. Juan believes that, by turning himself in to the police,
he will expiate his guilt and will, therefore, be able to restore that state of
innocence; although, symbolically, the idea of giving the two of them up to
the police is also a way for Juan to ‘recover’ María José, without the
interference of her husband. In this way, they would be free to make a
clean start, redeemed of the two crimes they committed: the murder of a
cyclist and marital infidelity.
In Bardem’s early films there is always the promise of change, something
that the main characters are longing for, and which introduces the ‘dual
recognition’ of how things are, and how things should be, that is typical of
melodrama.41 However, these changes are always frustrated in the end.
These endings could be read as pessimistic about the possibility of change.
I read them, instead, in connection with the most subversive melodramas,
in which there is no resolution, but a persistence of conflict. In this way,
the tensions explored in the film are not contained, but press for a
resolution in real life. In Muerte de un ciclista, even if the femme fatale who
embodies the rapacious side of the ruling class is correctly punished and
dies, the political structure that sustains those in power prevails. The
working-class cyclist who at the end of the film goes for help shows that a
moral universe exists, and that collective welfare should be favoured over
individual interest. The film is, thus, resorting to the popular—and
populist—appeal of melodrama to provide its social critique.

La mujer sin cabeza: A Melodrama without Pathos

La mujer sin cabeza also premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Martel’s first
two feature films, La ciénaga (2001) and La niña santa (2004), had been
acclaimed on the festival circuit. This film, however, had a mixed reception.
Its elusive and perplexing nature, in combination with its subtle allusions
to Argentine history, made it difficult for international reviewers to
grasp.42 In one of the first scenes of the film, the protagonist, Vero, a
middle-aged woman from the upper-middle classes of Salta, accidentally
hits something on a minor road while she attempts to answer her phone.
She remains in shock for a couple of minutes. Then, she looks at the side
mirror, but eventually decides to remain in the car, unaware of the nature
of the casualty. Vero finally puts on her sunglasses and leaves. As
spectators, we see fleetingly, but clearly enough, that there is a dog lying
on the road. However, later in the film news arrives that the body of a boy

41 Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field’, 45.

42 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 102.
26 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

has been found in the canal along the same road—the dead body is, indeed,
one of the indigenous boys that were shown playing in the first scene.
Therefore, suspicions that Vero may have also killed the boy start growing
for the audience. Throughout the film, Vero wanders aimlessly, as if she
were a victim of a post-traumatic shock. Nevertheless, the men of the
family—her husband, her brother and her cousin—take care of the
‘situation’: they make Vero’s medical examination at the hospital
disappear, they fix the dent in the car and they remove the record of the
reservation at the hotel in which Vero had a sexual encounter with her
cousin on the day of the accident. Vero completes the cover up by dying her
hair from blonde to brunette.
Lucrecia Martel’s films have been classified within the New Argentine
Cinema, a broad movement that comprises different directors who began
their careers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. According to Jens
Andermann, this movement reacted to the films from the 1980s that made
history its subject, using—what he calls—an ‘aesthetics of TV
melodrama’.43 The films of the New Argentine Cinema avoided the
principles of their predecessors and performed instead ‘a form of historical
consciousness by making the image conscious of itself’ and calling attention
to the camera’s own presence as a facilitator of both performance and
spectatorship.44 Martel’s films also represent a retreat into bourgeois
domestic spheres. Although this focus on the private has been commonly
criticized as an attempt to avoid history, the critical re-evaluation of
melodrama stressed its potential to represent broader power structures
through the dramatization of internal, family conflicts. La mujer sin
cabeza, for example, explores questions of guilt, responsibility, complicity,
trauma and amnesia which have been central to the public debate about
the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983) by focusing on a
private drama and the micropolitics found in the domestic sphere. Deborah
Shaw reads the film precisely in these terms: ‘the private interior world of
a bourgeois Argentine woman is mined to reveal collective truths and to
present an anatomy of a sick, traumatised nation’.45 I argue that this ‘focus
on intimate, interior, private and domestic spaces’ is in itself a
melodramatic convention.46 None the less, Martel distances her work from
the political melodramas of the 1980s, chiefly La historia oficial (dir. Luis
Puenzo, 1985), by reflecting on its own filmic construction, especially

