Performance and Gender in Almodvars Bodies

cinema and culture: anthropological approaches to fictional film

Alicja Khatchikian
Dept. of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Vienna
2013

Table of contents
I. Introduction2
II. Popular Culture and Visual Culture2
III. Visual Anthropology and Feature Films3
3.1 What to Analyse and How to?
3.2 Methodology of Feature Film Analysis
3.3. The Scopes of Feature Film Analysis

IV. Performance and Performativity6

4.1 The Anthropology of Experience
4.2. Schechner and Turner: Performance and Liminality
4.3 Butler: Gender Performativity

V. Spanish Queer Cinema: The Case of Pedro Almodvar10

5.1 Pedro Almodvar and his characters: the cultural context
5.2. The Authentic Body in Todo Sobre Mi Madre (1999)
5.3 The Pathogenic Masculinity in Hable Con Ella (2003)

VI. Performing Bodies15

VII. Conclusions15
References and Other Sources.16

I. INTRODUCTION
Due to his iconic status as one of the most successful Spanish filmmaker at present, many theorists
and critics from a wide range of disciplines have researched and written on Pedro Almodvars work.
Besides their international fame and critical acclaim, however, the films of the Spanish director can also
be seen as providing an extremely interesting insight on the post-Franco Spanish socio-cultural
context. Particularly, among the variety of concerns that Almodvar cinematically engages with, this
paper aims to uncover and analyse the performance of gender in his characters, with a special regard
to two of his films - Everything About My Mother (1999) and Talk To Her (2003).
The paper starts with a brief inquiry into visual and popular culture (Fedorak 2009; Mirzoeff 1998),
highlighting the role and development of the visual within anthropology (Pink 2006), as well as
examining the legitimacy of using feature films as ethnographic sources (Weakland 2003). The paper
then incorporates the study of gender performativity to the visual element, and goes on to set out its
main theoretical framework the highly influential work by Judith Butler on gender performativity
(1988; 1993; 1997) and the concept of cultural performance in Victor Turner (Graham 2008) and
Richard Schechner (1985; 1986; 2002). After outlying the core theoretical framework, the paper
continues to outline Pedro Almodvar films as one of the greatest example of the Spanish Queer
cinema, as well as his characters as iconic portraits of contemporary Spanish femininity and
masculinity. For this purpose, I will develop a content analysis that takes into account two peculiar
scenes from Everything About My Mother (Agrados monologue) and Talk To Her (Marco and Benignos
first meeting), among others, and combine them with the concepts of authentic body (Ballesteros
2009) and pathogenic masculinity (Allbritton 2013). Further, in order to deepen Almodvars
understanding of gender constructedness, I will also use some thoughts of the most recent and
remarkable theorists on his film work such as Marsha Kinder (1997; 2013) and Mark Allison (2001).

II. POPULAR CULTURE AND VISUAL CULTURE

Different schools of thought have engaged in defining the blurred lines that determine what popular
culture is. The two main approaches, however, seem to be either exclusionary or highly contextual:
on the one hand, mass culture theory provides a definition of high culture (e.g. opera, classical
theatre, fine art, and music) in contrast to low culture consequently, popular culture is a sort of
leftover; on the other hand, populist theory looks at popular culture as an escape from the
boredom of everyday life, whereby consumers, as entitled participants or audiences, choose or refuse
to engage with elements of popular culture, depending on their individual needs and desires (cf.
Fedorak 2009: 4).
The difficulty in defining what popular culture is seems to be broader and quite common among

scholars from cultural anthropology as well as from other academic fields: the depth of the subject
refers, in fact, to a wide range of aspects of our everyday life. Borrowing Shirley A. Fedoraks
definition, popular culture is the sum of performance, expression, and symbolism that both influences
and reflects human culture the culture of our everyday lives (Fedorak 2009: 3). Popular culture tells
about our idiosyncrasies, our values, beliefs, and patterns of behaviour; its strong potential for
communication (not to mention manipulation) and literacy, can generate political commentary and
activism, mirror changing social values and societal practices, resist mainstream hegemonies, and even
influence the way we understand the world around us (Fedorak 2009: 4). More basically, through its
metanarrative feature as narrative about everyday narratives, popular culture provides shared
experience, whereby people learn about other people (Fedorak 2009: 12).
In contemporary society, as Nicholas Mirzoeff maintains, the attention for the visual experience and
the predominance of visual forms of media, communication, and information is crucial; human
experience itself is more visual and visualized than ever beforethe visual experience of culture has
become everyday life (cf. Mirzoeff 1998: 3). Mirzoeffs understanding of visual culture as a tactic, rather
than a discipline, for studying the functions of a world addressed through pictures, images, and
visualizations (of things that are not in themselves visual), rather than texts and words, grasps, in his
words, the greater shift from the modern novel to the postmodern picture. However, visual culture
does not depend on pictures, yet on this modern tendency to picture or visualize existence (cf.
Mirzoeff 1998: 6). Therefore, visual culture is integral part (if not the essence, as Mirzoeff would
argue) of our everydayness, and thus undoubtedly constitutes a crucial aspect of our contemporary
popular culture.

III. VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND FEATURES FILMS

The great potential of visual-anthropologically produced or informed media has long since been
recognised, whereas visual anthropology associated it primarily with the practice of ethnographic
filmmaking (cf. Pink 2006). By the 1980s and into the 1990s, however, questioning concerns about
body, phenomenology and experience, ethnographic film finally emerged as a subjective and reflexive
genre (namely with the intense work of David MacDougall and Jean Rouch) and interrogated the
relationship of film to anthropological writing (Pink 2006: 12). However, it was not the challenge of
the visual that pushed the entire field of anthropology into crisis during the last decades of the 20th
century, as Pinks underlines, but rather a deeper reflection on the cornerstone of conventional
anthropological representationthe written text, and the limits of verbal presentations (cf. Pink 2006).
In trying to situate visual anthropology, Pink suggests that its role in a future public anthropology (an
anthropology accessible, and readable, by wider general-public audiences) would have greater

potential if developed as a form that combines images and words (cf. Pink 2006: 139). What she
underlines here is the necessity to consider visual anthropology in both its methodological and
theoretical contributions. Within this scope, there has been a significant (and, perhaps, a growing)
anthropological interest in the making of films and the studying of film records as cultural documents
(cf. Weakland 2003: 45). While the subjects of such films range greatly beyond the most conventional
anthropological concerns, the general orientation seems to be consistent to preserve and study, by
objective and careful systematic examination, visual and sound records of samples of actual
behaviour (Weakland 2003: 47). To this extent, it is becoming even more apparent how feature
films can be taken seriously as cultural products (cf. Weakland 2003: 45).
However, the analysis of feature films within the context of anthropology is more complicated than in
mere terms of technical or commercial considerations, or as inquiry into reception and interpretation
by general or target audiences, filmmakers, or critics, among others. In fact, as Weakland suggests, any
anthropological study of feature films should, in itself, be a kind of minority report in terms of its
filmic and anthropological contexts; such a report would start with an outline of the main lines of
interest in films and the contrasting nature of film study from an anthropological point of view (cf.
Weakland 2003: 46).
2.1 What to Analyse and How to?
The problem that anthropology encounters in engaging with the visual is, according to MacDougall,
historically related to another anthropological concern: what to do with the person, the sentient,
thinking being who belongs to a culture but, from the anthropologists point of view, can often
reconstitute only a small part of it (MacDougall 1997: 14).
As products of culture, feature films are cultural documents by definition (Weakland 2003: 46).
However, it is more helpful to determine what kind of cultural documents feature films present and
what kind of contribution them, and their analysis, can bring to the field of cultural anthropology. If we
assume that the usual aim of the making and studying of film within anthropology is to produce a
more visible and accurate examination of certain realities, of certain everyday narratives, it is easy to
see how anthropology looks at feature films as being fictional. And, even though they may portray
certain aspects of human behaviour in a documentary or factual way, this is not our main focus (cf.
Weakland 2003: 47). Rather, feature films can be seen as projecting images of human social patterns
and behaviour, and these actual images should be the first object of study. The potential of these
images lies in their capability to reflect cultural premises or patterns: they might throw light on certain
behaviour or influence the behaviour of the audience. It is up to the anthropologist to determine its
significances by investigating them in relation to the filmmakers, the audiences and other information

available about their subjects (cf. Weakland 2003: 47).

