Gesamtkunstwerk Almodóvar

From James Miller's book about an outstanding director

James Miller, the author of a book about the Spanish midnight bomber from cinema, calls Pedro Almodóvar a director-philosopher. Read about why he bestowed this title on the creator of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “The Skin I Live In,” and many other, dissimilar and subtly similar films in an excerpt from “Self-Portrait in Seven Films.”

All of us, since February 24, 2022, have found ourselves in the face of advancing barbarity, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editors of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that there is still a place for thought and fiction in the world.

James Miller. Almodovar: self-portrait in seven films. M.: Eksmo, 2026. Translation from English by Alina Butina. Content

[Almodóvar scholar Paul Julian] Smith largely ignores the possibility that Almodóvar, a serious disciple of Andy Warhol, intends to blur the line “between art and mass production.” Alfred Hitchcock, perhaps the film artist Almodóvar most admires, was already blurring these boundaries in the 1950s and 1960s at the height of his creativity, popularizing a virtual caricature of himself, a celebrity instantly recognizable in profile (just as the profile silhouette of Almodóvar today, with his signature topknot, adorns a deluxe gift set of eighteen of his films on Blu-ray released in France in 2016).

Smith also tacitly suggests that “self-education” is something of a cosmetic exercise. But Almodóvar himself has long seen filmmaking as a potential opportunity to learn more about who he is and who he can still become. “My films are more sincere than I am in real life,” he noted in 2004. — My films are more honest than I am in real life. My films are clearer than I am in real life.” As we know, films changed his life - so why shouldn't we assume that the films this director so carefully makes will continue to have the same impact on the person who creates them?

Of course, Almodóvar knows how to position himself. Sometimes he takes pains to present his carefully polished, even somewhat anodyne image, as in a very elegant multimedia installation celebrating his career at the Academy Museum in Hollywood. (Almodóvar organized this exhibition and organized the accompanying lavishly illustrated catalog under the following headings: Bodies, Café Müller, The Shrinking Lover, Mothers, Guilt and Pain, Bergman and Melodrama, Musicals, Comedy, Noir, Sex and Desire, Religious Education, The Family.)

There is also no doubt that Almodóvar takes pains to embody a variety of fictional characters in his most explicit works, unlike David Bowie, Fernando Pessoa or, for that matter, Søren Kierkegaard.

At the same time, it's surprising how openly Almodovar uses his fictional alter egos in his own films to explore the weaknesses of the various male directors he portrays: Pablo Quintero, Enrique Goded, Mateo Blanco and even Salvador Mayo are all self-absorbed, vain, manipulative, sometimes even ruthless.

All these avatars are essentially immoral egoists; perhaps a solid foundation of self-respect is all that remains when the collective counterculture, originally founded on mutual self-reliance, disappears from the shelves, and the works of art created by its newest apostles become commodities that can be easily purchased or sold. According to Almodóvar, they all suffer from the cruelest “law of desire”: the unrequited desire for unconditional love. As a result, many of them suffer from guilt, anxiety and a crippling fear of abandonment.

At the same time, these fictional filmmakers are all serious characters who are desperately trying to understand and embody what the philosopher Bernard Williams once called “categorical desire,” which in each example turns out to be the desire to be true to oneself, to be “authentic,” passionately pursuing one’s calling, which may express the categorical desire to find out what a person is really like and what he really thinks, and to show in unique works of art what he could become; and because they are directors, they all do this by re-examining their beliefs in behavior and in the scenarios they choose to create, asking the audience to judge the success or failure of these characters.

If one is an adherent of postmodernism as a supposedly transgressive and inherently subversive theoretical position, or, for that matter, if one believes that great art should engage directly with the world and somehow contribute to the betterment of society, then Almodovar's lifelong preoccupation with authenticity may seem retrograde, perhaps even a betrayal to the world, as some scholars, such as Smith, found in his early films.

Indeed, anyone who turns to his films for edification and inspiration will likely be disappointed. His storytelling style is disturbing. He slyly unbalances even when he entertains.

Likewise, if one subscribes to the tenets of philosophy, understood as a form of systematic, rational inquiry, then one will also be unimpressed by the assertion that Almodóvar is a philosophical director. Intuitively, the creator long ago aligned himself with thinkers who were willing to use art, literature, autobiography, hagiography, and the open-ended essay form to dramatize moral dilemmas that often prove intractable: a tradition as old as philosophy itself, and it includes the fictional dialogues of Plato and Cicero, the moral letters and plays of Seneca, the confessions of Augustine, the essays of Montaigne, the multimedia Rousseau's production of his opera, his novel and his Walks of a Lonely Dreamer. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Georges Bataille and Sartre all belong to this tradition. And so, by his own description, does Pedro Almodóvar.

