Pedro Almodóvar Caballero ( ; born 1949, is an
Academy Award winning Spanish
film director,
screenwriter and
producer.
Almodóvar is arguably the most successful and internationally known
Spanish filmmaker of his generation. His films, marked by complex
narratives, employ the codes of
melodrama
and use elements of pop culture, popular songs, irreverent humor,
strong colors and glossy décor. Desire, passion, family and
identity are among Almodóvar’s most prevalent themes. His films
enjoy a worldwide following and he has become a major figure on the
stage of world cinema.
He founded Spanish film production company
El
Deseo S.A. with his younger brother
Agustín Almodóvar who has
produced almost all of Pedro’s films.
Early life
Pedro
Almodóvar Caballero was born on September 25, 1949 in Calzada de
Calatrava
, Spain
, a rural
small town of Ciudad
Real
, a province of Castile-La Mancha
in the administrative district of Almagro. La Mancha
is the windswept region of flat lands made famous by
Don Quijote. He was born as one of four children
(two boys, two girls) in a large and impoverished family of peasant
stock. His father, Antonio Almodóvar, who could barely read or
write, worked most of his life hauling barrels of wine by mule.
Almodóvar's mother, Francisca Caballero, turned her son into a part
time teacher of literacy in the village and also a letter reader
and transcriber for the neighbors.
When Pedro was eight years old, the family
sent him to study at a religious boarding school in the city of
Cáceres, Extremadura
, in the west of the country, with the hope that he
might someday become a priest. His family eventually joined
him in
Cáceres, where his father opened
a gas station and his mother opened a bodega where she sold her own
wine.
While Calzada did not have a cinema, the streets where he lived in
Cáceres contained not only the school, but also a movie theater.
“Cinema became my real education, much more than the one I received
from the priest,” he said later in an interview.
Almodóvar was influenced by such directors as
Luis Buñuel,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
Alfred Hitchcock,
John Waters,
Ingmar
Bergman,
Edgar Neville,
Federico Fellini,
George Cukor,
Luis García Berlanga and
neorealist
Marco Ferreri.
Against
his parents' wishes, Pedro Almodóvar moved to Madrid
in
1967. His goal was to be a film director, but he lacked the
economic means to do it and besides,
Franco had just closed the National School
of Cinema so he would be completely self-taught. To support
himself, Almodóvar worked a number of odd jobs, including a stint
selling used items in the famous Madrid flea market
El Rastro. He eventually found full-time
employment with Spain's national phone company,
Telefonica, where he worked for twelve years as
an administrative assistant. Since he worked only until three in
the afternoon, he had the rest of the day to pursue his own
interests.
Beginnings
In the early seventies, Almodóvar grew interested in experimental
cinema and theatre. He collaborated with the vanguard theatrical
group, Los Goliardos, where he played his first professional roles
and met
Carmen Maura. He was also
writing comics and contributing articles and stories to a number of
counterculture magazines, such as
Star, Víbora and Vibraciones.
Madrid’s flourishing alternative cultural scene became the perfect
scenario for Almodóvar's social talents. He was a crucial figure in
La Movida Madrileña
(Madriliene Movement), a cultural renaissance that followed the
fall of the
Franco regime.
Alongside Fabio McNamara, Almodóvar sang in a
glam rock parody duo. He published a novella,
Fuego en las entrañas (
Fire in the Guts). Writing
under the pseudonym "Patty Diphusa", he penned various articles for
major newspapers and magazines, such as
El País, Diario
16 and
La Luna. He kept
writing stories that were eventually published in a compilation
volume,
El sueño de la razón (
The Dream of
Reason).
Short films
Almodóvar bought his first camera, a
Super-8, with his first paycheck from
Telefonica when he was 22 years old, and began to make
hand-held short films.
Around 1974, he showed his first short film,
and by the end of the 1970s they were shown in Madrid's night
circuit and in Barcelona
. These shorts had overtly sexual narratives
and no soundtrack:
Dos putas, o, Historia de amor que termina
en boda (1974) (
Two Whores, or, A Love Story that Ends in
Marriage);
La caída de Sodoma (1975)(
The Fall of
Sodom);
Homenaje (1976)(
Homage);
La
estrella (1977)(
The Star) 1977
Sexo Va: Sexo
viene (
Sex Comes and Goes) (Super-8);
Complementos (shorts) 1978; (
16mm).