The importance of film content an approach to film analysis that, Weakland claims, has been largely
neglected or exclusively done in terms of aesthetical statements about their goodness, truth, or
beauty (cf. Weakland 2003: 48), should be central in the anthropological approach to feature films,
which should be, in fact, a sort of inquiry into the unknown, as well as a discovery of the films cultural
environment(s) and the possible interrelations among them. Hence, being the content of any film such
a rich and complex cultural product, its analysis implies a careful examination of the film itself (cf.
Weakland 2003: 49).
Particularly, whereas before relegated to the disciplines of psychology, medicine, linguistics, and
history, among others, concerns about emotions, time, body, senses, gender and individual identity
have been facing a mounting anthropological interest, and so prompt the necessity of finding a
language metaphorically and experientially close to them enough to explore and communicate their
understandings (cf. MacDougall 1997: 287). Rather than rejecting fictional forms, then, visual
anthropology would be more likely to adapt them, to reuse them, into new combinations (cf.
MacDougall 1997: 288). For this purpose, (postmodern) anthropological analysis concerns with what
is common and general more than specific. The analysis and description of feature film content should,
therefore, include what is shown, how it is shown and its overall structure, which may serve as basis
for any further inquiry (cf. Weakland 2003: 50).
Interestingly then, film analysis closely relates to the mainstream of traditional anthropological
concerns more than we may imagine: through the projection of structured images of human
behaviour, social interaction, and the nature of the world, feature fictional films seem to be
corresponding - in terms of cultural significance - to the stories, myths, rituals, and ceremonies in
primitive societies that anthropologists have long studied (Weakland 2003: 54). Therefore, we see
how the study of feature films and their content can correspond to a particular case of a more
general anthropological examination of cultural material.
2.2 Methodology of Feature Film Analysis
Insofar as we consider feature films content as part of cultural material, and thus object of
anthropological inquiry, when approaching an anthropological analysis of a film, one must combine a
direct, comprehensive and unbiased observation of the data with the adherence to certain basic
(scientific) principles in making and reflecting on such observations (cf. Weakland 2003: 55). Not far at
all from what is commonly known in social sciences as participant observation, the process should
include a deep examination of the film itself, extensive note taking, a review of what has been
observed and recorded and, finally, a repetition of the entire process. Particularly, special attention

should be paid to any content that appears curious or more difficult to understand, as this may offer
further interesting insights (cf. Weakland 2003: 56). The long-term engagement with peoples daily
lives that the traditional anthropological methodology insists upon gives scope to both deepen and
broaden the content that is being analysed: in this sense, an attempt to obtain a native view of film
content would mean to gain an understanding of how members of the same culture perceive it
through informant interviews or through the studying of reviews, for instance.
2.3 The Scopes of Feature Film Analysis
As obvious conclusion to the previous passages, the study of feature films can be very useful to the
field of anthropology as an insight into cultural patters and behaviours in several ways. Primarily, their
basic fictional nature represents an important interpretation of a segment of the human experience
that, as we have seen, is now visual and visualized more than ever before (cf. Mirzoeff 1998).
Furthermore, as collaborative products of many members of a culture (from the film crew members
to everyone involved though the diverse and several stages of the filmmaking), feature films are totally
considerable as cultural products and, thus, are likely to project certain cultural values. Even more,
since intended for wider audiences, such films are likely to produce culture(s) that vary in an
extraordinary range of subjects, specific social situations and themes.
Finally, feature films as cultural documents (cf. Weakland 2003) provide both visual and verbal material
at the same time, allowing for a deeper and comparative analysis (Weakland 2003: 60-1). Their
complex essence and depth of cultural information represent, therefore, a rich and useful source for
anthropological analysis, providing the anthropologist with regional material (as in the case of this
paper, Spain and Europe) or allowing for more comprehensive interpretation from a certain
theoretical point of view (such as the gendered body perspective, or the performativity of gender,
among other topics that this paper attempts to tackle).

IV. PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVITY

I would say that everything imaginable has been, or can be, experienced as actual by means of performance.
And that, as Turner said, it is by imagining by playing and performing that new actualities are brought into
existence. Which is to say, there is no fiction, only unrealized actuality. (Schechner 1986: 363)

The notions of performance and performativity are both key elements in the field of performance
studies as well as in that of anthropology. Performance studies itself synthesizes a wide range of
disciplines within the social sciences, feminist and gender studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory,
semiotics, area studies, media and popular culture theory, and cultural studies, among others (cf.