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.
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 27

regarding questions of identification. As I will discuss in the last section of

this article, Martel negotiates the spectator’s pathos to avoid an uncritical
—and dangerous, according to the director—over-identification with Vero.
Lucrecia Martel’s films have usually been categorized as part of arthouse
or festival cinema. All of her films have premiered in the major international
film festivals—La ciénaga in Berlin, La niña santa and La mujer sin cabeza in
Cannes, and Zama (2017) in Venice. Arthouse and festival films are seldom
characterized as genre cinema although, more problematically, they are
sometimes approached as a genre of their own. Yet Martel’s films have
been addressed by scholars in the light of popular genres, despite their
initial refusal to fit coherently into any of them. Deborah Martin, for
example, explains the international distribution of Martel’s films through
her use of themes and styles of global art cinema, her dialogue with
classical auteurs such as Antonioni and Hitchcock, as well as her ‘subtle
echoing or reworking of genre film including conventions of the horror, the
thriller and the melodrama’.47 Since Martel’s films focus on everyday life,
some critics have labelled her cinema as realist, despite its formal
stylization. Thus, David Oubiña has referred to her aesthetics as a
‘realismo insidioso’ or, even, ‘negligente’, because the camera in her films
observes reality, but unwillingly, avoiding any direct confrontation with
the events.48 For Oubiña, Martel’s is a critical realism in the tradition of
György Lukács, for she attempts to represent a totality from the individual
actions and behaviours of a specific group.49 He, none the less, contrasts
Martel’s realism to other, plainer forms of realism. Whereas the latter
makes use of a crude image surreptitiously stolen from reality and
elaborates on those images, Martel’s films are the result of a previous
intellectual construction, which is imposed on the film later, during its
production stage.50 Martel, however, has argued that her cinema ‘es más
cercano al género fantástico que al costumbrista’.51 This link to the

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).
28 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

fantastic, and more specifically to horror films and B-movies, has been
approved by scholars and critics. Mariana Enríquez, for example, talks
about a ‘gótico salteño’ in relation to the presence of spectres, even if only
metaphorically, in La mujer sin cabeza.52
I am not the first person to suggest that Martel’s films could be conceived
as melodramas. Dominique Russell, for example, argues that, given the
centrality of women, the focus on the bourgeoisie, the domestic and the
maternal and the forbidden and incestuous desires of the characters,
Martel’s films could be said to play with the conventions of melodrama.
However, in these films, emotion barely surfaces: the narrative is de-
dramatized, there are no tears or high moral tones, significant moments
only happen offscreen and sound does not punctuate the character’s
emotions.53 Russell adds that, nevertheless, much is to be written on
melodrama and Martel; for example, her exploration of the social via
private contexts and emotions, her focus on victims, the maternal and
active female desire.54 Juana Suárez, for her part, suggests that, because of
their focus on the disintegration of the family and the erosion of the
patriarchal order, Martel’s films belong to the tradition of melodrama,
although she deliberately adopts and abandons some of its conventions.55
Bearing the views of these critics in mind, I want to claim that Martel
negotiates with some of melodrama’s thematic and formal conventions and
works through them as a useful way to depict, and criticize, the bourgeois
family from within. However, aware of the problems entailed by character
identification, she also detaches her films from pathos. In this way, Martel
avoids portraying the main characters as victims, a typical problem of
melodrama that I will address later.
Geoffrey Novell-Smith has argued that the characters of melodrama
belong to the petty bourgeoisie, a class which does not conceive of itself as
holding power, but neither do these characters see themselves as
disinherited or dispossessed. For this class, ‘[t]he locus of power is the
family and individual private property, the two being connected through
inheritance’.56 Martel has recognized that her films are told from the
perspective of the upper middle class because that is the social class she

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).
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 29

belongs to, and also the one she is ashamed of: ‘Avergonzada un poco de la
clase social a la que pertenezco no podía tampoco ponerme a narrar desde
un lugar del que no tengo ninguna experiencia de vida’.57 Her films,
starting with La ciénaga, portray the decline of the bourgeoisie and can be
conceived as active demolitions of the bourgeois family. Martel has also
criticized the institution of the family as the main reason why the
protagonists of La mujer sin cabeza act not only to cover up the crime but
also to deny its very existence:

La familia como institución tal como la conocemos es la base de toda

corrupción. Supone una forma de lealtad que está inspirada en la
sangre en lugar de otras afinidades de pensamiento […] La sangre y la
propiedad son formas básicas de defensa […] Si uno se identificara
menos con la familia entonces el sentido de pertenencia a una
comunidad sería más fuerte, y atropellar a alguien, o dejar que alguien
sufra o sin educación serían problemas reales.58

