Marvin D’Lugo,
Pedro Almodóvar.
Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006
ISBN-10: 0-252-07361-4
US$19.95 (pb)
192pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press)

Auteur on the Global Scene: Pedro Almodóvar’s Geocultural Strategies

It is no secret that the public persona of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is built on a series of oxymorons. An enfant terrible of Spanish cinema, he is also a prominent figure in the pantheon of European film directors. Dismissed sometime as a superficial commercial filmmaker he, nevertheless, is considered a major world-class auteur. Although Spanish critics often attack Almodóvar for a lack of basic narrative skills, his art of storytelling – no matter how extravagant – has won him an Oscar award for scriptwriting. The director’s working notebooks, production papers and films are carefully saved, archived, and scrutinised in the Almodóvar Studies Centre at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. In short, Almodóvar’s image is a curious composite of a celebrity auteur, whose status is constantly challenged, and a major cultural icon functioning far beyond the local cinematic community. This ambiguous construct has resulted in a controversial image in the public space, a knot that many English-language researchers of his work endeavour to unravel.

Marvin D’Lugo’s monograph on Almodóvar, part of the Contemporary Film Directors Series, is one of several recent contributions that target the centre of the knot: the geopolitical positioning of Almodóvar’s work and public persona. Published after a number of other important writings such as Vernon and Morris’ anthology (1995), extensive studies by Paul Julian Smith (2000), Gwynne Edwards (2001), and Mark Allinson (2001) and numerous papers by Marsha Kinder, Marvin D’Lugo’s analysis addresses a specific area: authorship in the era of globalisation. In this regard, his study offers more than just another in-depth analysis of Almodóvar’s films. D’Lugo’s discussion significantly extends the critical discourse on Almodóvar’s work by focusing on the cluster of ambiguities and polarities that sustain the most controversial aspects of Almodóvar’s authorship. For D’Lugo the concept of authorship itself is of increasing importance; he regards the film auteur as a vital link between the national and the global, functioning with equal effectiveness within both, while reconceptualising them in the process.

No doubt, Almodóvar is an excellent example of a transnational cult directors who succeeds on a global scale without renouncing the sumptuousness of local culture. His iconic status, both within and without Spain, infuses with high artistic currency the recently coined term glocalisation. Like Kieslowski, Wenders and before them, Fellini, Almodóvar remains a major figure in his national culture while extending his presence on a global scale. The trajectory of Almodóvar’s personal evolution – from provincial amateur to international auteur – replicates his country’s re-emergence and re-integration into the European community after Franco’s era. The practical consequences of such complex geocultural re-positioning in terms of filmmaking and cinematic theory define the central question driving D’Lugo’s entire investigation.

D’Lugo portrays Almodóvar’s authorship as a fluid phenomena sustained by the overlapping of three major discourses: the dynamics of the recent socio-political history of Spain, the director’s personal evolution, and, finally, the active and self-conscious cultivation of an alternative style of authorship which includes Almodóvar’s notorious strategy of self-narrativisation (multiple interviews, “hyper self-conscious” self-portrayal and image-making, effective self-promotional shows, etc.). D’Lugo’s analysis encompasses all these broad discourses to include several critical plots and subplots across the study. Each of these extends our knowledge about the director by capturing less familiar features behind the popular image. While constantly testing the classical formula of film auteur, D’Lugo’s argument reaches beyond this criteria to examine Almodóvar from a different angle – as a truly national figure acting on an increasingly cosmopolitan world stage. D’Lugo’s explanation of Almodóvar’s remarkable success may sound simple, yet it certainly is not that easy to achieve in practice: “it is not simply the inexplicable genius of the filmmaker but the talent of the eclectic craftsman who knows how to develop stories as collages that produce the ironic and multiple readings that appeal to a broad range of spectators.” (p. 11)

