Post-Franco, Postmodern ― The Films of Pedro Almodovar

The films of Pedro Almodovar have demonstrated great crossover appeal in their ability to attract both mainstream and marginal audiences and to command critical as well as commercial success. The contributors to this anthology of critical essays seek, through close readings of the director's 10 feature films, to analyze the multiple contexts of Almodovar's phenomenal international success. This volume offers a corrective to the glib approaches that have dominated previous discussions of Almodovar's films, which have treated them, on the one hand, as simply the latest contribution to the travel poster image of passionate, "romantic Spain," or, on the other, as historical joyrides through the global pop culture scene. As the first comprehensive study of Almodovar's cinema to be published in North America, the book is also noteworthy for the range of critical and theoretical methodologies that the contributors bring to the study of his works. Drawing upon disciplines that run from psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, film and media studies, and cultural theory to the empirical study of audience response, the authors nevertheless share a concern to illuminate the specifically Spanish context of the director's films. While this volume serves the important function of introducing American audiences to post-Franco Spanish culture, it also pursues the complementary goal of projecting contemporary Spain into the critical debate on the forms and functioning of postmodern culture and society.

KATHLEEN M. VERNON is Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. She is the editor ofJuan Benet (1986) and The Spanish Civil War and the Visual Arts (1990), and the author of numerous articles on contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature and film in journals such as Film Quarterly, Film and History, La Torre, Hispania, and Revista de Estudios Hispanicos. She is currently completing a study of the representation of memory and history in post-civil war Spanish narrative, novel and film.

BARBARA MORRIS is an independent scholar working on contemporary Spanish film and literature. She is the author of essays in Chicago Review, Critical Inquiry, Letras Peninsulares, Revista de Estudios Hispanicos, Espana Contemporanea, and Anales de la Literatura Espanola Contemporanea. She is currently writing a book on configurations of gender in post-Franco Spanish cinema.