For Martel, therefore, the family acts as an institution that protects property
through blood ties, preventing its members from feeling part of a broader
community. The 1950s melodramas produced by Universal Pictures found
in the family a perfect source of conflict, since the family unit is overlaid
with tensions ready to be acted out. In those films, Laura Mulvey argues,
‘[t]he family is the socially accepted road to respectable normality, an icon
of conformity, and at one and the same time, the source of deviance,
psychosis and despair’.59 The home also provides a claustrophobic setting
that increases the tension in the internal quarrels of the family, showing
‘the passions and antagonisms that lie behind it’.60 In the film, the home is
also the symbol of a conservative sense of class and family belonging, based
on property and inheritance and at the same time it is the microcosm in
which the cover-up of a murder is planned.
As in classical melodrama, the mise-en-scène also speaks through its use of
colour. In the interiors, for example, the preponderance of light blues and
browns can be read, as Mulvey does regarding All That Heaven Allows (dir.
Douglas Sirk, 1955), as signifiers of ‘loneliness, repression and
oppression’.61 These colours point to the repressive nature of a patriarchal,
bourgeois society, but they also act as a visual reminder of typical 1970s

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.
30 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

interior design, making a link—as do other visual markers throughout the

film—to the last military dictatorship. The film, however, does not
establish an emotional relationship between spectators and characters: it
plays down the emotions of its characters; it does not stress the most
dramatic moments of the story, which often happen offscreen; and it
refrains from making a drama out of the plot’s extra-marital affairs. In
fact, Vero has a sexual encounter with her cousin Juan Manuel (Daniel
Genoud), which has the potential to cause an unending conflict within the
family. However, the affair is almost diluted in the film, as if it had no
consequences. When Vero goes back home the following morning, she
discovers that her husband has also spent the night elsewhere. Apologetic,
he blames his late arrival on the storm, but this lie brings no further
repercussions. Infidelity, in other words, does not cause conflict. Turning a
blind eye enables the preservation of the familiar institution.
La mujer sin cabeza has been associated with the cinema of Michelangelo
Antonioni. This was the most obvious aesthetic affinity that film critics found
when it premiered at Cannes. Though it was not compared with Antonioni’s
early films, as in the case of Bardem, but with his more modernist films from
the early 1960s, particularly Il deserto rosso (1964). Deborah Martin, for
example, has compared the way that Martel and Antonioni shot both films:
‘La mujer sin cabeza’s use of focus strongly recalls that of Michelangelo
Antonini’s Red Desert, in which the female protagonist Giuliana’s (Monica
Vitti) alienation and heightened perception is communicated in a similar
way through shallow focus and fog’.62 Emiliano Morreale argues that, in
the period when he filmed Il deserto rosso, Antonioni had developed a
technique of stripping the narrative bare through a conscious confrontation
with his use of melodrama in earlier films, this film being the last one to
introduce a melodramatic female character in his cinema.63 Louis Bayman
also recognizes that the themes, settings and love stories of Antonioni’s
films are similar to melodrama. However, ‘the experience of time, drama
and emotion in his films seems calculated to drain the events of any actual
experience as melodramatic’.64 I will claim that Martel does something
similar. She uses and exploits the themes, characters and stories of
melodramas, but empties them of their emotional and spectacular content
in order to provide a more critical relationship with their characters. In
this way, she provides a melodrama without pathos.

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).
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 31

To Kill a Subaltern
Muerte de un ciclista and La mujer sin cabeza, although they do so in different
ways, adopt and rework the conventions of melodrama in order to address
questions of class and power. In both films the bourgeois protagonists are
faced with a victim from a lower social stratum, which forces them—and
the spectators through them—to see their class difference. In both cases,
the accident happens offscreen but has important repercussions for the
representation of the bourgeois protagonists. In Muerte de un ciclista, the
accident occurs below an incline in the road, and the spectator only
perceives the event through the music, which punctuates the collision, and
the reaction of the characters. Furthermore, the cyclist remains faceless,
for we only see the wheels of the bicycle, via a low-angle shot, when Juan
checks whether he is still alive. La mujer sin cabeza does not give the
spectator complete visual access to the accident either. First, the camera
looks frontally through the windscreen at the dirt road and then Vero is
shown laterally as she searches for her phone. From this position, the
spectator can only ‘feel’ and ‘hear’ the accident.65 Andermann defines
accidents ‘as an insufficient awareness of, and control over, the out-of-field,
which intrudes into and shatters the internal coherence of the screen’.66
For Juan, in Muerte de un ciclista, the reality of class difference and
political unrest enters his life after the accident via the stone thrown by
the students in the university. As with the metaphor of the broken glass,
the accident allows him to see and understand his egoism, marking a step
towards his conversion. In the world of Vero, the offscreen is the space
inhabited by the ‘other’. After the accident, however, the racial and social
other creeps into the frame, a space usually reserved for the actions of the
upper classes. According to Andermann, Vero’s sense of guilt ‘puts her in a
state of trance and clairvoyance towards her own social world and that of
the “others” [who are] relegated almost by reflex to the margins of vision’,
usually shown in the background or out-of-focus.67 The film highlights the
haunting presence of indigenous people precisely—or paradoxically—by
ensuring that they are always present but marginalized in the background.
In both films, indeed, the invisibility and powerlessness of the victims are
stressed negatively by giving voice to the bourgeoisie. The dead, however,
emerge through to the surface in the form of signs in the mise-en-scène, as
symptoms of the repressed.
I am using the concept of ‘subaltern’ to refer to the social groups to which
both dead characters belong, since they are displaced to the margins of society
and deprived of agency and voice. I am aware that the way I am using the