“I showed them in bars, at parties… I could not add a soundtrack
because it was very difficult. The magnetic strip was very poor,
very thin. I remember that I became very famous in Madrid because,
as the films had no sound, I took a cassette with music while I
personally did the voices of all the characters, songs and
dialogues. After four years of working with shorts in Super-8
format, in 1978 Almodóvar made his first
Super-8, full-length film:
Folle, folle,
fólleme, Tim (1978) (
Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Tim),
a magazine style melodrama. In addition, he made his first
16 mm short,
Salome. This was his first contact with
the professional world of cinema. The film's stars,
Carmen Maura and Felix Rotaeta, encouraged him
to make his first feature film in
16 mm and
helped him raise the money to finance what would be
Pepi, Luci, Bom y
otras chicas del montón.
Film career
Asked to explain the success of his films, he says that they are
very entertaining. "It's important not to forget that films are
made to entertain. That's the key." He was heavily influenced by
old Hollywood movies in which everything happens around a female
main character, and aims to continue in that tradition.
Almodóvar is openly gay, and he has incorporated elements of
underground and gay culture into mainstream forms with wide
crossover appeal, thus redefining perceptions of Spanish cinema and
Spain.
Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap
(1980)
Almodóvar made his first feature film,
Pepi, Luci, Bom and
Other Girls on the Heap (
Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras
chicas del montón), in 1980 with a very low budget and a team
of volunteers shooting on weekends. The film was based on his
photo-novella,
General Erections, previously published in
the magazine
El Víbora (
The Viper).
Pepi,
Luci, Bom… consists of a series of loosely connected sketches
rather than a fully formed plot. It follows the adventures of the
three characters of the title: Pepi, who wants revenge from the
corrupt policeman who
raped her; Luci, a mousy,
masochistic housewife; and Bom, a
lesbian punk rock singer.
The central theme of the film, friendship and female solidarity,
appear repeatedly in Almodóvar’s filmography.
The film was plagued by financial and technical problems. However,
Almodóvar would look back fondly to his first film: "Pepi, Luci,
Bom… is a film full of defects. When a film has only one or two, it
is considered an imperfect film, while when there is a profusion of
technical flaws, it is called style. That’s what I said joking
around when I was promoting the film, but I believe that that was
closer to the truth
.
The film captured the spirit of the times – above all the sense of
cultural and sexual freedom – and established Almodóvar as an
agent provocateur. With
its many
Kitsch elements,
campy style, outrageous humor, and explicit
sexuality (there is a famous
golden shower
scene in the middle of a knitting lesson), the film amassed a
cult following.
It toured the
independent circuits and then spent four years on the late night
showing of the Alphaville Theater in Madrid which
provided the funds for Almodóvar's second film.
Labyrinth of Passions (1982)
Labyrinth of Passions
(
Laberinto de Pasiones) is a
screwball comedy about multiple identities,
one of Almodóvar’s favorite subjects. The plot follows the
adventures of two sex-crazy characters: Sexilia, an aptly named
nymphomaniac, and Riza, the
gay son of the leader of a fictional
Middle Eastern country. Their unlikely destiny
is to find one another, overcome their sexual preferences and live
happily ever after on a tropical island. The campy roundelay also
involves Queti, Sexilia’s “biggest fan”, whose delusional father
rapes her.
The film is an outrageous look at love and
sex, framed in Madrid of the early
1980s, during the so called Movida
madrileña, a period of sexual adventurousness between the
dissolution of Franco's authoritarian regime and the onset of
AIDS consciousness. Labyrinth of
Passions caught the spirit of liberation which then ruled in
Madrid and it became a cult film.
Almodóvar said about
Labyrinth of Passions: "I like the
film even if it could have been better made. The main problem is
that the story of the two leads is much less interesting than the
stories of all the secondary characters. But precisely because
there are so many secondary characters, there's a lot in the film I
like."
Dark Habits (1983)
Dark Habits (
Entre
Tinieblas) heralded a change in tone to somber
melodrama with comic elements. This film has an
almost all-female cast featuring many of Almodóvar's favorite
leading ladies: Carmen Maura,
Julieta
Serrano,
Marisa Paredes and
Chus Lampreave. The narrative centers
upon a cabaret singer, who, running away from justice, finds refuge
in a convent of destitute nuns, each of whom explores a different
sin. The mother superior, a drug addict worse than the fallen woman
trying to redeem, falls in love with the singer.
The film is a
satire of Spain's religious
institutions, portraying spiritual desolation and moral bankruptcy.