Schechner 2002), and originally drew its main theoretical groundings from them. Early work in
modern performance theory, in fact, mainly refers to strategies and concerns drawn from sociology
and anthropology, whereas linguistics provided some of the most important analytical tools and basic
concepts of its theoretical framework (cf. Carlson 2004). Particularly to this regard, Mikhail Bathkins
writings on carnival contributed to linguistic performance theory through his concept of
heteroglossia and his contextually oriented work on the utterance a strip of language that is
always individual and contextual in nature, and is formed through a speaker's relation to the otherness
(cf. Bathkin 1992). Further, J.L. Austins Speech Act theory identified a particular type of utterance as
performatives in speaking a performative, someone does not only make a statement but also
performs an action (see Austin 1962). Performativity, thus, cannot be exclusively analyzed in practices
that are traditionally understood as performative: postmodernism and its academic response, namely the
philosophy of poststructuralism (and the related deconstruction) all apply the performance principle
to every aspects of social life. Performativity is everywhere linked to the interdependence of text and
interpretation, action and reaction, subject and object (cf. Schechner 2002: 114), as performance isnt
in anything but always between (cf. Schechner 2002: 24).
4.1 The Anthropology of Experience
Within the broader academic shift that, between the 1980s and the 1990s, underlined concerns over
body, phenomenology and experience, the understanding of experience in anthropology elaborated
by Victor Turner and Edward M. Bruner, among others, broke with previous anthropological
paradigms, aiming to show how the emerging postmodern perspective actually worked in
ethnographic practice (cf. Bruner 1986: 9). As a founder of the anthropology of experience, Turner
draws (following Dilthey) the distinction between mere experience and an experience. Whereas
the former is received by consciousness, it is individual experience, temporal flow; the latter is the
intersubjective articulation of experience, which has a beginning and an ending, and thus becomes
transformed into an expression (Bruner 1986: 6). Importantly, as Bruner underlines, experience is not
used as equivalent to the more familiar concept of behavior which implies an outside observer
describing someone elses action and repetition of a standardized routine yet it refers to something
more personal and intrinsic, as it relates to an active self, to a human being that not only engages in
but also shape actions (Bruner 1986: 5) and is shaped by them.
The limits that this understanding of experience encounters are, on the one side, its tendency to be
self-referential (we can only experience our own life) and, on the other side, the dialogic and
dialectical relationship between experience and its expressions, which should be the very focus of the
anthropology of experience (cf. Bruner 1986: 7). As our understanding of people and of their

expressions is structured on the basis of our own experience and self-understanding, also expressions
structure experience in that dominant narratives of a historical era, important rituals and festivals, and
classic works of art define and illuminate inner experience (Bruner 1986: 6). However, in a life
history, the critical relationship between experience and expressions has also to face reality (what is
really out there, whatever that may be), so that life appears to be simultaneously as lived (reality), as
experienced (experience), and as told (expressions) (cf. Bruner 1986: 6).
4.2 Schechner and Turner: Performance and Liminality
Drawing from studies on rituals, initiation rites, shamanism, aesthetic dance and theatre, among others,
Richard Schechner and Victor Turner fruitfully collaborated and investigated on the way sociocultural
structures are produced or reproduced formed and performed (cf. Graham 2008:3).
Richard Schechner, founder of the New York Universitys distinguished Performance Studies
department, and, more importantly, one of the few who has bridged the gap between theory and
artistic practice, introduced a primary definition of performance as restored behavior, i.e. the
process of repetition and the continued awareness of some original behavior, however distant or
corrupted by myth or memory, which serves as a kind of grounding for restoration (Carlson
2004:47). In this sense, performance as restoration seems to refer more to what Bruner (1986) calls
behaviour, as it is living behaviour treated as a film director treats a strip of film. [] [It] can be
rearranged and reconstructed like a training routine (Schechner 1985: 35). However, though their
source or truth may be lost, forgot, or distorted by myth and tradition, these strips of behaviour
have a life of their own. In fact, the self contains multivocal significances the self can act in/as
another, as both individual and transindividual self (cf. Schechner 1985:35); it can act upon multiple
literacies people are increasingly body literate, aurally literate, visually literate, and so on (cf.
Schechner 2002: 4); and exist within three different states being as existence itself; doing as
the activity of all that exists; and showing doing as performing (cf. Schechner 2002: 22). The field of
performance studies, thus, would aim to explaining this showing doing.
Along a similar line, Turner looks at every performance as self-constituting instead of mere reflection
upon society: the multivocality of each symbol that appears in a performance means that one
object/action may stand for different ideas for different people.
More significantly, it was Victor Turner that made us realize that rites and rituals are creative they
do not simply reproduce a given social and symbolical order, but allow constructing something new.
Throughout his works, he extended and further developed the idea of Arnold van Gennep that
suggests that rituals, as for rites of passage, consist of three phases: separation, liminality, and
reaggregation. As John Mitchel explains: Separation involves the physical detachment of the