65 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 82.

66 Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, 158.
67 Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, 159.
32 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

term, as synonymous with an oppressed class or, even, with the ‘Other’, is
problematic. Gayatri Spivak, for example, has criticized such a use,
arguing that the working class may be oppressed, but they are not
subaltern, because they can speak since they are within the hegemonic
discourse.68 In postcolonial theory, the ‘subaltern’ has been defined as a
social figure excluded from any form of political or aesthetic representation,
in opposition to the citizen. I want to return, however, to the original
definition of Antonio Gramsci, which allows me to encompass both the
working-class cyclist and the indigenous boy as subalterns. According to
Peter D. Thomas, for Gramsci the subaltern is not excluded from, but
integrated into the hegemonic relations of the modern state.69 According to
him, ‘[r]uling classes in political modernity need to produce—and to
reproduce continually—subaltern social groups in order to become and to
maintain themselves as ruling classes’.70 In this way, for Gramsci,
subalternity is not opposed to citizenship, but rather embodies and
expresses its own contradictions. Thomas also argues that subalterns
express themselves, but ‘in ways which are not easily comprehended within
the existing political or intellectual orders’.71 Neither of the dead in either
film is, in fact, historically deprived of citizenship, albeit both are in a
position of inequality that allows the hegemonic classes—and the bourgeois
protagonists—to maintain their power. In the case of Muerte de un ciclista,
the dead person is a metallurgy worker who cycles every day to the foundry
in Carabanchel where he works. He lives in a poor corrala in a semi-ruined
area of Madrid and is a father of two. In this way, he signifies the ‘Other’ to
Juan, a well-off middle-aged man who fought in the war on Franco’s side
and attained a lectureship in the university thanks to his well-positioned
brother-in-law. In La mujer sin cabeza, the dead person is an indigenous
boy of about twelve years old who lives in a poor slum village outside Salta.
He is one of the faceless, marginal people who inhabit Argentina and are
invisible to the middle and upper classes. The protagonist of La mujer sin
cabeza, Vero, who works as a dentist, belongs to a wealthier white
community of European ancestry. She and the other members of her
extended family employ indigenous people as servants, but they seldom
engage with other indigenous people as equals, apart from Vero’s niece
Candita (Inés Efrón). As in Martel’s two previous films, the indigenous and
mestizo servants and neighbours are symbolically ‘othered’ by this white

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.
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 33

elite.72 The dead boy represents, therefore, Vero’s social and ethnic other.
Martel and Bardem decide in this way not to speak for these oppressed
groups but instead express their situation through a complex strategy of
visibility/invisibility that stresses their subaltern status.
Two scenes which are repeated in both films confront Juan and Vero with
the haunting presence of the dead bodies, putting them in the position of
defendants. The first scene deals with Juan and Vero reading the news
about the deaths. In La mujer sin cabeza, an indigenous gardener is doing
some work in Vero’s garden, while she supervises him. Vero finds a
newspaper on a table and checks that the gardener is not looking. She
reads something and closes the newspaper, showing some signs of anguish
—although it is a long shot and her face cannot be read clearly. Vero turns
her head again to make sure the gardener is not observing and reads the
news again. The shot changes to a close-up that shows Vero’s head
laterally, occupying the left half of the anamorphic screen, whereas the
gardener appears out of focus at the right side, directly behind her neck.
When Vero turns her head again to check the gardener, he leaves the
frame. The audience does not know about the content of the article, but in
the following scene we learn that the body of a boy has been found in the
canal.
In Muerte de un ciclista, Juan also finds the news about the death of the
cyclist in a newspaper. Juan reads the news without paying attention to a
student, Matilde (Bruna Corrà), who is taking an exam at the blackboard.
When Juan finds the news that confirms that the cyclist died, his sense of
guilt is conveyed through a very powerful montage that juxtaposes close-
ups and extreme close-ups of his agitated face with the headlines, with
Matilde and with the students, until he explodes and tells Matilde to shut
up. At that moment, the students—who were actually looking at Matilde
even though Juan believed they were observing him—start talking about
his behaviour. Even if the mise-en-scène and intensity of both scenes are
entirely different, in the two cases the presence of the students and the
gardener unsettles the protagonists as being possible witnesses to their
crimes. They act as judges of their wrongdoings, as a constant presence
that weighs on the protagonists’ consciences. In Muerte de un ciclista, the
students take the form of a jury, while in La mujer sin cabeza the gardener
is more of a spectral presence who haunts Vero, as if he were the ghost of
the dead boy returning to demand justice. It is typical of melodrama that
the audience acts as a judge who recognizes the existence of evil and
virtue, as well as the errors made by the protagonists. This role is usually
embodied in the film by a group of people acting as a jury. In these films,