It will not be a surprise for the reader to discover that Almodóvar’s auteur persona and film practice fall outside the classical paradigm of authorship in many respects. Like Tom Tykwer and Fatih Akin, Almodóvar is a curious hybrid of high culture/pop-art auteur, and, like them, can be seen as a bricolage of contrasting definitions or another series of oxymorons: talented filmmaker and eclectic craftsman; accessible and profound; erotic and naïve; stylish and spontaneous; obscene and tender; provocative and trivial; compelling and vulgar… While these may put under pressure the most common postulates of auteur theory (especially its flirt with high art/culture), Almodóvar’s notorious artistic omniscience is not far from the classical claim that the director is the single genius behind the cinematic representation. Andre Bazin’s major identification of authorship, “the personal stamp”, is everywhere in Almodóvar’s films. His authorship includes increasing control over the key components of the films: script, directing, visual style (design, décor, patterns of cinematography), performance (voicing and acting each character while working with the actors), as well as production and promotional strategies. As D’Lugo often reminds us, the Almodóvar we know now is the final product of a life-long process of self-education in visual narration, stylistic sophistication, and merchandising; his prominent cultural status at present is the supreme achievement of an ordinary country man, whose only dream was filmmaking.

One of D’Lugo’s major critical arguments is the alignment of the evolution of Spanish society since the 1980s and the development and maturation of the director’s style. Almodóvar’s career can be seen as a triple-line story criss-cross between the self-invention of the auteur persona, the narrative of national identity, and the consistent gestures towards global cultural positioning. The historical context, Spain’s painful transition from dictatorship to modern democracy, makes its way into D’Lugo’s textual space indirectly, as a chronicle of Almodóvar’s eccentric, anarchic and provocative stylistic evolution. Not surprisingly, chronology is a key constructive tool for D’Lugo: the time-line structure is, perhaps, the only Ariadne’s thread able to lead the reader out of what Mark Allinson calls “a Spanish labyrinth” and Gwynne Edwards (and Almodóvar) used to refer to as “labyrinth of passions” the complicated contextual/intertextual network of Almodóvar’s cinematic texts. D’Lugo discovers certain reciprocity between Spain’s progressive restoration of democracy and the filmmaker’s intense self-education in auteurism as the filmmaker’s personal emancipation mirrors the society’s maturation. Each of Almodóvar’s films is situated within the double framework of the director’s internal evolution and the vibrant and dynamic cultural context of the external “revolution” – the revitalisation of the nation and the emergence of a new Spanish mentality after the end of Franco’s era. D’Lugo leads the reader throughout this labyrinth with the individual films as signposts: Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (Spain 1980) is Almodóvar’s joyful discovery of Madrid’s youth culture, an open celebration of pop culture and La movida, the Spanish movement for cultural liberation. Matador (Spain 1986) breaks with the earlier narrative form of “choral films” (p. 47), resorting to the most notorious cultural icon to address the national identity through the prism of sexuality, violence and the necrophilia theme – “the corrida is a heterosexual ritual and a metaphor of the dispersive eroticism that lies beyond the bullring in the public spaces of everyday life” (p. 49). With Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Spain 1988) the global re-positioning has been completed: Almodóvar gained the double status of being the most commercially successful Spanish filmmaker and, in being nominated for an Oscar, a prominent international auteur. High Heels (Spain/France 1991), a Spanish “tough melodrama” (p. 76), adds more brilliance to Almodóvar’s endless experimentation with the global genre: the narrative presents a unique blend of the native and the global, inspired by local realities but designed to circulate internationally. Kika (Spain/France 1993), a collage of postmodern themes revolving around “the sickness of big cities” (Almodóvar, cited in D’Lugo, p. 81), presents a Spain entering a new phase as the rural clashes with the cosmopolitan, the media dominates collective consciousness, violence is overwhelming, dehumanised technology rules individual lives, and the crisis of artistic creations becomes one of the inevitable consequences of massive, advancing consumerism. The “fantastic neorealism” and “naturalism of the absurd” (p. 10) of Talk to Her (Spain 2002) signals new detour as it reveals a more disciplined storyteller and a more self-absorbed country, another occasion of international triumph for the director (the film won an Oscar award for the script), and a moment of melancholic speculation on Spain’s increasingly problematic identity as coded in the fluid identities of the characters. And finally, Bad Education (Spain 2004), Almodóvar’s critical retrospect, a re-assessment of his “own past and the culture out of which his cinema has taken shape” (p. 129) and the filmmaker’s first straightforward historical reference; a narrative, resorting to the country’s traumatic background as it does directly with the socio-political determinants of individual and collective identities.