Dark Habits explores the force of desire in characters who
are ruled by their intuition rather than reason. This is also
Almodóvar’s first film in which he clearly uses popular music to
express emotion: in a pivotal scene, the mother superior and her
protégé sing along with
Lucho Gatica’s
bolero:
Encadenados
(
Chained together).
Dark Habits was a modest success, and cemented Almodóvar’s
reputation as the
enfant
terrible of the
Spanish
cinema.
What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984)
Almodóvar's next film,
What Have I Done to
Deserve This? (
¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer
esto?) was inspired by the Spanish
black comedies of the late 50s and early 60s.
It is the tale of a struggling housewife and her dysfunctional
family: her
abusive husband, who
works as a taxi driver; her oldest son, a cocaine dealer; the
youngest son, who sells his body to the local perverts; and the
grandmother who hates the city and just wants to return to her
rural village.
The theme of the downtrodden housewife coping with the travails of
everyday life arise repeatedly in the director's work, as do other
issues of female independence and solidarity.
What Have I Done
to Deserve This? is also a critique on consumerism and
patriarchal culture. In one scene, the
housewife trades her own son so she doesn't have to pay a dentist
bill, and in another the only witness of a crime is a lizard, aptly
named “Money”.
What Have I Done to Deserve This? was more successful than
Almodóvar’s previous films and became his first with international
distribution.
Matador (1986)
Almodóvar's subsequent films deepened his exploration of sexual
desire and the sometimes brutal laws governing it.
Matador is a dark, complex story that
centers on the relationship between a former bullfighter and a
murderous female lawyer, both of whom can only experience sexual
fulfillment in conjunction with killing. The film offered up desire
as a bridge between sexual attraction and death.
Matador drew away from the
naturalism and humor of the
director’s previous work into a deeper and darker terrain.
Almodóvar established the interrelation between sexuality and
violence as seen in his cinematographic quotation of the final
sequence from
King Vidor’s
Duel in the Sun. The violent
elements of the film caused some controversy. Almodóvar justified
his use of violence explaining "The moral of all my films is to get
to a stage of greater freedom." Almodóvar went on to note, "I have
my own morality. And so do my films. If you see Matador through the
perspective of traditional morality, it's a dangerous film because
it's just a celebration of killing. Matador is like a legend. I
don't try to be realistic; it's very abstract, so you don't feel
identification with the things that are happening, but with the
sensibility of this kind of romanticism".
Law of Desire (1987)
Almodóvar solidified his creative independence when he started the
production company
El Deseo, together with
his brother
Agustín
Almodóvar, who has also had several cameo roles in his films.
From 1986 on, Pedro Almodóvar has produced his own films.
The first movie that came out from El Deseo was the aptly named
Law of Desire (
La Ley del
Deseo). The narrative follows three main characters: a gay
film director who embarks on a new project; his sister, an actress
who used to be his brother (played by Carmen Maura), and a
repressed murderously obsessive stalker (played by
Antonio Banderas).
The film presents a gay love triangle and drew away from most
representations of homosexuals in films. These characters are
neither coming out nor confront sexual guilt or homophobia; they
are already liberated, like the homosexuals in
Fassbinder’s films. Almodóvar said about
Law
of Desire : " It's the key film in my life and career. It
deals with my vision of desire, something that's both very hard and
very human. By this I mean the absolute necessity of being desired
and the fact that in the interplay of desires it's rare that two
desires meet and correspond".
Almodóvar's films rely heavily on the capacity of his actors to
pull through difficult roles into a complex narrative. In
Law
of Desire Carmen Maura plays the
role of Tina, a woman who used to be a man. Almodóvar explains:
"Carmen is required to imitate a woman, to savour the imitation, to
be conscious of the kitsch part that there is in the imitation,
completely renouncing parody, but not humour."
Elements from
Law of Desire grew into the basis for two
later films:
Carmen Maura appears in a
stage production of
Cocteau’s
The Human
Voice, which inspired Almodóvar’s next film,
Women on the
Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; and Tina's confrontation scene
with an abusive priest formed a partial genesis for
Bad Education.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
Almodóvar’s next film was his first huge international success:
Women on
the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (
Mujeres al borde de
un ataque de nervios), a feminist light comedy that further
established Almodóvar as a "women's director" like
George Cukor and
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Almodóvar
has said that women make better characters: “women are more
spectacular as dramatic subjects, they have a greater range of
registers, etc.”
The film, staged as a faux adaptation of a theatrical work, details
a two-day period in the life of Pepa, a professional movie dubber
who has been abruptly abandoned by her married lover and who
frantically tries to track him down. In the course of her search
she discovers some of his secrets, and realizes her true
feelings.