72 Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 37.

34 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

the students and the indigenous people who are always around in the
background play the role of judges and act as reminders of the accidents.
In another scene, both Juan and Vero visit the slums in which their victims
lived. In Muerte de un ciclista, Juan goes there to check whether anyone knows
anything about the accident, but his encounter with the cyclist’s poor
neighbourhood, where the buildings have been left in ruins as living scars of
the war, gives Juan empirical and affective evidence of his privilege. The
contrast between his comfortable world, symbolized by lavish bourgeois
interiors, and the corrala where the cyclist lived, an open space shared with
his neighbours, is further accentuated by juxtaposing both spaces through a
sudden cut. In La mujer sin cabeza, Vero is compelled to give Candita’s
indigenous friend a lift to the house where the dead boy lived. Filmed with
the camera in the vehicle’s rear seats, the spectators witness Vero’s
uncomfortable confrontation with the dead boy’s family as if they were with
her in the car. When Vero leaves, we see Changuila (Catalino Campos), the
brother of the dead boy, walking along the road on his way to fetch water.
While Vero passes alongside him, Changuila directs a fleeting gaze at her.
Deborah Martin reads this as the gaze of the repressed ‘other’—an
accusatory gaze trained on Vero, but also on us as spectators.73 What is
more interesting in this scene is that the camera pans left to look at
Changuila, while Vero does not turn her head. This shows that the camera
is subjective, but also that it does not identify with Vero. Martel has
described the camera in her films as being like a ten-year-old child who is
very curious and does not impose moral judgments.74 In this scene, the
camera decides to look at Changuila, a gaze that Vero denies. In this way,
the film not only undermines identification with Vero, but also proposes a
different approach to the accident, for it refuses to deny what happened.

Victimhood
Recently, melodrama scholarship has focused on exploring the politics of
victimhood implicit in its approach. In Melodrama after the Tears, Scott
Loren and Jörg Metelmann discuss the role of the suffering victim as the
locus for subjective identification within melodramatic narratives. Their
starting point is the famous sentence in Thomas Elsaesser’s seminal article
‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, in which he argued that melodramas ‘manage to
present all the characters convincingly as victims’.75 The capacity of the

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).
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 35

victim, they argue, is used to induce sympathy and motivate identification.76

In a revision of his statement, Elsaesser argues that victimhood has become,
in politics, a desirable subject position. He suggests that many of the
privileged amongst the middle-classes, have adopted this position as a way
of alleviating their guilt for being silent witnesses and beneficiaries of the
uneven distribution of wealth. In other words, presenting themselves as
victims of the same system from which they have benefitted is taken as a
symbolic act of solidarity. Being victims not only makes them aware of the
injustice and the power relations that cause suffering, but affords them
some responsibility, and this act of responsibility also gives them a sense of
moral superiority.77
This point is most relevant to the position defended by Juan, the
protagonist of Muerte de un ciclista, since he presents himself as a victim of
the same system he has contributed to establishing and by which he has
been favoured. Indeed, he regards his ultimate victimization—surrendering
to the police, if not being killed by María José—as an act of heroism (‘seré
una especie de héroe’, Juan tells his mother). Previously in the film, he
introduces himself as the bad son of the family, in comparison with his
‘good’ brothers, who died in the war fighting alongside the rebels, and his
sister, who married a man of considerable standing within the Francoist
regime. Juan also laments that he got his position as a lecturer in the
university only thanks to his brother-in-law. In this way, Bardem
introduces the character of Juan as someone who, being part of the regime,
is now disaffected. As Juan Francisco Cerón has noted, Bardem was
advancing here the politics of National Reconciliation that the Partido
Comunista de España (PCE) would approve in 1956 and which would find
a more direct materialization in Bardem’s 1958 film La venganza.78
Through their politics of National Reconciliation, the PCE abandoned the
possibility of a violent uprising against the regime in favour of establishing
an understanding among the different sectors of society that were
disaffected with the regime to find a democratic solution. Although this
stance was adopted in 1956, the Fifth Conference of the PCE, in November
1954, had already laid the foundations for joining with other political forces
in a National Front against Franco with the aim of joining forces to further
the establishment of a democratic system. The film was conceived,
therefore, amidst these ideas that Bardem was aware of. Through the
figure of Juan, a disaffected falangist, the film addresses those other people
who were part of the regime but who would end up in the political