Such clear signposts, however, are of limited assistance in finding a way out of the labyrinth. Almodóvar’s story, a composite of many branches, requires the simultaneous framing of narratives, style(s), contexts and intertexts. The paradox is that even the most precise chronology would only lead the reader into another labyrinth. The more one advances within Almodóvar’s body of work, the more convoluted is the critical discourse supposed to disentangle the knot. Almodóvar’s work does not allow tidy mapping. Seen as a process, as an evolving, dynamic and multi-branched phenomena, it inevitably resists the chronological approach, obliging D’Lugo to resort to multiple cross-references between the chapters, and finally to reside in a complex network structure. It is true that with Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap Almodóvar pronounces his long-lasting and insistent interest in pop culture but this also applies to many of the films, made later, each exploring its pop culture roots in different ways. If Labyrinth of Passions (Spain 1982) is an example of complex plotting of the choral narratives, the same applies to Live Flesh (Spain/France 1997). Matador mobilises one of the most prominent Spanish cultural icons and opens space for further investigation of “the marks of Spanish cultural identity” (p. 45), and this film is far from being the single example in these respects. The cross-references become inevitable; the critical discourse becomes similar to the cinematic discourse, both flowing like a single braided river with its various themes and motifs.

The curious question shadowing D’Lugo’s discussion is to what extent Almodóvar’s public self-narrativisation inaugurates, determines and shapes the critical discourses about his work. Frédéric Strauss’ book-length Conversations avec Pedro Almodovar (Spanish edition, 2001) represents only a tiny proportion of the number of interviews Almodóvar has given over the years. Almodóvar’s intrusive tactics of self-construction are presented consistently throughout D’Lugo’s book. The director not only “writes” his public biography, he consciously provokes and even orchestrates certain critical paradigms that he wants to see associated with his work. He himself extensively discusses in his interviews the same aspects of his filmmaking which are central to the critical writing about his films: the adaptation and re-make of melodramatic structures, the blending of national and international styles, the survival of marginal cultural discourses within cult culture (such as folklore, scatological humour, popular jokes and stories), the revision of traditional gender politics of representation, oppositional styles of authorship, and, finally, the deliberate eclecticism which, for Almodóvar, is nothing less than a sign of true originality. The multiple quotations from Almodóvar’s interviews which we find in D’Lugo’s discussion are as much the writer’s rhetorical choices as they are evidence of the director’s tactic of consistently undermining the autonomy of his own film texts by surrounding them with a vibrant self-interpretational discourse. As a result Almodóvar’s films are always perceived through the aura of a fertile and abundant multi-media self-promotional textuality, which provokes an endless multiplicity of readings. Positioned at such a trans-discursive cross-point, Almodóvar’s own conceptual and interpretative models – even when they contradict certain critical claims – remain an integral part of his authorship, since they confirm its strategic ambiguity. One suspects that academic writers can hardly avoid Almodóvar’s discursive intervention in what they consider critical discussions of their own. In being aware of this consistent pattern of “co-authorship”, D’Lugo successfully defends his critical autonomy by using extensive references to earlier publications in English and Spanish and detailed historical and cultural contextualisation. Even when it is tamed this way, Almodóvar’s discourse maintains its massive pressure on D’Lugo’s critical narrative. As Barthes has predicted, this “bastard type” of authorship, the dual authorial status of auteur-writer, will proliferate in our age, and most often the same person will adopt both roles. Almodóvar’s performative vigour perfectly conflates the two roles. As a writer his activity is “to say at once and on every occasion what he thinks”, while as an auteur his function is to “transform […] thought into merchandise”, to “inaugurate ambiguity”, and to inspire decipherment. (A Barthes Reader, 1982: 191, author’s emphasis) If we want to elaborate further on Barthes’ comparative typology, Almodóvar resembles “a remote descendant of the accursed”; a central figure who consistently absorbs liminality and is both excluded and integrated; like witch doctors in ancient societies, he both diagnoses the diseases (in his films) and approaches them intellectually (in his interviews).