participant from normal life, and entry into a liminal, transcendent phase. Liminality [] involves a
prolonged period in which the participant is both literally and symbolically marginalized. Reaggregation
is when the participant returns to society (Mitchel 1996: 491). Liminality, the most important phase
of rites of passage for Turner (cf. Mitchel 1996: 491), is thus seen as a state of being in between: the
individual is separated from society and mentally and physically challenged by the presence of
ambiguous ideas, monstrous images, sacred symbols, ordeals, humiliations, esoteric and paradoxical
instructions, the emergence of symbolic types represented by maskers and clowns, gender reversals,
anonymity, and many other phenomena. [] [It] is a no-mans-land betwixt and between the
structural past and the structural future (Turner 1986: 41). In other words, rituals and rituals-like are
rooted in individuals and societies as a sort of fragmented memory that, in particular moments that
Turner calls liminal, resurge and renew into performance genres (cf. Graham 2008).
4.3 Butler: Gender Performativity
As a field, Richard Schechner looks at performance studies as sympathetic to the avant-garde, the
marginal, the offbeat, the minoritarian, the subversive, the twisted, the queer (Schechner 2002: 4).
The notion of performance, in fact, has been applied to a diverse range of fields and aspects of human
nature. In his introduction to film theory, Robert Stam suggests that, whereas class and ideology had
dominated analysis from the 1960s until the late 1970s, it began to disappear in favor of different set
of practices and concerns, such as those regarding race, gender, and sexuality. Much of the discussion,
he continuous, would so revolve around the feminist issues, the enforcement of gender studies and
the coming out of queer theory in the late 1980s (cf. Stam 2000: 170).
As one of the leading theorist in the field of feminism and queer theory, namely drawing from Austins
formulation of linguistic performatives and Michel Foucault understanding of power, Judith Butler seeks
to undermine the idea of gender as natural and constitutive of a persons essence through unveiling
gender as performative accomplishment (cf. Butler 1988: 520). A central concept of her theory, in fact,
is that gender is not merely a cultural construct but rather produced through repetitive performances
ritual repetition of stylized acts, an imitation or miming of the dominant conventions of gender (cf.
Butler 1988: 519). This relates to the idea that discourse creates subject positions for one self to
occupylinguistic structures construct the self. The structure or discourse of gender for Butler,
however, is bodily and nonverbal, and discontinuous rather than table and coherent. Gender is a
stylized repetition of acts [] which are internally discontinuous [] [so that] the appearance of
substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane
social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of

belief (Butler 1988: 520; italics in original). To say that gender, and gender reality, is performative is
then to argue that gender is real only to the extent that it is performed (Butler 1998: 527).
Biological sex is also a social construction gender displaces and absorbs sex, whereby gender is the
social significance that sex assumes within a given culture (cf. Butler 1993: xv).
Significantly, Judith Butler highlights the impossibility to reduce performativity to performance:
Performance as bounded act is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a
reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken
as the fabrication of the performers will or choice; further, what is performed works to conceal, if not
disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, un-performable (Butler 1993: 24; italics in original).
Existence thus becomes a sort of tacit form of performativity, a citational claim lived and believed at
the level of the body (Butler 1997:147).
Moreover, performativity of gender can be subversive and challenge the ideology of heterosexuality:
Drag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender
is itself produced and disputes heterosexualitys claim on naturalness and originality (Butler 1993: 85).
However, subversion through performance is not automatic or painless; indeed, Butler complains that
people have misread her book Gender Trouble (1990) towards an idea of commodification of gender,
and the understanding of taking on a gender as a kind of consumerism []. Performativity has to do
with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms (Butler 1992).

