A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar

Marvin D'Lugo, Kathleen M. Vernon, Marvin D'Lugo, Kathleen M. Vernon

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781405195829
• eBook ISBN: 9781118325384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar

"Marvin D'Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon give us the ideal companion to Pedro Almodóvar's films. Established and emerging writers offer a rainbow of insights for fans as well as academics."
Jerry W. Carlson, Professor of Film Studies, The City College & Graduate Center CUNY

"Rarely has a contemporary film artist been treated to the kind of broad, rich discussion of their work that can be found in A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar."
Richard Peña, Professor of Film Studies, Columbia University

Once the enfant terrible of Spain's youth culture explosion, the Movida, Pedro Almodóvar's distinctive film style and career longevity have made him one of the most successful and internationally known filmmakers of his generation. Offering a state-of-the-art appraisal of Almodóvar's cinema, this original collection is a searching analysis of his technique and cultural significance that includes work by leading authorities on Almodóvar as well as talented young scholars. Crucially included here are contributions by film historians from Almodóvar's native Spain, where he has been undervalued by the academic and critical establishment.

With a balance between textual and contextual approaches, the book expands the scope of previous work on the director to explore his fruitful collaborations with fellow professionals in the areas of art design, fashion, and music as well as the growing reach of a global Almodóvar brand beyond Europe and the United States to Latin America and Asia. It also proposes a reevaluation of the political meanings and engagement of his cinema from the perspective of the profound cultural and historical upheavals that have transformed Spain since the 1970s.

PART I

Bio-Filmography

1

Almodóvar’s Self-Fashioning

The Economics and Aesthetics of Deconstructive Autobiography

Paul Julian Smith

There seems little doubt that Almodóvar is now the most successful Spanish ­filmmaker of all time, whether that success is measured in terms of financial or symbolic capital. With no fewer than eighteen feature films, none of which has failed to turn a profit, and countless honors, including the Prince of Asturias Prize, the Légion d’Honneur, many Goyas and innumerable Césars, two Oscars, and an honorary doctorate at Harvard, his career is unparalleled over some thirty years. His Los abrazos rotos/Broken Embraces (2009) received a rhapsodic review from the chief critic of the New York Times, the most important “gatekeeper” for admission to the select world of art cinema in the United States (Scott 2009). The particular importance of this feature is that it focuses on the construction of an auteurist self for the filmmaker, the theme that will be a main concern of this chapter.

The contours of that career, which is of course still developing, remain unclear and cannot be reduced to the established models of film authorship associated with the “classical” auteurs (such as Welles and Rossellini) whom Almodóvar so regularly cites in his own oeuvre. Some sense of this unease comes from the diverse accounts of Almodóvar’s career in different languages on Wikipedia. Thus in the English version, after rapidly dispatching “Early Life,” “Beginnings,” and “Short Films,” the anonymous authors simply enumerate the feature films in order of their appearance (Wikipedia 2010a). The trajectory established is thus purely chronological. The French version, somewhat more analytical, adds a section on “leitmotifs” to the chronological list. Almodóvar’s persistent, but notably heterogeneous, themes are said to be: sexual identity; parent–child relations; women; the mise en abyme; references to world and U.S. cinema; drugs; and color symbolism (Wikipedia 2010b). A quote from the auteur, absent in the English version, establishes his “passion” for cinema. Finally, spurning the simple list of films or motifs, the Spanish version places successive titles within a series of somewhat arbitrary “periods”: the “experimental period” of the shorts and first two features, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón/Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls like Mom (1980) and Laberinto de pasiones/Labyrinth of Passion (1982); the “Fellini-influenced” period includes Entre tinieblas/Dark Habits (1983) and ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!/What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984); the “maestro-influenced” period stretches furthest (from Matador [1986] to Tacones lejanos/High Heels [1991]); while the “autobiographical period” concludes the cycle with Todo sobre mi madre/All About My Mother (1999), La mala educación/Bad Education (2004), and Volver (2006) (Wikipedia 2010c). In addition to this idiosyncratic periodization (apparently uncontested by Spanish-speaking collaborators of the website), the entry suggests some additional signifying contexts for the auteur, absent in other language versions, giving short sections on Almodóvar’s work as a producer, on his political activities, and on his “detractors.”