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.
36 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

opposition to Franco, such as Dionisio Ridruejo, Pedro Laín Entralgo and

Antonio Tovar.79
Juan’s guilt over the death of the cyclist acts, in fact, as a substitute for his
guilt about his involvement in the Civil War. This analogy is made clear in
the last scenes of the film. When Juan makes the decision to give himself
up to the police, as a way of expiating his guilt, he looks especially happy,
as if feeling a sense of moral superiority. Separated by a fence, Juan gives
Matilde his resignation letter to hand in to the university and tells her that
he is leaving on a ‘viaje de vuelta a sí mismo’. The reason he gives for
leaving is ‘algo malo que hice una vez’. The temporal frame of his sentence
does not seem to refer to the car accident that happened only a few days
earlier, but some event previous to that—such as during the war. The link
to the war is also evidenced by the place where Juan and María José ran
over the cyclist—the same place where Juan had fought in a significant
battle in the Civil War—to which they return before turning themselves in
to the police. Juan says that for them this place is particularly important:
while in the trenches, he was thinking of their future together and, in the
same place, they ran over a man and ran away because he posed a
nuisance to their comfortable lives. This place is chosen by him as a
meaningful point for his conversion. According to Patricia Keller, this place
‘signifies a site of profound loss—of his youthful innocence, of his love for a
woman who will betray him repeatedly and unexpectedly, and […] of the
cyclist’s life’.80 It is, therefore, a return to painful memories, but also to
‘what has remained unspoken’ and ‘haunts him’.81 The war and Juan’s
memories of it is that which has been repressed, it is now coming out and
is expressed in the hysterical narrative and mise-en-scène that characterize
the last scenes of the film.
Juan’s death appears as a premonition in his mother’s recollection of the
different rites of passage that her sons have been through: ‘la primera
comunión, el instituto, el servicio militar, la política, la guerra, la muerte’.
Her last word is promptly punctuated by the soundtrack and the editing
swiftly cuts to the following scene, with a close-up of María José’s
expressionless face, crossing the frame from right to left, as if heralding
her fatal role. Ironically, Juan also seems to invoke his own death. He gives
one of his usual, long monologues:

Me gusta esta hora, el crepúsculo. Hay una hora donde todo calla. Tengo
tantas ganas de vivir. Como nunca. Es duro empezar otra vez, pero es
bueno. Ves, la tierra está en orden, es el silencio, la paz.

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.
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 37

Juan often resorts to this sort of grandiloquent expression throughout the

film. Jorza has criticized the film for relying too much on these
existentialist moralizing harangues.82 Indeed, this way of expressing
himself through words may seem unmelodramatic. However, as Peter
Brooks suggests, characters in melodramas ‘tend to say, directly and
explicitly, their moral judgments of the world’, using ‘a vocabulary of
psychosocial and moral abstractions to characterize themselves and
others’.83 In this and other soliloquies throughout the film, Juan presents
his moral world-view: egoism is the primal existentialist sin.84 Innocence is
the lack of this egoism, of this sin. Juan abandons the possibility of a
religious redemption in the church and, at first sight, it seems that he looks
for it through justice, surrendering to the police and admitting his crime.
However, eventually he appears to seek redemption in furthering his own
victimization and committing an act of martyrdom. When María José gets
into the car to shelter from the cold, Juan makes, and repeats, a gesture
asking her to go towards him. This double gesture can be read as an
invitation to kill him and, therefore, become a martyr of the egoism that
María José represents and from which he wants to be redeemed. María
José finally runs him over and, in a similar low angle shot to the one used
in the opening scene, she checks that he is dead. Juan has portrayed
himself as a victim of the same society—Francoism—that he has helped to
establish and from which, as part of the ruling class, he has benefitted. As
Linda Williams argues, in melodrama suffering gives moral recognition.85
Juan attempts to attain such recognition through his martyrdom. Thus,
even though he left the cyclist to die unattended and fought in a war that
established an authoritarian regime, Juan presents himself as the victim of
that same society.
In La mujer sin cabeza, the audience can witness a similar process of
victimization. As Deborah Martin has pointed out, ‘Vero is the obvious
“perpetrator” yet after the accident she also plays the role of a traumatised
victim’.86 In her post-traumatic state, everything reminds Vero of the
accident and the missing child, whose presence she feels everywhere: the
roe deer her husband has hunted, an injured boy on the football pitch, a
shoe thrown onto the same road where the accident happened. Although
part of a well-off family, Vero also presents herself in a position of