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He is not the first in the history of feature cinema to consciously raise and explore philosophical issues in his films. (I leave aside the case of filmmakers such as Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Max Ophüls—creators who may have raised such questions tacitly, without explicit intent.)

For example, Eric Rohmer specifically explored moral issues in many of his films. His landmark 1969 feature film A Night at Maud's, partly composed of long conversations inspired by the memoirs of Blaise Pascal, expresses the conflicting feelings of its characters, paying close attention to small gestures and how the characters interact in everyday settings.

In Decalogue, a series of ten films, each an hour long, made for Polish television in 1989, Krzysztof Kieślowski used the Ten Commandments to force his characters to ponder one or more moral dilemmas as they try to make ends meet living in a brutalist housing estate in modern Poland - and each of these films can be interpreted in part as a philosophical essay, a meditation on meaning love or the commandment “thou shalt not kill.”

Ingmar Bergman, the acknowledged predecessor of Almodóvar, in his high modernist melodramas was concerned with the difficulties faced by a person without faith in God, trying to understand how to act and what he can hope for if God is hidden or silent. Almodovar is not always grimly serious: he is a master of playful comedy and no less adept at dark humor, as he should be, since many of his films show us characters who are desperately unlucky in love. (Bergman, on the other hand, failed miserably every time he tried his hand at comedy.)

Yet by the time Flower of My Secret finished filming in 1995, Almodóvar had developed all the skills needed to create philosophical film essays as rich and open-ended as those of Rohmer, Kieślowski and Bergman, but usually containing compelling plots that allowed him to explore various abstract predicaments in paradoxical and unconvincing ways.

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Take Talk to Her, for example, one of his greatest achievements as a filmmaker and, in fact, a parable of sorts. A conscientious hospital nurse has sex with a comatose dancer, an act motivated by genuine love that nevertheless lands him in prison for rape, although this sexual assault results in an apparent miracle: the ballerina ends up pregnant and, after a miscarriage, makes a full recovery and returns to ballet; while the man who loves her ends up in prison alone and commits suicide.

So what should we think? (Can sexual abuse in any way be considered part of a divine plan?)

As another example, in The Skin I Live In we, the audience, are engaged in a process of voyeurism, as is the film's director, even as we are encouraged to speculate—as in a conventional horror film—about what is inherent in the personality of an ordinary young man who is kidnapped and held captive by the latter-day Dr. Frankenstein, subjecting him to extreme forms of torture.

Is this unfortunate, pathetic creature really the same person? This is a version of the famous "Ship of Theseus" thought experiment, a paradox preserved by Plutarch in his Comparative Lives:

“The thirty-oared ship on which Theseus and the teenagers set sail and returned safely, the Athenians preserved until the time of Demetrius of Phalerus, removing old boards and beams as they deteriorated, and putting in their place other, strong ones, so that this ship even became a reference example in the reasoning of philosophers defining the concept of growth: some argued that it remains itself, others - that it has become a new object.”

There is also the film “Parallel Mothers” - the title makes you think! — in which a heroine with an aggressive desire for public truth (about those missing in action during the Spanish Civil War) must decide whether she is ready to tell the painful truth about her personal life.

If she was honest with her friend, she would lose the child she raised as her own. And, she is reminded, if she and her colleagues insist on honesty about their country's past, they risk reopening old political wounds. Should we always tell the truth?

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An original product of the Madrid Movida counterculture and the surrealist movement in France during the interwar period, Almodóvar does not hesitate to follow his wildest associations and fantasies when writing the film's script.

But once the script is ready, he is subject to the discipline of working within a limited budget and on time with a talented team of volunteer assistants tasked with helping the director bring his script to life, working not only with outstanding actors such as Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz, but also with other talented people, such as the late José Salcedo, who edited many of Almodovar's films, graphic designers Anchon Gomez and Juan Gatti, with costume designers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, and with Alberto Iglesias, his exceptionally brilliant film composer.

This collaboration, almost always long-standing and reliable, makes it clear that when working with Almodóvar, they are free to follow their creative muse, but at the same time, it is the director who ultimately decides what his film needs.

In this way - namely through a combination of aesthetics and production, as well as inspiring reflection - by telling stories that fascinate and entertain, Almodóvar may have become the world's first "whole" auteur: a filmmaker who controls every aspect of his films, from the script to the production design, the tailoring of the costumes, the use of props, locations, sound design, soundtrack and posters to promote the film. At every stage of writing, filming and post-production, he asks his colleagues to enhance the emotions of the characters on screen. Even the smallest detail is too significant for him not to be considered.

The result is expressionist art of the highest order and a radically personal approach to creating narrative films that are philosophical essays, as well as the most fascinating kind of Gesamtkunstwerk - a single work of art .