How does a concern with trauma and memory offer a different and more profound way of engaging with the work of Pedro Almodóvar, one of the world's most critically acclaimed and commercially successful filmmakers? And what can Almodóvar's aesthetic practice offer ethically and politically to ‘post-traumatic’ cultures, both nationally and globally – given that his work has been called ‘apolitical’ or ‘ahistorical’ (Smith 2014: 2)? This book provides a critical and theoretical reformulation of a neglected aspect of Almodóvar's cinema: its engagement with the traumatic past, subjective and collective memory, and the ethical and political meanings that result from this engagement. I focus on close readings of Almodóvar's films from the 1990s and 2000s, Volver (2006), Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, 1999), La mala educación (Bad Education, 2004) and La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In, 2011), in order to explore how his cinema mourns and witnesses the traces of trauma and fragments of memory. This book pays attention to the toxic effects of these traces, as well as the transformative potential of encountering them in the present.

I begin with the aesthetic and psychic economy of the trace.3 As Georges Didi-Huberman's reflection in my epigraph shows, the trace establishes a productive tension between visibility and invisibility, between the intelligible and unintelligible. The trace stands at an ambivalent point. It is both silent and a remainder of that which cannot be signified. It points to the primal other, a pre- or post-symbolic Other, what Parveen Adams calls the other of language and representation (Adams 1991: 93).