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.
38 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

powerlessness—a position typical of melodramatic characters. The men of the

family have the necessary power and social connections in the province to
orchestrate the perfect cover-up. Vero, however, feels disempowered and
considers herself a victim of a patriarchal society that, as Cecilia Sosa puts
it, shows that ‘a woman’s guilt can be easily muted, as a sort of girlish
pathology in the rational “adult” world’.87 In order to protect her, the men
of the family feel empowered to infantilize Vero, repress her own memories
of the event and impose their own version of reality. In the conservative,
patriarchal society of Salta that Martel presents in this film, women are
denied their own subjectivity and could thus also be considered as the
‘Other’.88
Characters of melodramas often present themselves as tragic, without
any power over their destiny—although, as Elsaesser points out, they are
usually too self-conscious of that role.89 One of the contradictions that
melodrama brings to the surface is that it takes the point of view of the
victim, and the mise-en-scène insists on their innocence. However, the plot
constantly questions this innocence. Thus, melodrama interrogates
whether these characters are really victims who have no decision-making
powers, or whether they are guilty of internalizing social conventions,
cultural or familiar norms, and constructing a destiny to justify their
weaknesses. If so, these characters would be guilty of believing that they
are tragic characters. We could think of Vero along these lines. From her
position as victim, she thinks that she is powerless and cannot change the
state of things. Thus, at the end, Vero embraces the cover-up orchestrated
by the men of the family.90 In order to complete her acceptance of the story,
she dyes her hair, shifting from blonde—with its connotations of the upper
classes—to brunette. The rest of the relatives approve this change and
comment that it suits her well. Through this change, Vero attempts to
cleanse her guilt, in a sort of redemption that, paradoxically, entails fully
embracing the men’s plan. Vero thus passes from a state of guilt to one of
(active) denial. By submitting herself to the power of the men of the family,
she becomes an accomplice.91

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
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 39

Negotiating Pathos
By definition, melodrama requires pathos for the spectators to identify with a
character, through whom they suffer.92 This affective identification with the
character is central to the problem of victimization that I have explored
above. Linda Williams, however, argues that the spectator’s pathos is never
a simple mimicry of the emotion of the protagonists, but ‘a complex
negotiation between emotions and between emotion and thought’.93
Usually we, as spectators, know more than the characters and, therefore,
we may be moved by the misrecognition of the protagonist with whom we
sympathize. According to Williams, ‘pathos involves us in assessing
suffering in terms of our privileged knowledge of its nature and causes’.94
In this way, our identification with the characters may be negotiated.
Some questions arise regarding the audience’s identification with Juan in
Muerte de un ciclista. At the level of pathos, the audience suffers with him,
but is somehow prevented from fully identifying with him. The spectator is
aware, rationally, of the class Juan represents. Furthermore, Juan is
undoubtedly portrayed as naïve. On a broader level, he is naïve about the
possibility of changing things from within the system. His death is
evidence that change will not be easily achieved. His martyrdom, stressed
by his gesture inviting María José to approach him, is a symbolic act with
no actual possibility for change. The question here is whether Bardem is
taking an ironic approach to the character of Juan or whether he aligns
with him, as a sympathizer vocalizing his own dissatisfaction with
Francoism. Looking at the political climate of the time, it seems plausible
that Juan’s symbolic martyrdom is a call for those disaffected with the
regime to revolt against a system which has only brought about social
injustice. Nevertheless, Bardem warns that such a change will not be easy
and Francoism will respond harshly, as María José does with her lover.
This melodramatic position of portraying Juan as a victim is, however,
problematic, even if understandable within the framework of National
Reconciliation. Juan fought for the establishment of a totalitarian regime,
was appointed as a lecturer because of his brother-in-law’s influence and
left a cyclist to die without helping him. Portraying Juan as a victim may
be an insult to the real victims of Francoism, and to the cyclist as a symbol
for all of them. The ending, however, opens up another reading. The cyclist
who goes for help after witnessing María José’s fatal car accident proves, at

