Bricolage and The Divas: Almodóvar Meets Hollywood’s Golden Age

By Noah Cowan
Cinematheque Ontario Program Guide
Summer 2003

(Film notes by the lovely George Kaltsounakis and Steve Gravestock can be seen in the PDF)

“The teasing melodramatist-modernist may be something unprecedented in movie history”—David Denby, The New Yorker

“All of the influences on me and all of the film references in my films are very spontaneous and visual. I don’t make any tributes. I’m a very naive spectator. I can't learn from the movies that I love”—Pedro Almodóvar

“You are more and more authentic the more you look like someone you dreamed of being” —Agrado in All About My Mother

Pedro Almodóvar is the most maddening of contemporary auteurs. He has made some of the most pleasurable art cinema of the past few decades—All About My Mother and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown are enormously compelling by just about any standard—and some real dreck. (The films from Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! through Kika make for an almost unforgivable career lapse.) When things go well in an Almodóvar creation, the recipe most often involves a clear and deft gesture of cinematic bricolage, wrapped in layers of luminous, inspired performances from his troupe of extraordinary Spanish actresses.

This programme of playful double bills celebrates how some of these fine concoctions spring forth from an inspired and unapologetic repurposing of Hollywood’s Golden Age and, especially, its legendary divas. All of these pairs were suggested by Almodóvar himself, as part of a recent retrospective and exhibition at La Cinémathèque francaise. He was asked to suggest several films inspired by or complementary to each film in his career. The result was a sprawling, frequently naughty, and utterly unique survey of cinema history. This programme culls that list down to six pairs that encapsulate his unironic, clear-eyed affection for Joan Crawford, George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, Joseph Mankiewicz, Bette Davis, Nicholas Ray, and the extraordinary worlds, aesthetic and narrative, they created.

To focus the programme on American classics was a decision taken with some anxiety; even the casual cineaste can identify Almodóvar as an astute student and reassembler of cinema history; name-checking his influences is practically film nerd sport. He liberally draws from all of cinema’s masters—Bergman and Hitchcock are his principal suppliers of visual language, Buñuel a cultural touchstone—but Almodóvar’s creative spirit and the passionate emotive core of his cinema is so clearly inspired by Hollywood that he can, in breathtaking fashion, quote an entire monologue from Johnny Guiter towards the end of Women on the Verge, and it feels completely right.

Almodóvar’s symbiotic relationship with American cinema functions largely through his appropriation of great female performance. He has molded many of this generation’s boldest international stars: Carmen Maura, Marisa Paredes, Cecilia Roth, Penélope Cruz, Rossy de Palma, Chus Lampreave... the list goes on. They have become some of cinema’s greatest divas by channelling and making contemporary the pain, suffering, and will to overcome heartbreak that first animated the very idea of cinematic melodrama. (I also include Antonio Banderas on that list above, despite his gender. In their two key films together, Law of Desire and Matador, Almodóvar deploys the stunning young man as a kind of kooky femme fatale. The performances don't actually make sense if Claudette Colbert doesn’t come to mind from time to time.)

However, it would be a mistake to imagine Almodóvar single-handedly resurrecting Joan Crawford out of whole cloth every few years. He insists that the women in his films contend with modernity, usually through amusing transgressions involving sexual difference, gender realignment, technology, and Spanish (often specifically Castilian) cultural cliché. But his divas also find themselves in murkier contemporary waters, making peace with more recherché subjects like organ transplantation. Of late, they overcome classical bondage through other cultural forms, such as dance, literature, and music.

Nor is Almodóvar a purveyor of camp. Although some critics think otherwise, I believe he (like those who influenced him, and particularly Sirk) embraces melodrama without an iota of irony. Almodóvar honestly believes that the ability to deliver heightened emotions is one of cinema’s great gifts; that cinema can actually make you feel the world more strongly. It is true that his films are often very funny, but the situational humour he employs is never at the expense of his heroines; their difficulties are deadly serious, no matter their origin. His own response to cinema seems to confirm an un-ironic gaze: “Movies changed my life,” he has said. “Why wouldn’t they have a similar impact on others?”

If we seek a key to what motivates Almodóvar’s playful aesthetic, we might find it in a more personal impulse. Consider his famously deadpan and telling aphorism when asked about his influences: “Everything that isn’t autobiographical is plagiarism.” It follows that there is some- thing of himself, a gay man, a former punk rock gender illusionist, a country boy awed by the big city, central to all his work as well.

This autobiographical tendency is strongest in the early films, up to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and the programme focuses mostly on this difficult-to-see work. These films are raw, low-budget bundles of energy, splashing their giddy transgressions onto the screen. He is not interested in seamless appropriation at this time, instead haphazardly plunking bits of classic Hollywood into a newly radicalized Spain, then deep into the cultural movido that followed Franco’s death. The push and pull of cocaine-addled whores, slammed up against Nick and Nora Charles dialogue remains head-spinning today. We have included the justly celebrated trio of Law of Desire, Matador and Women, plus the very early Labyrinth of Passion, a kind of compulsive sketchbook for the work to come. Watching these films, one can delight in seeing a young artist hitting his early high points, translating the influences he feels deeply in his heart into raucous cinema that never fails to entertain. We have avoided Almodóvar’s problematic middle period, shuttling through to the two films that best embody his current identity as a director, Flower of My Secret and All About My Mother. As Almodóvar became less interested in trespass for its own sake—think Kika—he turned back to the cinemas that inspired him, most notably the “women’s pictures” and, specifically, the great George Cukor. Both of these films share the Hollywood master’s casual classiness, facility with language, and narratives of stealth complexity, and a belief in the exhilarating capacity of cinema to transform how we see the world.
—Noah Cowan

Footnote: William Klein’s decidedly aprés le déluge POLLY MAGGOO is here mostly for sentimental reasons, although Grayson Hall clearly hails from the same stratosphere as Rosalind Russell et al.

Cinematheque Ontario would like to thank the following for their assistance in the preparation of this series: Dean Otto, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); William Klein; and Anne Morra, MoMA (New York).

Film descriptions by George Kaltsounakis and Steve Gravestock