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6 - Almodóvar on Television: Industry, Thematics, Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2023

Paul Julian Smith
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Industry

Almodóvar's first fifteen feature films are framed by references to television. In Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980) Carmen Maura's unlikely heiress Pepi sets herself up as an advertising producer. Her first project is a spot for knickers with a twist: they will absorb gas and urine or, when necessary, double as a dildo. In the final titles which bring La mala educación (Bad Education, 2004) to a provisional and unsatisfactory close, we read that the mercenary and murderous actor played by Gael García, known variously as Ignacio, Juan, and Angel through the course of the complex plot, will spend ten years as a movie star before “now work[ing] exclusively in TV series.” While Pepi gleefully incorporates parodies of pop or mass culture such as television into its defiantly heterogeneous filmic text, Education seems to posit television as a radical other to cinema, a fate for an actor (and perhaps a director) that is almost worse than death.

Television is the dark continent of Almodóvar's oeuvre. While references are constant in his films (Mark Allinson claims that in the first thirteen features there is only one in which characters fail to watch television [54]), there is almost no criticism that addresses this vital topic (Allinson himself is the only one to write at length on the medium). The neglect is no surprise. Spanish critics of film and indeed TV despise television, a position which Almodóvar would seem to share in Education; foreign critics lack familiarity with a notoriously domestic medium. What I argue in this last chapter, however, is that television, however repressed or disavowed, is indeed central to Almodóvar's work over the course of twenty-five years. Indeed his later “blue period,” which I have argued elsewhere resurrects the artistic distinction of “art cinema,” can be profitably re-read in the light of TV studies. After all, Almodóvar himself has acknowledged the ubiquity of television. In interview on the US release of Kika, his most savage critique of the medium, he is reported as saying:

It is an omnipresent eye in everyone's life. In every country, any place, there is a television. I don't think there is a day in the year in which we don't see an image in that square frame. So if there is an open window, then I thought that someone with a camera could be watching. (Willoquet-Maricondi 102–3)

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Chapter
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Television in Spain
From Franco to Almodóvar
, pp. 143 - 156
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2006

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