Why Almodóvar?: A Career and its Contexts

As we can see from his recent reception in Cannes, Almodóvar’s cinema remains as relevant and delightful as it was when he first started his career almost five decades ago. This lecture will give an overview of his filmmaking and his career, tracing their development and changes and placing it in various contexts: Spain’s transition to Democracy; the punk/ ‘new romanticism’ of la nueva Movida Madrileña and its various undergrounds; production contexts; the influence of classic auteurs such as Hitchcock, Sirk and Luis Buñuel; questions of genre hybridity and queer representation, and the evolution of the filmmaking into a very precise mise-en-scène and a masterly control of tone that together combine into a rich and distinctive style.