V. SPANISH QUEER CINEMA: THE CASE OF PEDRO ALMODVAR

As Chris Perriam underlines in the very introduction of his extensive work on Spanish Queer Cinema
(2013), 1998 was the year in which the Catalan government passed the first of a series of regional
government laws in Spain on civil union, which eventually passed into law in July 2005 under
Zapatero, marking a significant increase in visibility and intensity of discourses around LGBTQ
identities (cf. Perriam 2013: 1). Importantly, he underlines, [t]his sequence of surface events, with
profound social and personal implications, created a ripple effect in the politics of the everyday and in
the cultural expression and production of LGBTQ Spain (Perriam 2013: 1). Within this overall
context, the Spanish director Pedro Almodvar certainly represents a strong personality based-line
of contact with the LGBTQ past in Spain (Perriam 2013: 80).
5.1 Pedro Almodvar and his characters: the cultural context
Born in 1949 in Calzada de Calatrava, a rural small town of Ciudad Real, southwestern province of
Catile-La Mancha, Spain, Pedro Almodvar Caballero grew up as one of four children of a humble
working family. At the age of eight, the family moved to the Extremadura region, where he was

10

educated under Franciscan and Sicilian friars. In 1967, at the age of seventeen, he finally settled down
in Madrid, far from the small town that always made him feel "like an astronaut in the court of King
Arthur" as he "knew he was born to take on the big cities" (Almodvar in Kinder 1987: 36). Here, he
started working as administrative assistant at Telefnica, the Spanish national phone company. Later on,
he will refer to those years as his true education the contact with the Spanish lower middle class at
the start of the consumer era, their dramas and misfortune; a true source of inspiration for a future
storyteller. He soon became familiar with the underground Madrilenian scene, and engaged in a long
list of curious activities: he started writing for alternative newspapers and magazines (Star, Vibraciones,
and El Vbora), participated in Super eight film festivals with his early experimental comedies, acted
with the independent avant-garde theatre company Los Goliardos, led a punk-rock band called
Almodvar and McNamara, and created the character Patty Diphusa, an international porn star whose
serialized confessions appeared in the magazine La Luna, among others (cf. Allison 2001: 8). Hence,
despite the severe dictatorship, Madrid already smelt like freedom to the young director.
Significantly, the socio-historical and cultural context of Almodvar films is the fault line between the
Francoist Spain and the transition to democracy after Francos death in 1975 namely, homosexuality
was highly illegal under the dictatorship and censorship very severe. However, by the time of Franco's
death in 1975, Almodvar was already a central figure of Spanish underground movements: the
directors clear identification with Spains movida (the countercultural urban youth movement and its
explosion of pop culture which followed Francos death) only partly explain his iconic status, as Mark
Allison suggests. The nature of Spains transition to democracy a gradual process of constitutional
reform rather than a radical break with the past necessitated a cultural evolution to compensate for
the absence of a political one (Allison 2001: 3). In this sense, Almodvar was able to perform a
radical sex change on Spains national stereotype (Kinder 1997: 3 in Allison 2001: 5): taking distance
from the stereotypical machista man and passive woman of Spains reactionary past, Almodvars
main characters are namely strong females who frequently brutally demolish weak male characters (cf.
Allison 2001: 5).
In 1980, Almodvars first full-length feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montn [Pepi, Luci,
Bom and Other Girls on the Heap], and its three main female characters (Pepi, an independent
modern woman; Luci, a mousy, masochistic housewife; and Bom, a lesbian punk rock singer) evidently
embodied this outbreak of cultural freedom in the aftermath of Franco and mirrored the transition
from social and sexual repression that constructed Francos seamless iconography and monolithic
values, to a postmodern deconstruction of those values (Tseelon 2000: 263). However, Almodvar
not only engages with deconstruction and problematisation: through their emblematic irony and
paradoxical characters, his films seek to reformulate cultural and sexual values as well as rewriting the
social and moral logic of the past (cf. Tseelon 2000: 264) by uncovering and highlighting its

11

idiosyncrasies rather than simply denying it.

