Monograph: Popular and Transnational Sex. A Reexamination of Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli's Cinema

 

Coordinators: Agostina Invernizzi y Victoria Ruétalo

 

When Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli started making movies in 1956, they activated a series of provocations by presenting the naked body of the exuberant Miss Argentina and rising actress. Over time their cinema began to impose different aspects that challenged the norms of the time crossed by the dictatorial periods in Argentina. However, the duo’s cinema has been largely ignored by specialized critics during its period of greatest splendor. It is from the 80’s with the publication of the books by Jorge Abel Martín and Rodolfo Kuhn that started to pay attention on it. In the 90’s, this cinema entered into the history of national cinema through publications such as Cine argentino, la otra historia, by Sergio Wolf (1992). In its popular character, the cinema of the 60’s is taken into account in different sections of Cine argentino, 1957 a 1983: Modernidad y vanguardias (España 2004, 2005), an analysis of the film industry from the 1957 film law to the end of the civic-military dictatorship in 1983. This is how it entered the history of national cinema and is part of academic study (Maranghello, 2005; Peña, 2012). This monograph focuses on a new phase of Sarli-Bó’s film criticism marked by the publication of the book Violated Frames: Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli’s Sexploits (2022), published by Victoria Ruétalo.

Regarding to the context, as a response to the industrial and national cinema of the golden age (1930-1950), a political cinema emerged in the region that was distributed to a more educated and international viewer through film festivals. For the first time, the “New Latin American Cinema” achieves worldwide recognition for its formal experimentation and its double political and aesthetic avant-garde character (Stam, 2014). In Argentina, this continental phenomenon acquires local expressions: “Cine del subdesarrollo” (Birri, 1988) and “Tercer cine” (Solanas and Getino, 1997). These notions have been extensively analyzed in the two volumes on the history of Argentine political and social cinema (Lusnich and Piedras, 2009 and 2011). Although the new Latin American cinema achieved international recognition for its aesthetic-political contribution, its reach in terms of large audiences was limited and, with few exceptions, it could not access layers of viewers outside of very specific political, cultural, and militant cores. However, simultaneously another cinema had emerged in the region, a more commercial cinema that appealed to the popular classes. Consisting of different genres (fantastic, horror, musical, and sex) the films created new formats that appealed to a young audience looking for something different. The most current bibliography has named some of these expressions as “latsploitation”, a fluid term that reflects hemispheric entrainment, interregional flows, and transnational distribution (Ruétalo and Tierney, 2009). Latsploitation combines the definition of Eric Schaefer (2001) while respecting its Latin American autonomy. This cinema was generally made with money from small investors from different parts of the region, creating a kind of unofficial co-production and operating outside of national subsidy regimes. In addition, these works attracted investors from places where a robust cinematographic tradition did not necessarily exist (Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela), thus managing to enter those markets. It is precisely in these coordinates where the cinema of Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli is located, reaching places so infrequent for national cinema such as Toronto, Canada, as well as other regions of the United States.

“Popular and Transnational Sex: A Reexamination of Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli's Cinema” will allow us to elaborate the foundations of a type of popular cinema. The director Armando Bó and his star Isabel Sarli were pioneers of a phenomenon that was later copied by others: they made their works with relatively small production companies, which later spread throughout Latin America and the United States, generating a trail of replicas, tributes, and intertextualities. Although local censorship did not stop persecuting them, the duo's productions continued to spread and succeed throughout the Americas.

For this monograph, we are looking for texts that analyze the cinema of Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli from the approaches that we propose below or delve into one of the following lines of research.

Approaches:

• Studies of History and Historiography of Latin American Cinema
• Theories of Reception
• Gender and Feminist Theories
• Queer Theories
• Affects and Emotions Theories
• Decolonial Theories

Lines of Research:

• The study of transnational flows
• Intertextualities and dialogues with other cinemas
• Circulation and reception on Latin American screens
• The intersections between gender and genre
• The study of music and popular songs

 

Bibliographic references:

Birri, F. (1991). “Las raíces del realismo documental”. En Burton, J. (Ed.), Cine y cambio social en América Latina. Imágenes de un continente (pp. 23-49). México: Editorial Diana.

Birri, F. (1988). “Cine y subdesarrollo”. En Hojas de cine. Testimonios y documentos del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano. Vol. 1 Centro y Sudamérica (pp. 17-22). México: Colección Cultura Universitaria.

 España, C. (Ed.) (2004). Modernidad y vanguardias 1957-1983, Vol. 1. Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes.

España, C. (Ed.) (2005). Modernidad y vanguardias 1957-1983, Vol. 2. Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes.

Lusnich, A. L. & Piedras, P. (Eds.) (2009). Una historia del cine político y social en Argentina (1895-1969). Buenos Aires: Nueva Librería.

Lusnich, A. L. & Piedras, P. (Eds.) (2011). Una historia del cine político y social en Argentina (1969-2009), Buenos Aires: Nueva Librería.

Maranghello, C. (2005). Breve historia del cine argentino. Buenos Aires: Laertes.

Peña, F. (2012). Cien años de cine argentino. Buenos Aires: Biblos.

Martín, J. A. (1981). Los films de Armando Bo con Isabel Sarli. Buenos Aires: Corregidor.

Ruétalo, V. (2022). Violated Frames. Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli’s Sexploits. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ruétalo, V. & Tierney, D. (Eds.) (2009). Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America. Nueva York: Routledge.

Solanas, F. & Getino, O. (1997). “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World”. En Martin, M. T. (Ed.). New Latin American Cinema. Volume 1. Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations (pp. 33-57). Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Stam, R. (2014). “The two avant-gardes: Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces”. En Documenting the Documentary. Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video (pp. 271-286). Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Wolf, S. (Comp.) (1992). Cine argentino, la otra historia. Buenos Aires: Letra Buena.

 

Important dates:

1. Call for Papers: May 15, 2024
2. Closing of the Call for Papers: September 15, 2024
3. Article selected for publication: November 15, 2024
4. Article published: January 15, 2025