After many years of collaboration, my former colleague Brad Epps and I co-edited a volume on the films of Pedro Almodóvar. This was the first critical book on this renowned director to appear in English for more than 10 years, since the publication of Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar, edited by Barbara Morris and Kathleen M. Vernon in 1995. Pedro Almodóvar contributed a piece to this volume, his shooting diary from the filming of Volver, which was his latest film at the time, and we had an amazing range of essays from an international group of critics, filmmakers, and scholars.
All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema
One 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 onto 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 the filmmaker’s oeuvre and in-depth analyses of specific films, the essays here explore a diverse range of subjects: 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 studio, All about Almodóvar both reflects and illuminates its subject’s dazzling eclecticism.
Editors: Bradley S. Epps is professor of romance languages and literatures and chair of studies in women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. Despina Kakoudaki is assistant professor of literature and film at American University.
Contributors: 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.
