Abstract
AbstractThis essay makes the case for sensationalism as an archive of violence. It traces the ways in which the Mexican filmmaker Felipe Cazals draws from the sensationalist tabloid Alarma! in the making of his film Las Poquianchis (1976), a film version of the story of human trafficking that led the tabloid to popularity. The visuality of sensationalism works mostly in the service of power: it keeps certain kinds of violence both out of sight and overexposed. Cazals and other artists and writers who draw materials from sensationalism complicate this visuality and counter it, but they do so by staying close to the kind of obscenity characteristic of sensationalism. The last segment of the essay revisits Elaine Scarry's seminal analysis of the relationship between language and pain. It offers a frame of interpretation for the most disturbing moments in sensationalism and in Cazals's film: moments defined by the screening of gruesome violence, traumatic bodily injury, violence by sexual means, and death.
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