Inspired by Hollywood comedies of the 1950s,
Women on the Verge
of a Nervous Breakdown became the stepping stone for Pedro
Almodóvar's later work. This light comedy of rapid-fire dialogue
and fast-paced action remains one of Almodóvar’s most accessible
films (with no drugs or sex). The film received public and critical
acclaim worldwide, and brought Almodóvar to the attention of
American audiences.
Women was showered with many awards,
and received an Oscar nomination for best foreign language
film.
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990)
Almodóvar's next film marked the breaking-off with his reference
actress, Carmen Maura, and the beginning of a fruitful
collaboration with another great actress of Spanish and European
cinema:
Victoria Abril.
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (
¡Átame!)
was also the director's fourth and most important collaboration
with Antonio Banderas.
In
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Ricky (played by
Antonio Banderas), a recently
released psychiatric patient, kidnaps and holds hostage an actress
(played by
Victoria Abril) in order
to make her fall in love with him. “I’m 23 years old, I have fifty
thousand pesetas and I am alone in the world. I will try to be a
good husband for you and a good father for your children,” he tells
her.
Rather than populate the film with many characters, as in his
previous films, here the story focuses on the compelling
relationship at its center: the actress and her kidnapper literally
struggling for power and desperate for love. The film’s title line
¡Tie Me Up! is unexpectedly uttered by the actress as a
genuine request. She does not know if she will try to escape or
not, and when she realizes she has feelings for her captor, she
prefers not to be given a chance.
In spite of some dark elements,
Tie Me Up! Tie Me
Down! can be described as a romantic comedy, and the
director's most clear love story, with a plot similar to
William Wyler's thriller,
The Collector. Nevertheless, the film was
the subject of heated debate; it was decried by feminists and
women's advocacy groups for what they perceived as the film's
sadomasochist undertones. Its U.S. release was marked by further
scandal and controversy. The
Motion Picture Association
of America, which determines film ratings in the U.S.,
marginalized its distribution with the stigma of an 'X'. Backed by
the film's distribution company,
Miramax,
Almodóvar filed a lawsuit, resulting in a stubborn legal battle.
The result of it was the birth of a new rating,
NC17, applicable to those films of explicit nature
previously regarded unfairly as pornographic.
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, which did not enjoy the
wide acclaim of
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,
rather had a negative reception among some Spanish critics, who
declared that Almodóvar had lost his sense of direction; similar
criticism was leveled at his two subsequent films.
High Heels (1991)
The family melodrama
High
Heels (
Tacones Lejanos) is built around the
fractured relationship between a self-involved mother, a famous
torch song singer, and the grown daughter she abandoned as a child,
who works as TV newscaster. The daughter has married her mother's
ex-lover and has befriended a female impersonator of her mother.
Popular songs, always a key element in Almodóvar’s work, are never
more present than in this film full of
boleros.
High
Heels also contains an unexpected prison yard dance
sequence.
The film has the feel of other mother-daughter melodramas like
Stella Dallas,
Mildred Pierce,
Imitation of Life and
particularly
Autumn Sonata,
which is quoted directly in the film.
High Heels was an
interpretative tour de force for two essential actresses of the
"Almodovarian universe":
Marisa
Paredes and
Victoria Abril.
Kika (1993)
After the melodramatic intensity of
High Heels, Almodóvar
took another sudden turn in his career by shooting one of his most
unclassifiable movies:
Kika, a choral
film where each character belongs to a different film genre, thus
generating a very free and heterodox movie. The plot centers on
Kika, a clueless but good-hearted make-up artist involved with an
older expatriate American writer and his bewildered stepson. A
vampy, oddball television reporter who is constantly in search of
sensational stories follows Kika's misadventures.
Kika is a critique of
mass
media, particularly its sensationalism. Here Almodóvar gives a
cameo role to his real life elderly mother, Francisca Caballero,
who plays an ill-qualified hostess of a literary T.V. program. She
reads badly and not much as her eyesight is bad, but she explains
to the audience that she has been given her job as presenter by her
son, the director (a self-reflexive Almodóvar), so that mother and
son can spend time together.
Kika created a certain amount of
controversy in the United
States
thanks to a humorous rape scene that was perceived
as being both misogynistic and exploitative. The film was
not well received by critics, but opened the door to a new era in
the director’s career.
The Flower of My Secret (1995)
Almodóvar changed gears with his next effort, 1995's
The Flower of My Secret (
La
flor de mi secreto). It is an exploration of denial in its
various forms, a film in which melodrama is treated more as theme
rather than as plot line.
