Violated Frames: Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli’s Sexploits by Victoria Ruétalo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Violated Frames: Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli’s Sexploits by Victoria Ruétalo Carlos G. Halaburda Keywords Victoria Ruétalo, Carlos G. Halaburda, Armando Bó, Isabel Sarli, Exploitation Cinema, Adult Cinema, Film History, Cultural Politics, Argentina, Censorship ruétalo, victoria. Violated Frames: Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli’s Sexploits. U of California P, 2022, 264 pp. Victoria Ruétalo has written an exceptional work of Latin American sexploitation film history in Violated Frames: Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli’s Sexploits. Carefully researched, theoretically bold, and elegantly written, the book is a page-turner, a captivating history of Latin American adult cinema. Violated Frames focuses on the legendary film couple, director Armando Bó and actress Isabel Sarli. Ruétalo engages with a torn film archive fragmented by decades of state censorship, military dictatorships, and preservation mismanagement to examine “remnants of relocated materials to debate questions of performance, authorship, stardom, sexuality, and circulation in the Sarli–Bó films” (3). Violated Frames constitutes a vital contribution to exploitation cinema, a much-undervalued subfield in Latin American film scholarship. The considerable significance of this book stems from the scarcity of critical literature and primary documentation of the state’s responses to the Sarli–Bó films in a context of political turmoil, proscription, censorship, and [End Page 147] militarism in Argentina (1955–1984). Jorge Abel Martín’s Los films de Armando Bó con Isabel Sarli (1981), Octavio Getino’s Cine argentino: modernidad y vanguardias (1998) and Cine argentino: entre lo posible y lo deseable (2005) are key scholarly precedents. However, Violated Frames is the first exhaustive analysis of how Sarli–Bó’s experimental cinema dared to reinvent social realism through a camp aesthetic and naïve erotica that conquered local and international publics. The book explores multiple angles concerning the Sarli–Bó cooperation, from the birth of Bó’s authorial signature of fast and low-cost productions, spontaneous realism, and new “clumsy montage” (8) to the role of censorship in delaying film production as much as creating anticipation. The story of an archival loss that recorded the censorship of all films screened in Argentina during an age of strict control is a salient concern of the book. The disappearance of a large number of documents concerning the Sarli–Bó legacy makes it difficult to investigate the cultural politics of screen sexuality in 1960s and 1970s Argentina. And yet Ruétalo puts together an extensive collection of press clippings, surviving film versions, press releases, official laws, and surviving secondary literature to write a provocative work that will fascinate scholars in fields where marginal cinema, political science, and gender and sexuality studies intersect. Part I organizes the first two chapters under the subtitle “Bodies and Archives.” It begins with an investigation of the political context under which the Sarli–Bó partnership operated, and closes with a discussion of the challenging conditions of undertaking film research in Argentina due to the unfortunate circumstances of its audiovisual archives. Chapter one discusses the period between 1955 and 1973, the years of Juan Domingo Perón’s political proscription and exile, military governments, and institutional instability, all sociopolitical aspects that impacted the production of twenty-three of the twenty-seven Sarli–Bó films. Bó’s filmmaking practices, the birth of youth movements, the films’ popular audience, and the aesthetics of “belonging and excess” configure one of the key theoretical proposals in the book: Peronism’s “affective mode” (30). Through a history of a popular spectatorship of “working-class males” (36), the chapter traces an affective commonality between Perón’s movement and the male audience subscribed to Sarli–Bó films. The political place of female nudity on the screen and the social attitudes toward marginal cinema constitute a significant debate about popular culture and taste formation. Chapter two tells a riveting story of the “disappearance” [End Page 148] of the files contained in the Ente de Calificación Cinematográfica [Film Classification Board], the body from which censorship was exercised through various mechanisms that included partial cuts and prohibitions under Law 18,019 of 1969. The archive’s vanishing act happened during the late 1990s and evidences an act of technological mismanagement and negligence that ended in the...