In the period between the first Peron presidency and the last military dictatorship (1955 to 1976), Argentine political opposition privileged the protagonism of the popular masses over that of the intellectual as agent of social change. But the intended audience of opposition cinema--such as that of the Grupo Cine Liberacion--was often what populist historical revisionism referred to as the intelligentsia, the middle-class intellectual it intended to inspire to commitment to the mobilization of the masses. As Fernando "Pino" Solanas, co-maker of La hora de los hornos (1968), said in a 1969 interview, his work addressed "the imperious necessity for the militant intelligentsia to root itself in Argentine reality and to contribute to the process of internal liberation of the movement of the masses." (1) In the years since the politically polarized 1960s, the military dictatorship's repression and the ensuing imposition of neoliberal economic policy--which produced the illusory boom in the 1990s under president Carlos Menem--have fragmented the collective struggle and destroyed the "militant intelligentsia," rendering more current (or "modern") the individual struggle for prosperity. Lucrecia Martel's La mujer sin cabeza illustrates the predicament of an Argentine opposition politics that has largely lost the middle class, by demonstrating the functioning of the mechanisms that depoliticize and prevent individuals from acting in solidarity with the concerns of other, more exploited sectors of society. Martel is one the central figures in the decade-old rebirth of independent Argentine cinema known as the Nuevo Cine Argentino, filmmakers who in the 1990s began to explore alternative funding strategies that later made it possible to produce non-industrial films that engaged with national realities, often through formal experimentation. Her first contribution, the 1995 short Rey muerto, was followed by La cienaga (2001) and La nina santa (2004), both of which brought to light class and gender tensions while avoiding the didacticism that for many contemporary viewers often lessens more explicitly political Argentine films. La mujer sin cabeza is Martel's third feature film, released in cinema in Argentina and elsewhere in 2008. Like her previous features, it is set in the highly stratified society of the provincial Argentine city of Salta. Where it differs from Martel's earlier features however, is in its subjective narration: the extent of the information provided to the viewer is restricted to that known to the protagonist, whose psychological perturbations are made visible in the image and sound through the use of what Pier Paolo Pasolini named cinematic free indirect discourse, in which, analogous to its literary equivalent, the filmmakers' stylistic decisions are based on his or her immersion in the mind of a character. In the resulting variation from cinema's "objective" formal norms the protagonist's subjectivity is expressed even when she is seen in the frame, a strategy that allows Martel to explore throughout the film (not just in point-of-view shots of states such as hallucinations, dreams or fantasies) a psychological crisis of a privileged inhabitant of a lingering neocolonial order that naturalizes a social hierarchy based on skin-tone and accent. Pasolini's theorization of cinematic free indirect discourse demonstrated a clear preoccupation with the effects that one's social class has on the way they perceive the world: the 'gaze' of a peasant, perhaps even of an entire town or region in prehistoric conditions of underdevelopment, embraces another type of reality than the gaze given to that same reality by an educated bourgeois. Not only do the two actually see different sets of things, but even a single thing in itself appears different through the two different 'gazes.' (177) Where Pasolini privileged the subjectivity of the peasantry and the society-changing possibilities inherent to it, Martel's film explores how a middle-class gaze, instead of catalyzing social change like the militant intelligentsia audience coveted by Solanas, contributes to the conservation of the status quo. …