The Flower of My Secret is the
story of Leo Macias, a successful romance writer who has to
confront both a professional and personal crisis.
Estranged from her
husband, a military officer who has volunteered for an
international peacekeeping role in Bosnia and
Herzegovina
to avoid her, Leo fights to hold on to a past that
has already eluded her, not realizing she has already set her
future path by her own creativity and by supporting the creative
efforts of others.
Starring Almodóvar regular
Marisa
Paredes, this psychological drama was hailed as his most mature
film to date, and remains one of the director's humblest films.
Leaving Almodóvar's usual choral exercises aside, the story
centered on the love-torn writer.
The Flower of My Secret
has many common elements with
All About My Mother and
Talk to Her. The three films
are about “loss, growth and recovery”.
The Flower of my Secret heralded a change in Almodóvar's
filmography to a more mature period. It is the transitional film
between his earlier and later style. It is worth noting, however,
that many leading critics did not respond well to this film.
Live Flesh (1997)
Almodóvar has written all of his films, but with
Live Flesh (
Carne trémula)
the director shared script writing credits. This was his first—and
so far only—script adapted from a book,
Ruth Rendell’s novel
Live Flesh. All that remains in the film
from the book is the plot line of the two male protagonists: David,
a police detective, and Víctor, the man accused of wounding and
paralyzing him. Upon his release, Víctor, looking for revenge, is
soon entangled in the lives not only of David and his wife, but
also of David’s former partner, Sancho, and Sancho’s wife.
Live Flesh explores love, loss, and suffering with a sober
restraint only briefly glimpsed in the director's earlier work. The
film tells the story of several characters implicated in each
other's fates in ways that are beyond their control.
Live Flesh is
historically framed from 1970, when Franco declared a state of emergency, to 1996, when
Spain had completely shaken off the restrictions of the
Franco regime. With this film Almodóvar started his
collaboration with
Penélope
Cruz.
All About My Mother (1999)
Almodóvar then continued to work in more serious dramatic confines,
directing
All About My
Mother (
Todo sobre mi madre).
The film grew out of
a brief scene in The Flower of My Secret, telling the
story of a mourning mother who, after reading the last entry in her
dead son's journal about how he wishes to meet his father for the
first time, decides to travel to Barcelona in search of the boy's father. She must tell
the father that she had their son after she left him many years
ago, and that he has now died. Once there, she encounters a number
of odd characters - a
transvestite
prostitute, a
pregnant nun, and a
lesbian actress - all of whom help her cope with her
grief.
The film revisited Almodóvar's familiar themes of the power of
sisterhood and of family. Dedicated to
Bette
Davis,
Romy Schneider and
Gena Rowlands,
All About My
Mother is steeped in theatricality, from its backstage setting
to its plot, modeled on the works of
Federico Garcia Lorca and
Tennessee Williams, to the characters'
preoccupation with modes of performance.
The
comic relief on the film centers on
Agrado, a pre-operative
transsexual. In
one scene, she tells the story of her body and its relationship to
plastic surgery and
silicone, culminating with a statement of her own
philosophy: “The more you become like what you have dreamed for
yourself, the more authentic you are”.
All About My Mother received more awards and honors than
any other film in the Spanish motion picture industry. Its
recognition includes an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, a
Golden Globe in the same category,
Best Director
Award and the
Prize of
the Ecumenical Jury Award at
Cannes; the French Cesar for Best
Foreign Film, the
Goya Award as best film
of the year, best Actress in a Leading Role for Argentine actress
Cecilia Roth and a twelfth Annual European Film Award.
Talk to Her (2002)
Two years later, Almodóvar hit another career high with
Talk to Her (
Hable con
ella). The film revolves around two men who become friends
while taking care of the
comatose women they
love. Their lives flow in all directions, past, present and future,
pulling them towards an unsuspected destiny. Combining elements of
modern dance and silent filmmaking with a narrative that embraces
coincidence and fate, Almodóvar plots the lives of his characters,
thrown together by unimaginably bad luck, towards an unexpected
conclusion.
The film was hailed by critics and embraced by arthouse audiences.
Almodóvar won numerous honors across the world for his film,
including a French César for Best Film and an Oscar for Best
Original Screenplay.
Bad Education (2004)
Almodóvar followed two worldwide cinematic successes with
Bad Education (
La mala
educación), a richly baroque tale of
child sexual abuse and mixed identities.
Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, discover love, cinema and fear
in a religious school at the start of the 1960s. Father Manolo, the
school principal and their literature teacher, is witness to and
part of these discoveries. The three characters meet twice again,
at the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s, or so it seems.
Almodóvar used elements of
film noir,
borrowing in particular from
Double Indemnity. The film's
protagonist, Juan, was modeled largely on
Patricia Highsmith’s most famous
character,
Tom Ripley, as played by
Alain Delon in
René Clément's
Purple Noon. A criminal without scruples,
but with an adorable face that betrays nothing of his true nature.
Almodóvar explains : "He also represents a classic film noir
character - the femme fatale. Which means that when other
characters come into contact with him, he embodies fate, in the
most tragic and noir sense of the word."
Volver (2006)
Almodóvar’s 16th film,
Volver
(
Return), is set in part in
La
Mancha (the director’s native region). The film opens showing
dozens of women furiously scrubbing the graves of their deceased,
establishing the influence of the dead over the living as a key
theme. The plot follows the story of three generations of women in
the same family who survive wind, fire, and even death. The film is
an ode to female
resilience, where men are literally
disposable.
Many of Almodóvar's stylistic hallmarks are present: the
stand-alone song (a redemption of the Argentinian
tango song "Volver"), references to
reality TV, and an homage to classic film (in
this case
Luchino Visconti's
Bellissima).
Volver started as a story of
la España negra, or
'black Spain'--the rural, superstitious and
conservative part of the country still often
associated, the director says, with violence, tragedy, even
backwardness: "It looks like they are living a century before. But
I tried to demonstrate that the same Spain, in the same local
places with the same local characters, could be called 'white
Spain', because the neighbors are in complete solidarity, all the
women join together and create a kind of family. The movie really
talks about women who survive, women who fight fiercely.
The storyline of
Volver appears as both a novel and movie
script in Almodóvar’s earlier film,
The Flower of My
Secret.
Broken Embraces (2009)
Almodóvar’s most recent film Broken Embraces (Abrazos Rotos), released
in Spain on March 18
2009, is the director’s longest and most expensive feature.
The plot follows the tragic fate of a former film director, who was
blinded in a car accident fourteen years before. The film has a
fractured puzzling structure, mixing past and present and film
within a film that Almodóvar explored previously in both
Talk to Her and
Bad Education.
Broken Embraces
is built up as homage to the craft of film making and takes some
cues from
Roberto Rossellini’s
Journey to Italy and
Almodóvar’s own
Women on the Verge of
a Nervous Breakdown.
Filmography
See also
Bibliography
- Allinson, Mark: A Spanish Labyrinth : The Films of Pedro
Almodóvar, I.B Tauris Publishers, 2001, ISBN 1-86064-507 -
0
- Bergan, Ronald Film, D.K Publishing, 2006, ISBN
0756622034
- Cobos, Juan and Miguel Marias: Almodóvar Secreto,
Nickel Odeon, 1995
- D’ Lugo, Marvin: Pedro Almodóvar, University of
Illinois Press, 2006, ISBN 0-252-073614 - 4
- Edwards, Gwyne : Almodóvar: labyrinths of Passion.
London: Peter Owen. 2001, ISBN 0720611210
- Strauss, Frederick Almodóvar on Almodóvar, Faber and
Faber, 2006, ISBN 0-57123-192-6
References
- Pedro Almodóvar: D’Lugo, p.13
- A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar: Allinson,
p.7
- Pedro Almodóvar: D’Lugo, p.14
- Labyrinths of Passion: Edwards, p.12
- Almodóvar Secreto: Cobos and Marias, p. 76- 78
- A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar: Allinson,
p.9
- Film: Bergan, p.252
- Pedro Almodóvar: D’Lugo, p.19
- Almodóvar on Almodóvar: Strauss, p.28
- Pedro Almodóvar: D’Lugo, p.96
- Strauss, Frederic, Almodóvar on Almodóvar, pg 68
- Pedro Almodóvar: D’Lugo, p.57
- Almodóvar Secreto: Cobos and Marias, p.100
- Almodóvar in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
- Pedro Almodóvar: D’Lugo, p.103
- : Almodóvar: labyrinths of Passion: Edwards,
Gwyne
- Pedro Almodóvar, All About my Mother
- Pedro Almodóvar: D’Lugo, p.105
- Pedro Almodóvar: D’Lugo, p.117
- Strauss, Frederic, Almodóvar on Almodóvar, pg 212
- www.sonyclassics.com/volver/main.html
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