Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodovar - Softcover

Smith, Paul Julian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1859843042 ISBN 13: 9781859843048

Publisher: Verso, 2000

Synopsis

Pedro Almodovar ... winner of a BAFTA for Best Director, 2000

All About My Mother ... Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, 2000

The huge international success of his latest feature, All About My Mother, has finally granted Pedro Almodovar the recognition he deserves, as the most artistically ambitious and commercially consistent film-maker in Europe.

Frequently comic, often deadly serious, always visually glorious, his films range from the screwball comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and the SM melodrama Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! to the almost classically austere Live Flesh. And, while questions of gender, nationality and sexuality have always been Almodovar’s concern, new subjects have been addressed in his more recent work: the corrosive effects of a deregulated Spanish media, the transition from dictatorship to democracy and, in All About My Mother, uncompromising explorations of the process of mourning.

This new edition includes four new chapters, among which is a rare interview with Almodovar himself, a new preface and additional illustrations. Still the only study of its kind in English, it vigorously confirms its original argument, that beneath Almodovar’s genius for comedy and visual pleasure lies a film-maker whose work deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness.

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.

James Dunkerley is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary, University of London, and Director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas. His books include Rebellion in the Veins, Power in the Isthmus and The Long War, all published by Verso.

John King is Professor of Latin American Cultural History at the University of Warwick.

Review

"Finely observed, compelling."—Publishers Weekly

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1859843042
• ISBN 13: 9781859843048
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 240