When Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli began making sexploitation films together in 1956, they provoked audiences by featuring explicit nudity that would increasingly become more audacious, constantly challenging contemporary norms. Their Argentine films developed a large and international fan base. Analyzing the couple's films and their subsequent censorship, Violated Frames develops a new, roughly constructed, and "bad" archive of relocated materials to debate questions of performance, authorship, stardom, sexuality, and circulation. Victoria Ruétalo situates Bó and Sarli’s films amidst the popular culture and sexual norms in post-1955 Argentina, and explores these films through the lens of bodies engaged in labor and leisure in a context of growing censorship. Under Perón, manual labor produced an affect that fixed a specific type of body to the populist movement of Peronism: a type of body that was young, lower-classed, and highly gendered. The excesses of leisure in exhibition, enjoyment, and ecstasy in Bó and Sarli's films interrupted the already fragmented film narratives of the day and created alternative sexual possibilities.
Victoria Ruétalo is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. She is coeditor of Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America.
"Violated Frames is a watershed, must-read work of adult film history, Latin American film studies, and feminist scholarship. It navigates a richly conceived 'bad archive' to reveal Isabel Sarli and Armando Bó as corporeal experimenters whose sensational legacy impacted a critical period in Argentine history as well as global film culture. Victoria Ruétalo boldly reframes our understanding of the relation between the sex film archive, authorship, performance, embodiment, film censorship, and the nation, painting a fascinating picture of Sarli's star body’s creative labor and radical singularity."—Elena Gorfinkel, author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s
"Violated Frames draws readers into its well-theorized exploration of the Argentine filmmaker and star partnership, and doesn’t let go until three hundred exhilarating pages later.”—Dolores Tierney, author of New Transnationalisms in Contemporary Latin American Cinemas
264 pp.6 x 9Illus: 28 b/w illustrations
9780520380080$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Mar 2022