Abstract
La mueca (1970) by the Argentine Eduardo Pavlovsky (b. 1933) portrays the tale of four intruders-filmmakers who decide to confront a bourgeois couple about their hypocrisies, and in the process bring to light the role of performance in the couple’s construction of identity. Whereas in Piñera’s Dos viejos pánicos violence was used to cover up a deep-rooted fear, Pavlovsky’s violence inspires fear in its victims in order to humiliate them and make them realize the precariousness of their situation. Violent gestures are used to define the characters and allow them, in turn, to define others. Violent laughter that interrupts actions or mocks another, for example, becomes a tool that permits the one who laughs a place of authority—an authority that is born from humiliation and made to break someone else. Violence, then, is used in La mueca to create and destroy relationships and to form identities and self-definitions through the use of force.
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Eduardo Pavlovsky, La mueca
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Notes
Matias Montes-Huidobro, “Psicoanálisis fílmico-dramático de La mueca,” Monographic Review/Revista Monográfica 7 (1991): 298–299.
Jorge Dubatti, “Estudio preliminar,” Teatro completo I, de Eduardo Pavlovsky, Buenos Aires: Atuel, 1997. For a more detailed account of the expressions of Argentina’s Theater of the Absurd, see Angela Blanco Amores de Pagella “Manifestaciones del teatro del absurdo en Argentina,” Latin American Theatre Review 8.1 (1974): 21–24.
Eduardo Pavlovsky, “Algunos conceptos sobre el teatro de vanguardia,” Teatro del’ 60 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Letra Buena, 1992) 114–115.
Dubatti sees that the 1960s need to be divided into two separate moments with the Mayo Francés in 1968 separating the first from the second (Jorge Dubatti, “Estudio preliminar,” Teatro completo II, de Eduardo Pavlovsky [Buenos Aires: Atuel, 1998] 10–11).
Arancibia, Juana A and Zulema Mirkin, Volumen II: Teatro argentino durante el proceso (1976–1983): ensayos criticos-entrevistas (Buenos Aires: Instituto Literario y Cultural Hispánico, 1992) 223.
Alfonso De Toro, “El teatro menor postmoderno de Eduardo Pavlovsky o el ‘Borges/Bacon’ del teatro: De la periferia al centro,” Gestos 31 (Abril 2001): 101.
David Rock, Argentina 1516–1982: From Spanish Colonization to the Falklands War (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985) 359.
Eduardo Pavlovsky, La mueca (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Búsqueda, 1988)
Charles B. Driskell, “Power, Myths and Aggression in Eduardo Pavlovsky’s Theater,” Hispania 65.4 (1982): 573.
Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 2003) 191.
George O. Schanzer, “El teatro vanguardista de Eduardo Pavlovsky,” Latin American Theatre Review 13.1 (1979): 10.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989) 16–17.
Martin Esslin, “Violence in Modern Drama,” The Theatre of the Absurd (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1973) 177–178.
Marvin Carlson, in his essay “What Is Performance?” for The Performance Studies Reader, finds three separate definitions of performance: “So we have two rather different concepts of performance, one involving the display of skills, the other also involving display, but less of particular skills than of a recognized and culturally coded pattern of behavior. A third cluster of usages takes us in rather a different direction. When we speak of someone’s sexual performance or linguistic performance or when we ask how well a child is performing in school, the emphasis is not so much on display of skill (although that may be involved) or on the carrying out of a particular pattern of behavior, but rather on the general success of the activity in light of some standard of achievement that may not itself be precisely articulated (70).” For this play, the word ‘performance’ is being used in conjunction with the second definition: the idea of a pattern of behavior that is both recognized and coded socially. Marvin Carlson, “What Is Performance?” The Performance Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 23.
Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) 443.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 7.
Claudia Gilman, Entre la pluma y el fusil: debates y dilemmas del escritor revolucionario en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Siglo veintiuno editores, 2003) 58.
This connection between class and authority recalls the famous Argentine short story “El matadero” from Esteban Echevarría in that the intruder’s obvious social status does not afford him a position of authority in the neighborhood of Buenos Aires that he has stumbled upon. Instead, the greater number of those who “belong” in that area allows them to exercise authority over the intruder. Here, as in La mueca, numbers dictate authority, not social class, as Helena would like to believe. Esteban Echeverría, “El matadero,” Antología del cuento hispanoamericano, ed. Fernando Burgos (México: Editorial Porrúa, 1991) 1–16.
Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 278.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997) 2.
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© 2010 Katherine Ford
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Ford, K. (2010). Filming the Bourgeoisie: Defining Identity with Violence in Eduardo Pavlovsky’s La mueca (1970). In: Politics and Violence in Cuban and Argentine Theater. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105225_4
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