As Marsha Kinder notes, his movies have a curious way of resisting marginalization: never limiting
himself to a single protagonist, the Spanish directors characters are an ensemble of homosexual,
bisexual, transsexual, doper, punk, terrorist characters who refuse to be ghettoized into divisive
subcultures because they are figured as part of the new Spanish mentality a fast-paced revolt that
relentlessly pursues pleasure rather than power, and a post- modern erasure of all repressive
boundaries and taboos associated with Spain's medieval, fascist, and modernist heritage (Kinder
1987: 34). Accordingly, Almodvar subverts the dominant ideology by realigning the centre with the
marginal and by positioning the once traditionally central powers into marginalised places (cf. Tseelon
2000: 266). His films disavowal of the repressive past appropriate the language of the old order and
ironically turn it against itself in the name of this new Spanishness. Extremely central throughout all his
work, in fact, the family, Church, [and] the police the embodiments of traditional patriarchal order
are now the agents of ushering in new cultural desires (Tseelon 2000: 264).
5.2 The Authentic Body in Todo Sobre Mi Madre (1999)
All have thats real are my feelings and these pints of silicone. Agrado, All About my Mother (1999)

The constructedness and performativity of gender in the cinema of Pedro Almodvar recurs so
often as a theme, as varied representations, and even as an aspect of mise-en-scne, that it has
become a distinctive marker of the directors authorial signature (Arroyo 2000:260).
In Todo Sobre mi Madre [Everythig About my Mother] (1999), we follow a grieving mother, Manuela
(Cecilia Roth), through a physical and deeply emotional journey into her past, trying to reencounter
the transgendered father of her dead son. The story that unfolds, however, has little to do with her
personal account; Manuela, as biological woman and natural mother, rather embodies the critical
ideology of heterosexuality and serves as representative sample of what is commonly understood and
perceived as feminine. The true main subject of the film, in fact, is the state of being woman, of
embodying femininity. Ironically, two of the main female characters are transgender women: Lola
(Toni Cant) the father; and Agrado (Antonia San Juan) a transgender woman and prostitute.
Thusly, the idea of femininity and of gender as performance and performative is highly central in the
movie. Particularly, the character of Agrado seems to play the motif of authenticity and, most
importantly, to embody the movement of the self between behaviour and experience, experience
and expression (see Bruner 1986 and Schechner 1985 above).
Her famous monologue is a suggestive example of Almodvars vision of gender: It costs a lot to be
authentic, she says, commenting on the numerous surgeries she has undergone in order to become
the woman she is now, And one cant be stingy with these things, because you are more authentic

12

the more you resemble what youve dreamed of being (Almodvar 1999).

On a filmic level, the aggressive frontality and naked closeness of this shot, with Agrado delivering her
speech almost directly to the camera and with only her head and shoulders visible against the theatre
red curtain, communicate quite obviously the thematic importance of her speech, but also force us to
look upon a person who many might find repulsive or disgusting. Through her highly ironic description
of all the operations she has been going through to become a woman, one may concretely depict
what Butler means by saying that drag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative
structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexualitys claim on
naturalness and originality; but one should also deeply perceive how subversion through
performance can be painless (Butler 1993: 85). Being is in Almodvar active embodiment rather
than a passive form of identity: what we admire in his female characters is not their being women but
the way they perform their femininity. However, Agrados performance is undoubtedly more a
manifestation of Almodvars own position toward gender rather than a plausible account of
spectatorial identification (cf. Ballesteros 2009: 87).
5.3 The Pathogenic Masculinity in Hable con ella (2003)
Although his renowned dedication to women, main characters throughout his whole filmography, the
representation of constructedness of gender in Almodvar is not restricted to femininity. However,
whereas women are broadly represented and normally play strong roles, men are deeply and
intimately incomplete figures, beset with identity problems, often isolated, and commonly physically
and/or mentally absent fathers their masculinity is pathogenic (cf. Allbritton 2013).
In 2003, following the previous international success of All About My Mother (1999), Hable con Ella
[Talk to Her] explores the emotional bounding between two male characters: Marco (Dario
Grandinetti) Argentinean journalist and travel writer; and Benigno (Javier Cnara) a nurse.

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The narrative unfolds through continuous shift backwards and forwards in time, telling simultaneously
about two separate stories that increasingly become intertwined, though they never directly speak to
each other. Marco and Benigno first meet at the theatre: they are sitting next to each other among
the audience, both spectating Pina Bauschs stunning piece Caf Mller.
They dont know one another yet, but Benigno will remember Marcos tear-filled eyes when they
meet again in the hospital where he works, and where the women that they love, a bullfighter named
Lydia (Rosario Flores) and a dancer named Alicia (Leonor Watling), both lie in coma. Benigno
devoted caring for Alicia, however, hides a pathogenic masculinity which is common, with different
shapes and aspects, in almost all of Almodvar male characters. His obsession with Alicia will
eventually be consumed through sexual abuse, leaving the girl pregnant.

