All about Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema

by Despina Kakoudaki (Editor), Brad Epps (Editor)

New critical perspectives on the filmmaker behind All About My Mother, Talk to Her, and VolverOne of world cinema’s most exciting filmmakers, Pedro Almodóvar has been delighting, provoking, arousing, shocking, and—above all—entertaining audiences around the globe since he first burst on the international film scene in the early 1980s. All about Almodóvar offers new perspectives on the filmmaker’s artistic vision and cinematic preoccupations, influences, and techniques. Through overviews of his oeuvre and in-depth analyses of specific films, the essays here explore a diverse range of Almodóvar’s nuanced use of television and music in his films; his reworkings of traditional film genres such as comedy, horror, and film noir; his penchant for melodrama and its relationship to melancholy, violence, and coincidence; his intricate questioning of sexual and national identities; and his increasingly sophisticated inquiries into visuality and its limits. Closing with Almodóvar’s own diary account of the making of Volver and featuring never-before-seen photographs from El Deseo production studio, All about Almodóvar both reflects and illuminates its subject’s dazzling Mark Allinson, U of Leicester; Pedro Almodóvar; Isolina Ballesteros, Baruch College; Leo Bersani, UC Berkeley; Marvin D’Lugo, Clark U; Ulysse Dutoit, UC Berkeley; Peter William Evans, Queen Mary U of London; Víctor Fuentes, UC Santa Barbara; Marsha Kinder, USC; Steven Marsh, U of Illinois, Chicago; Andy Medhurst, U of Sussex; Ignacio Olivia, Universidad Castilla–La Mancha, Cuenca; Paul Julian Smith, U of Cambridge; Kathleen M. Vernon, SUNY Stony Brook; Linda Williams, UC Berkeley; Francisco A. Zurián, U Carlos III, Madrid.

Genres: Nonfiction

488 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forgot when I actually finished it 🙃
If you are a fan of this Director this collection of essays is fantastic.
Some may even stand alone if you haven’t watched his films but let me be frank, you need to watch his films. My fave director!

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

De los mejores análisis en profundidad sobre Almodóvar. Es un buen libro para introducirse en la filmografía del director y, pese a que requiere pocos conocimientos técnicos de cine para entender las explicaciones, va más allá de la superficie en todos los aspectos que trata.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

a great selection of rather scintillating essays