Almodóvar: Self-Portrait in Seven Films

If one day Almodóvar stops making films, the world will become poorer. This book offers a thorough analysis of seven of Pedro Almodóvar’s key films—works through which his character is revealed and through which one can feel the breath of postwar Spain, which shaped the future master.

In Almodóvar’s cinema, there are many characters who are at once similar to the director and yet not the same as him: they are his possible “selves,” reflections, and masks. Again and again he returns to his own past, bringing up memories of who he could have become—and who he didn’t. His films are intensely personal, but precisely for that reason they help the viewer understand themselves better: who we are now and who we are still capable of becoming.

The book provides a careful analysis of the Spanish director’s work:
– Why does the story of Spain itself read through the heroines of Return?
– Who in Bad Education presents different sides of Almodóvar’s personality?
– How did the director himself explain the success of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown?
– How did his native La Mancha shape the visual and semantic language of his films?
– Why does Almodóvar introduce his own alter egos into his films again and again, and what do these images say about contemporary society?

In Almodóvar. An Autoportrait in Seven Films, the American writer, journalist, and researcher James Miller draws on the director’s most confessional works and shows how, together, they form a complete and expressive self-portrait.