The sexual corpus delicti in the history of the Argentine cinematography: La Patota 1960 and Paulina 2015

Abstract

Crime films and frontiers are fruitful settings to explore the transformation of representations of sexual crime. According to Ludmer (1993) beyond the criminalistic formula popularized by literature since the 19th century, there is a vast set of crime centered narratives that form a literary apparatus capable of articulating „political textualities and identity fables”. As Ludmer points out theorists such as Marx and Freud used crime as an analytic device to give an account of the contextual and culturally constructed character of social identities, the law and authority. My interest in crime as an analytic device is related to the ways in which its elaboration within the fictional universe of the film provides an account of the lies, untruth and fabrications on which identities are built, its imaginary constitution and representational limits. In this sense, the original version of “La Patota” of 1960 and its remake of 2015 “Paulina” confront us with rape as a border experience with trans-generational effects, irreducible to medical, cultural and right languages.