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HOME >PROGRAMMES > BRICOLAGE AND THE DIVAS: ALMODÓVAR MEETS HOLLYWOOD’S GOLDEN AGE
 
 
BRICOLAGE AND THE DIVAS: ALMODÓVAR MEETS HOLLYWOOD’S GOLDEN AGE FILM SELECTION
“This 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 naïve 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.” - La 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 française. 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 un-ironic, 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
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ALL ABOUT EVE
ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER
DUEL IN THE SUN
THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET
IN A LONELY PLACE
JOHNNY GUITAR
LABYRINTH OF PASSION
LAW OF DESIRE
MATADOR
RICH AND FAMOUS
WHO ARE YOU, POLLY MAGGOO?
WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
 
             
 
 
 
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