The three Wikipedias agree on some facts. For example, they all give Almodóvar’s date of birth as 1949, although the pressbook for Los abrazos rotos suggests with flattering vagueness that it falls within “the 1950s” (Almodóvar 2009b: n. p.). But the different versions disagree on other matters. For example the Spaniards do not mention Almodóvar’s alleged sexual orientation. The French claim he is “homosexual,” without offering a corroborative reference. And the Anglos call the director “openly gay,” although the only link they give in the entry is to a Time story of 2005 in which Almodóvar himself angrily rejects the label “gay director” and is rejected in turn by the gay rights organizations who say he “has never supported” them (Farouky 2005).

My point here is not to call attention to the controversy over even basic facts, intractable as they may seem, but to suggest the difficulty in providing plausible narratives to define this matrix figure and his growing oeuvre. Specialist scholars also struggle to constrain proliferating Pedros. An international conference held at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (whose final session was attended by Almodóvar and a retinue of chicas) comprised four days devoted in turn to “History and Film,” “Ethics and Aesthetics,” “The Cinematic Universe” (on film form), and “Society, Culture, and Gender” (Zurian and Vázquez Varela 2005). This current volume is divided into six sections that include bio-filmography, Spanish and global contexts, re-readings of various films and sections interrogating Almodóvar’s cinema in relation to gender, art, commerce, and society. But a third collection employed a very different structuring principle, with loosely defined groupings of essays on “Forms and Figures” (sound, violence, comedy), “Melodrama and its Discontents,” “The Limits of Representation” (girls, brothers, and nostalgia), and (finally) “The Auteur in Context” (Epps and Kakoudaki 2009). Typically, Almodóvar himself has the last word, with his “diary” of the shoot of Volver (already posted on his website) reproduced in print as a final chapter. D’Lugo’s earlier monograph had also ended with an autobiographical text, in this case a “self-interview” on La mala educación (2006: 145–52).

In my own recent research I have explored Almodóvar’s unpublished short stories of the 1970s, suggesting that the key themes they share with the subsequent films (most especially the twin motifs of the glamorous and vengeful transvestite and the mature fantasizing housewife) tend to support a traditional auteurist argument based on aesthetic criteria (Smith 2009b).¹ Almodóvar’s work in text, as on celluloid, thus reveals a remarkable consistency of value, conceptual coherence, and stylistic unity. But I have also examined the corporate mentality of Almodóvar’s production company El Deseo in its commercial context, revealing how it seeks to preserve and promote the “figure” of Almodóvar as part of its continuing business mission (Smith 2009c: 18–20). Kathleen Vernon (2007) has noted a similar blurring of boundaries in Almodóvar’s appeal to music: the songs branded as “his” when released on CD are neither written nor performed by the director, nor, in some cases, even featured in his films. Yet they are somehow enlisted into his ongoing creative and commercial project. The line between the artistic and the industrial is thus difficult indeed to draw.

That line is of course complicated by Almodóvar’s own continuing self-­commentary, which follows a double movement of revelation and concealment. D’Lugo has noted that “through the evolution of a style and a conception of filmmaking, he has moved to a critique of his own past and the culture out of which his cinema has taken shape” (D’Lugo 2006: 129). But Almodóvar’s extended printed comments in the lavish press kits that have long accompanied the releases of his features seek to influence the future also, providing a template for critical interpretation.² The pressbook for Los abrazos rotos (2009) distributed at the Cannes Festival is no exception. It is divided into eleven sections: “The Title” describes the film’s inspiration in Rossellini; “The Credits” reveals the “ghostly, mysterious quality” of the shoot; “Editing” suggests “the fragility of film”; “Making of” focuses on the “secrets of the people . . . coordinating the fiction”; “Duplication” suggests the double as a theme in the film (as shown, for example, by the two names of its main character: Mateo Blanco and Harry Caine); Chicas y maletas (Girls and Suitcases) describes the film-within-the-film, freely based on Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988); “Noir” claims Penélope Cruz’s Lena as a femme fatale; “Up and Down” identifies the staircase (down which Lena will fall) as a “cinematic icon”; “The Photo” presents another inspiration for the film: a picture of lovers embracing on the black sand of Lanzarote; “Parents and Children: The Monologue” introduces a comic short that is the “child” of the feature; and finally “Declaration of Love” asserts Almodóvar’s dedication to cinema, which is “not only a profession, but also an irrational passion”.

Offering his own list of signifying contexts, Almodóvar thus calls attention to aspects of film technique which are generally hidden or unrecognized; to cinematic sources that his audience may have some trouble identifying; to inspirations for his plot and structuring principles of his narrative; to items of the mise en scène; to peripheral works spun off from the main film; and to the cinematic obsession, at once personal and professional, which, he claims, contains and explains all these diverse elements.

