In search of lost spectator: the olfactory field in Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman

Abstract

Martel has always made clear her purpose of questioning the hegemony of the visual and some of the critics have focused on the auditory strategies that serve such interest. However, this questioning is not reducible only to hearing; it is possible to think about the senses that maintain a less direct relationship with cinema, such as smell. In this essay, I propose an analysis of the olfactory field in The Headless Woman (2008). The central idea is that the indirect evocation of smells requires a spectatorial participation whose purpose indicates the need for a critical look at a provincial bourgeois world and its values in decline. Furthermore, I propose that this participation, which implies both involvement and exclusion of the viewers, seeks to give them an awareness of their ability to intervene not only in the represented world, but in the one from which it has taken shape.