Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodo?var (Critical Studies in Latin American and Iberian Cultures) - Hardcover

Smith, Paul Julian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0860914976 ISBN 13: 9780860914976

Publisher: Verso, 1994

Synopsis

This text examines the work of Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish director whose nine features to date include the comedy, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), the S & M melodrama, Tie me up! Tie me down! (1990) and the family romance, High Heels (1991). This study argues not only that Almodovar is a highly skilled manipulator of cinematic form, but also that his films raise important questions—of gender, nationality and sexuality—which demand a serious response from their audience. Desire Unlimited offers analyses derived from recent feminist, gay and postmodern theory.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Julian Smith is Professor of Spanish and Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Cambridge University. His previous books include Vision Machines: Cinema, Literature and Sexuality in Spain and Cuba, 1983–1993 and The Moderns: Time, Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture.

From Publishers Weekly

A thoughtful scholar and evident fan, Smith situates the nine feature films of Spanish director Almodovar within the shifting politics of post-Franco Spain, international debates about gender and sexuality, and the codes of Hollywood (particularly slasher films, melodramas and work by Douglas Sirk, Frank Tashlin and Alfred Hitchcock). Almodovar's films, he argues, seek "truth in travesty," partly by calling attention to cinematic artifice and representing gender and sexuality as stylized performance. Smith also contextualizes Almodovar's work, comparing its reception in Spain to that in other European countries and America--though a consideration of other Spanish-speaking markets might have been even more enlightening. He notes, for example, that Spanish audiences particularly appreciate the casting of straight actor Antonio Banderas in a gay role and of "genuine girl" Carmen Maura as a transsexual, communicating "a certain bracketing of gender identity" that might be missed elsewhere. Smith points out that Anglo-American critics consumed with the supposed misogyny of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! missed the important theme of addiction. Although Smith's prose, informed by the psychoanalytic discourse of linguistics and feminist theory, occasionally threatens to deflate the delightful flamboyance of his subject, and some of his arguments beg for further development, his essays present a finely observed, compelling case for the seriousness and complexity of a cinema dedicated to evoking "the fragility of sexual difference."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0860914976
• ISBN 13: 9780860914976
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176