Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodovar

Reconceptualising Almodóvar’s films as theoretical and political resources, this innovative book 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.

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. Reconceptualising Almodóvar’s films as theoretical and political resources, this innovative book 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. With close readings of Almodóvar’s films from the 1990s and 2000s, including Bad Education and The Skin I Live In, Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla explores how Almodóvar’s cinema mourns and witnesses the traces of trauma, drawing on theoretical approaches from trauma studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, film studies and visual studies to suggest that his work proposes an ethical model based on our compassionate relations to others, and envisions a world co-inhabited by plurality and difference.