3 - Sounding Class, Race and Gender in The Swamp

Summary

‘No aspect of music is capable of being understood independently of the wider gamut of social and cultural processes … Yet, because of this, it is possible that there are aspects of social and cultural processes which are revealed uniquely through their musical articulation.’

John Shepherd and Peter Wicke

Interviewed for the Argentine film journal Lumière in 2009 after the release of The Headless Woman/La mujer sin cabeza (2008), Lucrecia Martel observed that film audiences respond differently to (non-musical) sound than they do to music:

[music] is like a net where the spectator rests, and [s]he remains there in some way, contained, prodded, scared, [yet] always supported by something. Instead, when the film works with sound, the spectator has to be mentally attuned in order to make sense of it all.

In an earlier interview with Jason Wood for Talking Movies: Contemporary Directors in Interview, Martel noted her objections to conventional film music on the grounds that it ‘leads the viewer to anticipate and even prejudge what's next’, whereas sound ‘only allows one to face what one is seeing at the moment’. Film music scholars agree. Theorising the effects of the ‘core musical lexicon’ most commonly heard in films intended for wide audiences, in her 1987 Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, Claudia Gorbman observed that ‘music […] anchors the image in meaning, throws a net around the floating visual signifier, [and] assures the viewer of a safely channelled signified’. More recently, in Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film, Amy Herzog states that non-diegetic music ‘stabilises the image and secures meaning while remaining as unobtrusive as possible’.

Martel's refusal to use conventional film scoring puts her in a category of filmmakers that practise what Danijela Kulezik-Wilson calls an ‘aesthetics of reticence’, one defined by ‘restraint and a certain level of ambiguity [as] the basic conditions for allowing individuated responses to film’. Partly because of Martel's comments on the subject of film music, partly because the music that is heard in her films is unrecognisable to most audiences, scholars have largely ignored, or dismissed as irrelevant, the music that forms a small but not insignificant part of her films’ soundtracks.