ALMODÓVAR, PEDRO (b. 1951)

Spanish filmmaker.

Pedro Almodóvar was born in the rural village of Calzada de Calatrava, in La Mancha, Spain. As a child, he was an avid reader and moviegoer with a remarkable imagination and a keen interest in playacting and theater, including the rituals of his local Catholic church.

Rather than attend film school or university, Almodóvar became a tremendous autodidact. His literary and cinematic tastes run from the decadent French poets of the nineteenth century to the British mystery writer Ruth Rendell, and to film-makers as diverse as William Wyler (1902–1981) and Michelangelo Antonioni (b. 1912). After moving to Madrid in 1968, Almodóvar worked at the Spanish national telephone company Telefónica, eventually earning enough money to purchase his first Super-8 camera. During the 1970s, Almodóvar became renowned for his amateur films in Madrid's burgeoning underground culture, whose growth was fueled by Spain's reversion to a more democratic government following General Francisco Franco's death in 1975.

Almodóvar made his first feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom, in 1980 with the actress Carmen Maura, who would star in several of his subsequent films. With Maura, Almodóvar inaugurated the practice of working with a kind of repertory of favorite actors, which he continued throughout his career. His earliest feature films perpetuate the gleefully anarchic feel of his Super-8 shorts, but by his third feature, Dark Habits (1983), he had already begun to integrate more serious themes and a tighter narrative and stylistic structure. Dark Habits also foregrounds one of Almodóvar's abiding obsessions: through a story of drugged-out nuns, Almodóvar began to develop his vision of the florid beauty and hypocrisy of the Spanish church. Much later, in Bad Education (2004), Almodóvar returned with a passion to this theme, with a story of sexual awakening and clerical perversion—it is this single word pasión (passion), in fact, that engulfs Bad Education' s final frame.

During the late 1980s, Almodóvar's films began to garner attention in and beyond Spain. His first international hit was the 1987 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, though many critics (including Almodóvar himself) consider his film from the previous year, The Law of Desire (1986), much more important. With Women on the Verge, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) and High Heels (1990), Almodóvar's signature "look" became firmly established. Almodóvar used a very wide 35-mm filmmaking format (1:85) in Women on the Verge and High Heels, to imitate classic American comedies filmed in CinemaScope, a significant departure from his hand-held Super-8 days. His film-making became synonymous with the use of kitsch and of vibrant, primary colors—red in particular—as well as strong background music and songs that convey key narrative and tonal elements. Some of the songs featured in Almodóvar's films over the years, many of them original, have become major hits in Europe.

At the center of these films, too, is a woman or women. Almodóvar'sdepiction ofwomen has evoked mixed reactions over the years; during Almodóvar's rise to international fame, several feminist film scholars decried what they considered hysterical female representations. But as with all his characters, Almodóvar dares us to see women as he sees them cinematically—that is, fetishized in their strength and their vulnerability, always larger than life.

In addition to the worldwide success of Women on the Verge, 1987 was a key year in Almodóvar's history because he and his brother Agustín established their own production company, El Deseo S. A. El Deseo ensured the aesthetic independence of Almodóvar's filmmaking, as well as certain formal continuities, made possible by a permanent staff at every level of production. Almodóvar also wrote or cowrote all his own films. In 2000 Almodóvar's All about My Mother won the Academy Award for best foreign film.

For all the apparent stylistic and thematic coherence in his oeuvre, however, there are exceptions to every seemingly well-established "Almodóvarian" convention. While Almodóvar usually works in a highly stylized, exuberant mode, What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) is a morose and poignant social realist film. Likewise, while Matador (1985) and Kika (1993) are highly conceptual, abstract works, The Flower of My Secret (1995) is soft in tone, with a straightforward narrative that is unique among Almodóvar's films. For yet another contrast, consider Bad Education (2004), whose movement in and out of its story-within-a-story teases the viewer by simultaneously treading near the outlines of Almodóvar's own biography.

Perhaps the difficulty of pinning down Almodóvar can be best explained by the director himself: he has said that he does not consider himself a transgressive filmmaker, because transgression is already too strong an acknowledgment of the law. Instead of being anti-Franco, for instance, he simply does not acknowledge Franco's existence in the Spain he creates in his films. For Almodóvar, this radical sense of freedom is the only way to move toward the truth of contemporary human experience. Only thus can a master of artifice render humanity—and pasión—so real.

See alsoCinema; Spain.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Smith, Paul Julian. Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar. 2nd ed. London, 2000. The definitive book on Almodóvar for both scholars and popular readers.

Strauss, Frédéric, ed. Almodóvar on Almodóvar. Translated by Yves Baignères. London, 1996. Almodóvar considers this his "official bibliography" because it is primarily concerned with his films rather than his life.

Vernon, Kathleen, and Barbara Morris, eds. Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar. Westport, Conn., 1995. Essays that address the cultural context and reception of Almodóvar in Spain and abroad.

Anne M. Kern