All about Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780816649617)

New critical perspectives on the filmmaker behind All About My Mother, Talk to Her, and Volver

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 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 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 production studio, All about Almodóvar both reflects and illuminates its subject's dazzling eclecticism.

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.

Author: Brad Epps
ISBN-10: 0816649618
ISBN-13: 9780816649617
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Language: English
Published: 05/21/2009
Pages: 488
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 1.20d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 07/24/2009 pg. 16
Choice 12/01/2009
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2009 pg. 267