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An Archive of Violence The Obscene Visuality of Sensationalism SERGIO DELGADO MOYA abstract This es say makes the case for sen sa tion al ism as an ar chive of vi o lence. It traces the ways in which the Mex i can film maker Felipe Cazals draws from the sensa tion al ist tabloid Alarma! in the mak ing of his film Las Poquianchis (1976), a film ver sion of the story of hu man traf fick ing that led the tabloid to pop u lar i ty. The visuality of sensa tion al ism works mostly in the ser vice of pow er: it keeps cer tain kinds of vi o lence both out of sight and overexposed. Cazals and other art ists and writ ers who draw mate ri als from sen sa tion al ism com pli cate this visuality and counter it, but they do so by stay ing close to the kind of ob scen ity char ac ter is tic of sen sa tion al ism. The last seg ment of the es say revis its Elaine Scarry’s sem­ i nal anal y sis of the rela tion ship be tween lan guage and pain. It of fers a frame of in ter pre ta tion for the most disturbing mo ments in sen sa tion al ism and in Cazals’s film: mo ments de fined by the screen ing of grue some vi o lence, trau matic bodily in ju ry, vi o lence by sex ual means, and death. keywords vi o lence, af fect, sen sa tion al ism, ar chive, visuality Between 1975 and 1976, Felipe Cazals re leased three fea ture films, films that sueis from an in sis tent set of chal lenges: to pic ture vi o lence fron tal ly, in all its bru tal ity to wards sen tient bod ies and in all its his tor i cal com plex i ty; to com mu ni cate vi o­ lence by fo cus ing on facts; and to re visit the moral and eth i cal con sid er ations that arise when com mu ni cat ing these facts. All three of these films—Canoa (Canoa: A Shameful Memory, 1975), El apando (The Heist, 1976), and Las Poquianchis (1976)1— frame forms of in sti tu tion al ized vi o lence, with the church, the ar my, pris ons, sex traf ck ers, and wealthy land own ers al ter nat ing as accessories, co con spir a tors, and per pe tra tors of this vi o lence. Two of these films, Las Poquianchis and Canoa, are plainly based on re al­life events (the third is based on a novel writ ten by José Revueltas while he was imprisoned).2 Both were pro duced af er ex ten sive in ves­ ti ga tive work. In an in ter view about Canoa, a film depicting the 1968 mas sa cre of uni ver sity af l i ates in San Miguel Canoa, Mexico (an event that pre dates the more CRITICAL TIMES | 3:2 | AUGUST 2020 DOI 10.1215/26410478-8517719 | © 2020 Sergio Delgado Moya This is an open ac cess ar ti cle dis trib uted un der the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 200 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/3/2/200/829130/200delgadomoya.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 widely condemned mas sa cre in Tlatelolco),3 Cazals high lights the ef orts that he and the screen writer Tomás Pérez­Turrent made to in cor po rate fac tual in for ma­ tion into the mak ing of their films. “It is im per a tive,” Cazals states in ref er ence to Canoa, “to un der score our over rid ing de ter mi na tion to cre ate a film conform­ ing pre cisely to the facts of the case. Our goal was to de pict these shame ful facts within a true con text based on am ple re search, in clud ing the tes ti mony of ac tual witnesses and par tic i pants.”4 The search for truth in mat ters re lated to vi o lence seems bound to the weight of facts, so it comes as no sur prise that Cazals would go to con sid er able lengths to en sure his filmic rec re a tions of re al­life vi o lence were based on ver i fi able in for ma­ tion, on hard facts.5 What’s sur pris ing about Cazals’s ap proach and his ef orts to make his fea ture films fac tual is the ex tent to which he mim icked crime tab loids, a form of journalism gen er ally dismissed for be ing too ex ploit ative, too taw dry, too sen sa tion al ist to be true. Nowhere does Cazals stay closer to sen sa tion al ism than in Las Poquianchis,6 a film that draws story lines, pho to graphic frames, and a gen eral ap proach to the rep re sen ta tion of vi o lence from the mag a zine Alarma! Únicamente la verdad. The film’s en gage ment with Alarma! is far from ca su al. From the nar ra tive arc (re li ant as it is on a pair of char ac ters who stand in for the re al­life jour nal ists work ing for Alarma!) to the cin e ma tog ra phy (in which pho to graphs in the tab loid are rec re ated faith fully in scenes through out the film) to the treat ment of the scopic field in the film and the tab loid (both re lent less in their pur suit of the mor bid and the ob scene), there is sub stan tial ev i dence to sug est that Cazals’s film is as much an ex plo ra tion of the tab loid’s dis tinc tively viscer al, emo tion ally charged cov er age of vi o lent events as it is a cri tique of the taw dry ex ploi ta tion performed by the tab loid. In the fol low ing pages, I trace the ways in which Cazals draws from the sen­ sa tion al ist tab loid Alarma! in the mak ing of his film Las Poquianchis, a film version of the story of hu man traf ck ing that led the tab loid to pop u lar i ty. Cazals’s film sticks to the facts of the story but does so by eliciting the kind of viscer al, emo tional re sponses (hor ror, re vul sion, dis gust) that largely ac count for the pop u lar ity of sen­ sa tion al ist pub li ca tions. As I hope to show, the vis cer ally emo tional re sponses elic­ ited by the more shock ing scenes in Cazals’s film al low the film to ap peal to a form of vis ceral em pa thy, a vol a tile, “frag ile em pathic shar ing” of the kind Brad Epps ex plores in his def read ing of an other body of films, Patricio Guzmán’s militant documentaries, the first of which also date to the 1970s.7 A vis ceral form of em pa­ thy, as I hope to dem on strate in this es say, can be a pow er ful con cept for envision­ ing new forces of eth i cal so lic i ta tion, forces that cir cu late out side the frame work of lib eral hu man ism, tear ing through and cut ting across sub ject po si tions (the sub ject who suf ers vi o lence, the sub ject who witnesses suf er ing) of en pre sumed to be DELGADO MOYA | AN ARCHIVE OF VIOLENCE | 201 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/3/2/200/829130/200delgadomoya.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 dis tinct and stat ic. These forces—emerg ing both from sen sa tion al ist pub li ca tions and from the work of art ists, writ ers, and film mak ers who draw ma te ri als from sen sa tion al ist pub li ca tions—con sti tute an in tense and un sta ble field of af ec tive re al i ty, one where bound aries of per cep tion be come destabilized, with po ten tially gen er a tive con se quences—gen er a tive both from the per spec tive of eth i cal en gage­ ment and in allowing for a mean ing ful repositioning of the sub ject in re la tion to the facts of vi o lence. The first sec tion of this es say makes the case for sen sa tion al ism as an ar chive of vi o lence. Afer pointing out the ways in which Cazals draws from this ar chive in the mak ing of his film, I an a lyze the re la tion ship be tween ob scen ity and the field of visuality that emerges from sen sa tion al ism. The visuality of sen sa tion al ism, I ar gue, works mostly in the ser vice of pow er: it keeps cer tain kinds of vi o lence both out of sight and overexposed.

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