Analyzing the Woman Auteur: The Female/Feminist Gazes of Isabel Coixet and Lucrecia Martel

In a noteworthy recent discussion of gender and cinema, Katarzyna Maciniak, Anikó Imre, and Áine O'Healy highlight the need to "demystify" the First World/ Third World divide through the area they have designated "transcultural feminist media studies" (11). The critics' term calls to attention the need for specialized investigation into questions of gender and representation through the image as it travels around the globe, becoming part of the system of global capitalism. The current transcultural nature of film production is especially relevant for inquiries into gender identity and how normative and counter-hegemonic images of women circulate. As director Isabel Coixet has stated, "Nadie se deja el género o la nacionalidad en el vestuario, cuando se pone a trabajar" ("Nobody leaves their gender or nationality in the dressing room when they set to work") ("Isabel Coixet Motor Homepage").¹ The astuteness of such a declaration is evident when considering the films of the two writer/directors I treat here: Isabel Coixet of Spain and Lucrecia Martel of Argentina. A close study of their films, The Secret Life of Words (2005) and La niña santa (2004), respectively, uncovers trends across the Atlantic even as the subject matter of the films differs substantially: Coixet tells the story of a woman working through psychic and physical trauma, while Martel relates an adolescent girl's nascent sexuality. An analysis of both directors' diegetic constructions and their filming techniques in particular brings to light the distinctly feminine gaze constructed by both Coixet and Martel in their work. The manners in which these directors employ space, lighting, and sound result in opposing possibilities for gendered beings. Coixet's attempt to transpose gender roles in her film only serves to reassert them while Martel's ability to blur boundaries results in a more fluid conception of gender that resists the binds of heteronormativity.

The obstacles involved in studying the auteur are more heightened in the film genre due to the nature of production. When multiple people are involved in the construction of a single frame, scene, and the film as a whole, separating out the auteur, or the veritable "producer" of the cultural product, becomes a futile task for the critic and one that would poorly represent the outcome of the artistic visions at work were it to be achieved.² Though Coixet and Martel may seem to alleviate some of the analytical dilemma of the auteur by also writing their own screenplays, it is still essential to consider the auteur, in Rosanna Maule's terms, as the "sociology-of-production" (24). Both of the films studied here were executively produced, in part, by El Deseo S.A., the production company of brothers Augustín and Pedro Almodóvar. Direct connection to the internationally famous Spanish director was undoubtedly helpful in ensuring the films' successes and reveals itself in the directors' use of filming techniques akin to Pedro Almodóvar's. Coixet and Martel's choice to work with Almodóvar, though, as Núria Triana Toribio's discussion of transnational/transcultural cinema demonstrates, may be less of an aesthetic decision than an economic one. Triana Toribio borrows the concept of the autor mediático (pertaining to the media) from Vicente J. Benet, one he defined as the presence of "certain auteurs (namely Pedro Almodóvar, Alejandro Amenábar and Julio Medem) whose style and themes can be conveyed to journalists in sound-bites and catchy phrases" ("Auteurism" 260).³ What Benet refuses to acknowledge, according to Triana Toribio, is the shifting nature of film production—Benet's term, originally intended as derogatory, in fact describes the necessary characteristics upon which a lasting and lucrative career is currently predicated.⁴ Triana Toribio explains that an auteur is mediático in two ways: both in his/her use of technology and in the creation (and in some sense promotion of) a recognizable public persona ("Auteurism" 262). Though Martel makes use of the media less than Coixet, whose personal homepage contains a cultural blog and her recommendations on everything from food to music, both have manufactured identifiable...