In this essay I argue that Los abrazos rotos, a film about a filmmaker and his craft, can be read in part as a kind of deconstructive autobiography of Almodóvar’s personal and professional career to date, complex and contradictory as it is. But it is not just the range, depth, and international profile of this career that makes the Almodóvar phenomenon so difficult to address in all its aspects. It is also the changes in broader cultural spheres, which this volume seeks to address and which have, in turn, transformed the context in which Almodóvar’s cinema is both produced and received. Broken Embraces, I will argue, can be read in part as a series of reflections on current conditions for industry and authorship, conditions we can briefly address below.

El País’s business section had reported back in 2007 that government policy intended to solve Spain’s growing balance of payments deficit by promoting new priorities in exports: high tech goods and services, rather than the more traditional sectors of manufacturing, textiles, and cars (Triper 2007). The sole illustration used for this article is a photograph of Almodóvar looking through a viewfinder, citing his “promotion of the Spanish audiovisual sector abroad” as exemplary of this trend in cultural exports. But in spite of such Spanish praise of Almodóvar as a key exporter, the international film sector was beset by many and varied ­challenges which clearly affected Spain and El Deseo. For example the editor of Screen International (SI), the trade journal for the European film business, wrote that arthouse cinema was facing an “ageing problem” (Gubbins 2008). In what SI calls this new “post-auteurist” era, festival programmers, specialist distributors, and exhibitors now feel the lack of “bankable name directors with built-in fan bases.” Moreover younger directors favor “a more collaborative theory of production,” with producers and writers “demanding more recognition of their role in the creation of a film.” There has thus been a shift from “a handful of important directors” to a body of “important film-making,” a change that SI claims to discern in the programming of recent festivals. While old-style auteurism arose in a pre-internet age when public demand was not so dominant, newer post-auteurs face the “postmodern challenge” of “engaging with audiences”. Newly disrespectful, the latter may prove to be indifferent or even hostile.

This new climate of skepticism to auteurism and to film purism is compounded by trends beyond production and distribution. Thus Sight & Sound noted in a survey of the film industry that changes in specialized exhibition in the U.K. (as elsewhere) “have led to predictions that films by some of the world’s finest auteurs may not make it into . . . cinemas” (Patterson 2008: 30). In the same year and in a special issue the editor of Sight & Sound asked “Who needs critics?” (James 2008). Given the decline in the status of film journalists, who had suffered mass culls in the United States, critics have been reduced to the status of consumer guides. Finding themselves unable to argue passionately in favor of art film or against blockbusters, because of the commercial priorities of their employers, film critics now tend to take refuge in humorous “satire” rather than to engage seriously with their chosen subject (James 2008: 17). While perhaps only one critic in the U.K. still has the power to make or break a specialist release (the contributor to The Guardian, a national daily), film reviewers generally have rapidly “declined in market value” (James 2008: 17). Conversely bloggers, who are free from print media’s sense of professional responsibility and unfettered by policy interventions from superiors (James 2008: 18), can afford to take up passionately held positions, but have little social impact. A little later we will compare this Anglo-American panorama with the situation in Spain, whose media have also changed in ways discomfiting to a mature auteur like Almodóvar.

Even as the fortunes of the Spanish film industry revived (box office and share rose in the domestic market at the end of the first decade of the millennium), old-school auteurism was under attack from two sides, at once discursive and economic: the decline in respect for art movies and the rise in status of genre films. It was a trend confirmed by the 2010 Goya Awards, where prison-set action movie Celda 211/Cell 211 swept the boards and Almodóvar went home empty handed. This was in marked contrast to previous years. As recently as 2007 an austere art movie like La soledad/Solitary Fragments (Jaime Rosales) could triumph over expert but populist genre fare such as El orfanato/The Orphanage (J. A. Bayona). It was significant that SI’s territory guide to Spain for the same year, which claimed that “Spanish films are experiencing an upturn in popularity” included a survey of distribution and box office entitled “Giving the audience what they want” (Evans 2010: 40).

Significantly, this apparent shift in taste also affects the distribution of Spanish films abroad. Charles Gant uses box-o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Skin He Lives In
• PART I: Bio-Filmography
• PART II: Spanish Contexts
• PART III: At the Limits of Gender
• PART IV: Re-readings
• PART V: Global Almodóvar
• PART VI: Art and Commerce
• Index
• Eula