The “bastard”-auteur is able to be recognised whenever Almodóvar chooses to explore the liminal, the traumatic, the abnormal or the transgressive. He never hesitates to cross the centre/periphery lines. Indeed, most of his plots threaten to break social taboos, the institutionalised, the accepted, and the permitted norms of representation. Transgression, like eclectics, is once again redefined, its limits pushed further. This is perhaps most visible in the representation of sexuality and the treatment of this theme throughout the films, a subject that is given a significant place in D’Lugo’s discussion. The intensity of feelings represented on the screen has, perhaps, its closest analogue in the paintings of El Greco, although Almodóvar’s films lack the religious disguise of classical Catholic art. Excessive passions, pleasures and desires are all objects of representation and the occasion for experimentation with representation, both a self-reflective aesthetic construction and self-conscious theatricality. The spectacular moments of stylised performance of passions, of staged desires and pleasures are not less legitimate portraits of the human nature than the representation of spontaneous emotions. (Bersani and Dutoit, 2004: p. 87) Almodóvar often emphasises the performative, scripted nature of sexuality and desire in his films, especially when he deals with the common motifs of transsexuality and transsubjectivity. As important Spanish themes with a long history in Spanish art, they have a prominent presence in Almodóvar’s work, and in D’Lugo’s discussion, attracting a series of recurring ideas: the paroxysm of obsession, the condensation and dispersion of passions, the bodily responses, and the orgy of desire. Although following a different path of investigation, D’Lugo identifies patterns similar to what Bersani and Dutoit call “desire as artefact”, “sex as pure construction”, and “passion’s theatricality, its reiteratively scripted nature”. (Bersani and Dutoit, 2004: pp. 87, 91)

This is where a more inquiring reader may want to see D’Lugo’s contextual field extended further to reach the sources beyond popular culture, i.e. the most visible level of influence. It is true, as D’Lugo suggests, that Almodóvar’s films re-make and “endow with countercultural meanings” (p. 5) most of the traditional Spanish cultural icons (such as gypsy culture, Catholic rituals, bullfighting and Andalusian folklore). However, Almodóvar’s alternative model of authorship is composed as an inimitable blend of the high and the low cultural strata, from both national and international sources. One can identify in his cinematic images examples of universal melodramatic structures, clichés of pop culture and mentality, or the renouncement of the hallmarks of Francoist kitsch culture, all given significant place in D’Lugo’s argument. The question one may want to see discussed is “what is Almodóvar’s treatment and use of classical and high art cultural forms?” since this is one of the resources shaping his unique, and, to use Almodóvar’s term, eclectic style. If one proceeds with a closer reading one will recognise some of Almodóvar’s high culture and classic aesthetic sources. These may dwell on a deeper level, beyond the image surface of the easily recognisable pop culture icons, but they are still there. Almodóvar himself gives us a glimpse in one of his comments: “Live Flesh is an intense drama, baroques and sensual […] that partakes both with the thriller and the classic tragedies…. It deals with Death, Chance, Destiny and Guilt.” (David Walsh’ s review on wsws.org) Further examples can be found in Federico García Lorca’s masculinized female characters, the dark emotional undercurrents of Spanish Catholic painting and Joan Miro’s palette of loud primary colours.

Such an extension of the cultural context would be consistent with D’Lugo’s insightful exploration of the contextual/intertextual connections in Almodóvar’s work and with the depth and power of his critical analysis. D’Lugo’s remarkable reading of the individual films, an impressive contribution to auteur studies itself, may benefit from further exposition of the deeper cultural roots of Almodóvar’s cinema. Since both D’Lugo’s critical narrative and Almodóvar’s films seem to address the same challenging issue, “the geocultural repositioning of Spain within modernity” (p. 17), a wider cultural contextualisation would be a perfect support for D’Lugo’s central claim of the role of auteur in the global context. This would add even more intellectual brilliance to his already lucid and important critical quest in terms of determining the unique role of a single auteur in outlining the magisterial direction of authorship in the global era.

Violetta Petrova,
Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.