Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar

Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar By Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla One of Spain's most celebrated directors, Pedro Almodóvar has won international recognition for his dark comedy-dramas like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother and Volver. Conventionally seen as an 'apolitical' or 'ahistorical' body of work, this innovative book instead reconceptualises Almodóvar's films as theoretical and political resources, and examines a neglected aspect of his cinema: its engagement with the traumatic past, with subjective and collective memory, and with the ethical and political meanings that result from this engagement. Departing from a standard auteurist approach to the director, Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla uses close readings of Almodóvar's films from the 1990s and 2000s, including Bad Education and The Skin I Live In, to explore how his cinema mourns and witnesses the traces of trauma, and to reframe recent arguments about the recuperation of historical memory. Drawing on theoretical approaches from trauma studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, film studies and visual studies, this book suggests that Almodovar's work proposes an ethical model that is based on our compassionate relations to others, and that envisions a world co-inhabited by plurality and difference. Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California

Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California.