From the very opening scene, Talk To Her is a melodrama that explores the human very profound
state of loneliness and struggle for communication. Loneliness is something which all the characters in
the film have in common. Alicia and Lydia are lonely too. And Katerina, the ballet mistress. And
Alicias father, although its likely that after a while hell have an affair with the receptionist in his
consultancy. And the nurse [] secretly in love with her fellow worker Benigno. And the
housekeeper in Benignos building. [] And the bull is left alone in the hungering when Lydia is taken
to the infirmary, fatally injured. Loneliness, I guess, is another possible title for this film (Almodvar
2003). Through two beautiful artistic quotations from Pina Bausch (two experts from her
masterpieces Caf Mller, in the opening scene, and Masurca Fogo, at the end of the movie) the
director seems to display the ritualization of death and life, of mortality and fertility, of illness and
recovery, omnipresent aspects of Talk To Her. The pathogenic masculinity that marks Todo Sobre Mi
Madre (namely, through the sick body of Lola) is taken further by Benigno in Hable Con Ella to the
liminal space where communication with the brain-dead is not a phantasy but a necessity, where the

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trappings of everyday language become meaningless, and where gender and sexuality become fluid
(Allbritton 2013: 240).

VI. PERFORMING BODIES

The profound and intimate relationship between gender and body finds in Almodvars characters
and movies great expression. Bodies in Almodvar cinema seem to be silhouettes in continuous
movement, as if the director were constantly trying to capture their movements and their continuous
trans-formations more than firmly following a script (cf. Kinder 2013: 287). Almodovarian bodies
inscribe themselves within a continuous flow, an unceasing and continual liminal state of being in
between of being and being performed. Within this flow, the gestural and corporeal expressiveness
of his bodies complement the words in Almodvars films, as if bodies would communicate their most
interior and intimate identity. Significantly, Agrados experientially structured account of the mutability
of the body and its availability to (re)construction denaturalizes the terms on which identity and
identification normally rely (Ballesteros 2009: 87). Through death and loss, through trans-formation
and de-formation, in fact, the characters of Almodvar seek to recreate and shape themselves, in a
continuous search for their own identity. Redefining masculinity through the lens of death, argues
Allbritton (2013: 240) means that Almodvar can recast gender and sexuality with a fluidity that they
lack, in fantasy worlds that still have no correlative.

VII. CONCLUSIONS
Performance is indeed central aspect of Pedro Almodvar cinema that at once underscores and
outstrips the general performative condition of cinema itself, and more deeply highlights the
performativities of its characters essence. In fact, it is often trough performance that his characters
and especially his female ones affirm or contest their gender identities, whether they are
understood in terms of biological essence, social construction, patriarchal imposition, or camp
impersonation (Ballesteros 2009: 87). Nonetheless, Almodvar deconstruction of Spanish national
identity in the aftermath of Franco has ironically become a re-construction to the extent that his films
are now the most accessible (and most accessed) depiction of contemporary Spain on international
level. (cf. Allison 2001: 5). His adoption as Spanish national icon, as well as internationally acclaimed
director and auteur, in fact, reveals the greater capability of his bodies to talk a trans-national language
through the intensity of their movements and their embodied cultural statements.

15

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Internet Sources
ALMODVAR,

Pedro.

2003.

Talk

To

Her,

in:

Sony

Pictures

Classics

Release.

http://www.sonyclassics.com/talktoher/talktoher.pdf 25.10.2013, 21:10.

EVERYTHING ABOUT MY MOTHER:
https://www.courses.psu.edu/span/span497b_jxe7/agrado%20monologue.jpg 25.10.2013, 19:46.
IRVINE, Martin. 2004-2011. Introducing Visual Culture: Ways of Looking at All Things Visual. In:
http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/visualarts/intro-visualculture.html 21.10.2013, 19:34.
TALK TO HER: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/Vg5fApJzvko/UajJ7k2Dz5I/AAAAAAAASdU/r8GMLVB8GsM/s1600/JAVIERtth2.jpg 25.10.2013, 19:45.

Film Sources
ALMODVAR, Pedro. 2002. Talk to Her. DVD. Vienna, 112 min.
ALMODVAR, Pedro. Todo sobre mi madre. DVD. Vienna, 101 min.

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