Realities Made to Order: About The Headless Woman

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the resources and procedures used in the narrative of La mujer sin cabeza, in order to offer an approach to perception and “reality” as instances resulting from construction processes. Through modes of representation of time and space, the organization of transitions between planes, the relationship between the image track and the sound track, among others, the film foregrounds certain features of the northern Argentinean society (connections between social classes, gender relationships, links between past and present). At the same time, it refers to the ways of constructing and perceiving the environment, the surrounding world, that bear on such society. In this respect, the Lacanian categories –the imaginary-symbolic-real triad, the relationship between real and reality– as well as Slavoj Žižek’s rereadings on the subject, are functional as a means of questioning how the relationships between subjects and their environment are configured in the film. Thus, this paper analyzes the modes in which the narrative refers both to the mechanisms responsible for naturalizing a slanted view as well as to the effects of such view on the configuration of “reality”.