Out Spotlight LXIII

Today's Out Spotlight is Academy Award winner Pedro Almodóvar Caballero.

Born on September 25, 1951 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 as one of four children (two boys, two girls) in a large and impoverished family of peasant stock. His father, Antonio Almodóvar, could barely read or write, working most of his life hauling barrels of wine by mule. His 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. At eight he was sent by his family to study at a religious boarding school in the city of Cáceres, Extremadura, 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,” ]

Against his parents' wishes, he moved to Madrid in 1967. His goal was to be a film director, but he lacked the money to do it and Francisco Franco had just closed the National School of Cinema so he would be completely self-taught. He became a student by such directors as Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Luis Buñuel, Edgar Neville, Federico Fellini, George Cukor, Luis García Berlanga and neorealist Marco Ferreri. To support himself, he worked a number of odd jobs. He found permanent job, working as a administrative assistant for twelve years at a telephone company. Working only until three in the afternoon, he had the rest of the day to pursue his own interests in films.

In the early seventies, he 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, who has starred in many of his films. 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, he 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).

Around 1974, Almodóvar showed his first short films on a Super-8 camera. 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.

Openly gay, he has incorporated elements of underground and gay culture into mainstream forms with wide crossover appeal, thus redefining perceptions of Spanish cinema and Spain.

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.

His second film 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, 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.

Dark Habits (Entre Tinieblas) 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. It is a satire of Spain's religious institutions, portraying spiritual desolation and moral bankruptcy. It explores the force of desire in characters who are ruled by their intuition rather than reason.

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.

Almodóvar’s next film was his first huge international success: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. 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.

In his next movie 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.

Different than his previous films, 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.

His film All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre) grew out of a brief scene in one of his previous films, 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. Agrado, a pre-operative transsexual 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”.

The film 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.

His 16th film, Volver (Return), return him home and is set in part in La Mancha. 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. IT 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.

After 30 years he returned to his first format, a naughty short entitled La Concejala Antropofaga (The Cannibalistic Councilwoman), premiered on Spanish cable television Canal + last week. The short is a spin-off from his next forthcoming release, Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces) which stars Almodovar's favourite actress and muse Penelope Cruz in a four-way love story shot in film-noir style on the island of Lanzarote, it is the story of a bored local politician driven by a desire to gobble up a man whole.

Just some of the many clips

Short : Salome (1978)

Law of Desire "La ley del deseo" (1987)

Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown

All about My Mother