Pedro Almodóvar
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Pedro Almodóvar (pronounced [ˈpe.dro al.mo.ˈdo.bar]) (born on September 24, 1949 in Calzada de Calatrava, the impoverished Spanish region of La Mancha Spain) is a Spanish filmmaker. Since making his first commercial film in the 1980s, he has written, directed, acted and produced nearly 30 films. His films are centred around relationships that occur around improbable circumstances and are accompanied by melodrama and high camp.
Early Biography
Pedro Almodovar was born to a humble family in Calzada de Calatrava of Ciudad Real, a province of Castile-La Mancha in the administrative district of Almagro. He migrated with his family to Cáceres in Extremadura when he was eight years of age and attended a Catholic boarding school run by Salesian friars that made him lose his faith in God. His experiences there, and the sexual abuse that was going on but that he asserts he was never subject to, would serve as the inspiration for his later film, Bad Education (2004) (Spanish: La mala educación).At sixteen years of age, Almodovar moved to Madrid. He had developed a great love of cinema growing up in Extremadura, but he was not able to study it as he wished, for Franco had shut down Spain's filmmaking schools. So Almodovar worked a number of odd jobs, including a stint selling used items in a flea-market called The Trail (Spanish: El Rastro), and lived an impoverished life amongst the down and out, who have appeared recurrently in his films, in the outskirts of Madrid. Eventually however, he was able to find a full-time job with Spain's national phone company, where he worked for a total of twelve years as an administrative assistant, and managed to save enough to buy himself a much coveted Super 8 camera.
And it was at around this time of his life that Almodovar started to be interested in more experimental cinema and theatre with his work as a member of the theatrical group, the Romantics (Spanish: Los Goliardos). From 1972, Almodovar began making his first short films on his Super 8, and towards the tail end of the seventies, he was writing comic books and contributing articles and stories to a number of conterculture magazines, such as Star and Vipers and Vibrations (Spanish: Víbora y Vibraciones).
Almodovar later sang alongside Fabio McNamara in a punk-glam-rock parody duo as part of the socio-cultural Madrilene Movement (Spanish: La Movida Madrileña) that came about in the eighties with the explosion of liberties after the death of the dictator, Franco. He published, amongst other things, a novella, Fire in the Guts (Spanish: Fuego en las entrañas), a pornographic photo-novella, All Yours (Spanish: Todo Tuya), and a number of pieces in newspapers and magazines, such as El País, Diario 16 and La Luna, under the invented female guise of Patty Diphusa, whose memories and other writings he would periodically produce.
Almodovar made his first film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Woman on the Heap (Spanish: Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón), in 1980 for half a million pesetas (approximately 3000€) from his photo-novella, General Erections (Spanish: Erecciones Generales), that had been published in the magazine The Viper (Spanish: El Víbora). After the success of the film, Almodovar made a few more, but fed up with begging for money to finance his cinematic creations, he founded with his brother, Agustín Almodóvar, the production company Desire (Spanish: El Deseo) in 1985 so that he could produce his movies independently, the first of which being The Law of Desire (Spanish: La Ley del Deseo) released in 1986. Since then, apart from Almodovar's own films, Desire has produced films for directors such as Álex de la Iglesia, Guillermo del Toro, Daniel Calparsoro, Mónica Laguna, and more recently, Isabel Coixet and the partnership of Dunia Ayaso and Félix Sabroso.
Almodóvar's Cinematic Work
Almodóvar's films, similar in aesthetic style and technique to those of the Spanish director Eloy de la Iglesia, cultivates a naturalism that deconstructs the depiction of middle-class values, lives and behaviour that abound in the usual Spanish cinematic fare. His films tend to deal with the marginal existence of the urban underclass and are full of scandalous and provocative elements, such as corrupt cops, drug consumption, prostitution, maltreatment, precocious kids, unashamed homosexuality, desperate housewives and philosophical country hicks. All this is combined with strong irreverent humour that often include explicit scenes of a sexual nature, as the golden shower scene of his first 35mm film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Woman on the Heap (Spanish: Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón), attests.Just like the surrealists, the occasional scandalous scene of bad taste is usually incorporated into Almodóvar's movies in order to perturb the morally haughty bourgeoisie and stilted intellectuals that feel they are above such unbecoming behaviour. Nonetheless, with the passage of time, Almodóvar has developed a more sophisticated and colourful sense of drama, closer to the classic melodramatic style of Douglas Sirk, and continues to improve his scriptwriting to the point where he has become a master of rhythm and structure. This progress was clearly evident in his breakout film of 1984, What Have I Done to Deserve This? (Spanish: ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?), which again featured one of his favoured actresses in Carmen Maura.
Later in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (Spanish: ¡Átame!), titled originally Cine X in the USA, a woman ends up falling in love with her kidnapper, and in Kika, a rape is trivialised. Almodóvar's sources of inspiration, nearly always autobiographical, also include Buñuel, avante-garde art, folkloric culture and anti-clericalism.
Trivia
- Often uses symbolism and metaphorical techniques to portray circular storylines.
- His films often portrays strong female characters and transsexuals.
- Mother Francisca Caballero and brother Agustín Almodóvar often appear in cameo roles in his movies.
Filmography
Notes and references
External links
- [Official website] includes comments on many of his movies and a diary on the making of his new one, Volver
- [Almodovar Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)]
- [Interview with Pedro Almodovar] from 1996 about The Flower of My Secret
- [Interview with Pedro Almodovar] about Talk to Her
- [Biography of Pedro Almodóvar] MundoCine
- [Pedro Almodóvar's Complete Filmography, Reviewed]
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