All about Almodóvar : a passion for cinema

One of world cinema's most exciting filmmakers, Pedro Almodovar 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 Almodovar 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: Almodovar'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 Almodovar's own diary account of the making of Volver and featuring never-before-seen photographs from El Deseo studio, All about Almodovar both reflects and illuminates its subject's dazzling eclecticism. Contributors: Mark Allinson, U of Leicester; Pedro Almodovar; 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; Victor 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. Zurian, U Carlos III, Madrid.