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.
40 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

a rational level, the moral superiority of the working class—because the

spectator understands his solidarity, not because the spectator suffers
through him.
La mujer sin cabeza more clearly avoids a fixed identification with the
protagonist. Vero is locked within herself and the film blocks the audience’s
access to her emotions, avoiding any psychological connection with her.
Martel has recognized that ‘when there are characters in films that one
tends to identify with and sympathize with, that can be really tricky and
damaging’.95 In this film, she is clearly trying to stop that direct
identification. Deborah Martin argues that Martel avoids defining the role
of the spectator not only by undermining their identification with Vero, but
also by shifting the spectator’s position between Vero and a repressed gaze
associated with her social and ethnic other.96 Along the same lines,
Delgado sees the camera as an additional character in the film, acting as ‘a
constant reminder of the absent “other” ’ and ‘implicating the viewer within
the unfolding trauma’.97 This is especially clear in the scene of the visit to
the slums analysed above. There, the camera takes up an independent
position and pairs with Changuila, instead of with Vero, who refuses to
look back at him. In this way, the position of the spectator is unclear and
the pathos of the film is not fixed. This causes the spectator to feel a certain
amount of disbelief towards Vero’s process of victimization. Furthermore,
as Martin has pointed out, ‘the film also allows for spectatorial mobility in
relation to the social and historical positionalities of “perpetrator” and
“victim” ’.98 This shifting position generates a discomfort in the viewers,
because we—as spectators—cannot identify simply with the suffering of the
victim, which would give us at least a sense of moral correctness, but
neither can we identify with the perpetrators, and their attempts to cover
up the crime. It is my view, however, that, although the film does not offer
a clear, fixed position, it ends up siding with the victims, and therefore also
offers a moral, or at least ethical, stance.99
In the last scene of the film, there is a family gathering in the same hotel
in which Vero had an affair with her cousin. Before joining them, she checks
in the reception if there are traces of the booking of the room in which she and
her cousin met on the day of the accident. Once she has verified that the
reservation does not appear in the hotel’s records, she joins the rest of her
family by passing through a semi-transparent door. The camera, however,

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).
DEATH OF A SUBALTERN: MELODRAMA, CLASS AND VICTIMHOOD 41

remains outside. As spectators, we perceive them through the door and hear
the music they are listening to—‘Mamy Blue’, sung by Demi Rousos—but we
are positioned outside their world. If during the film we have shared with
Vero and her family the bourgeois interiors of their middle-class houses
and cars, we remain now, according to Martin, in the position of the
‘Other’, ‘the bearer of the repressed gaze, and by association with the film’s
first sequence, in the position of the dead child, looking in from the
outside’.100 In my view, this position is emphasized not only visually, but
also aurally. While we see the family gathering from outside, we keep
listening to ‘Mamy Blue’, a very popular song in the 1970s and during the
military dictatorship, written by French songwriter Hubert Giraud and
popularized by various singers. Martel has declared that her uncle, a
military man, used to play this song on the guitar. She enjoyed listening to
him, but now, Martel admits, the song scares her.101 The song is, therefore,
not only associated with the bourgeois characters of the film but also with
the military dictatorship.102 At one point in the closing titles, the music
changes and we hear the cumbia song ‘Penas que queman el alma’,
interpreted by the local band Los Lirios Salteños—a song heard earlier in
the slums. Cumbia is, in this way, associated with the popular. By
changing the music that should accompany the closing credits, Martel
refuses to end the film on the side of the perpetrators. Thus, the film opens
with the indigenous boys playing in the canal and ends, in a way, with
their repressed gaze and voice.
Linda Williams argues that ‘melodrama is most centrally about moral
legibility and the assigning of guilt and innocence’ and that ‘pathos and
action are the two most important means to the achievement of moral
legibility’.103 Although pathos is unclear in the film, the film clearly judges
Vero and her family to be guilty, not so much of the accident but of
refusing to help, and of constructing a mechanism of silence in order to
hide and deny any involvement in the accident. Similar to Muerte de un
ciclista, the film labels the subaltern, the social and ethnic other, as
innocent. In this way, both films give their moral judgment of the guilt and
innocence of their characters. The ascertainment of a moral world is thus
negatively presented from the world of the bourgeoisie, which is accused of
acting unethically towards their subalterns and building their privileges

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.
42 BSVS, VII (2023) DANIEL MOURENZA

upon their corpses. Ultimately, both films denounce the mechanisms of

silencing and concealment wielded by the ruling classes as if nothing had
happened to disrupt their comfortable lives, while showing the audience
that things had indeed happened.*

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Daniel Mourenza http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3132-6789