Ackland Film Forum: “The Headless Woman” (2008, Argentina)
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Ackland Film Forum | Spring 2019
Fantastic Voyage: Cinematic Journeys into the Brain
Tuesday, 2 April 2019 | 7 PM
Varsity Theatre, 123 E. Franklin Street
The Headless Woman (2008, Argentina), Lucrecia Martel
One of the leading filmmakers of New Argentine Cinema, Lucrecia Martel’s films explore the struggle of the bourgeoisie to keep up appearances even as the world crumbles about them. In The Headless Woman, Martel’s third feature, we meet an upper-class woman, Vero, who appears to be successfully attending to the chores of her station—gardening, party planning, worrying about relatives–when she hits something after being distracted by her cell phone. Over the rest of the film, we perceive her world as she sees it, and struggle to solve the mystery of what she actually hit—was it a dog? A child? Or nothing at all? For the remainder of the film, we watch Vero recover from the trauma of her accident, and try to solve the mystery therein, all while everyone around her encourages to forget about what happened. Like Vero herself, the surface of Martel’s films are deceptively shallow. With each viewing you notice another clue—an errant sound, a stray image—that underscores of the depth of the deception and resonates with a broader societal impulse, in Argentina and many other places, to bury our darkest secrets in hopes that they never resurface.
ABOUT THE SERIES:TICKETS:
Free for UNC One Card holders; $7 general public. Tickets available at the Varsity Theatre Box Office.
The Spring 2019 Ackland Film Forum series “Fantastic Voyage: Cinematic Journeys into the Brain” is organized by the Ackland Art Museum and the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature and presented in connection with the Ackland’s exhibition The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (25 Jan – 7 April 2019).
