Abstract
This chapter turns attention to the porosity of bodily boundaries in the films of Pedro Almodóvar. Considering the trope of the body in relation to the function of authorship in film studies, it takes the authorship of Almodóvar as a case in point. The chapter addresses both the representation of bodies in Almodóvar’s films, as gendered, transformable, vulnerable, permeable, lost, and resurrected, and the formation of Almodóvar’s corpus as a vulnerable body in itself. It brings out how Almodóvar’s invocation of bodily themes at the level of film structure effects a splitting and doubling of each individual film that contain stories within stories, identities within identities, and bodies within bodies. Such splitting and doubling also bring about a blurring of filmic boundaries, between an inside and outside of the film’s narrative structure. The author calls attention to a motion of self-differentiation within each individual film body on the level of structure, story, and character in which inside and outside are blurred and elliptical, dividing the work from within. This blurring and splitting applies not just to individual films, but also to the work as a whole, troubling its relation to the author and the boundaries between and within individual films and the full corpus of films.
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Notes
- 1.
The problem of “enunciation” in film theory is generally discussed in terms of the film “apparatus” rather than the author and thereby linked to an ideological critique. However, Kaja Silverman notes that even in theories of film’s ideological apparatus, the author “makes the occasional surreptitious return.” For Silverman, the author is inseparable from the film’s representations and constituted through them; Silverman’s author “would in fact be nothing outside cinema—an author ‘outside’ the text who would come into existence as a dreaming, desiring, self-affirming subject only through the inscription of an author ‘inside’ the text” (1988, 201, 202. Emphasis in original).
- 2.
Something like this noncoincidence of the self is expressed in embodiment theory, which often seeks to explain the role of consciousness in reversible terms. The self is produced in a state of internal/external awareness and experiences consciousness from a divided perspective. Thus, for Lisa Folkmarson Käll, “My very self-awareness is predicated on the fact that I never quite coincide with myself, but as one, embody two aspects in reversible relation, thereby continuously differentiating myself from myself” (2009, 115).
- 3.
In his essay, Freud explains that the perception of “uncanniness” is both an experiential moment and a moment of return (“heimlich/unheimlich”) to the mother’s body, a familiar inside that has also become alien, strange.
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Acknowledgments
This paper owes much to two sources. First, I would not have thought of writing it but for Jeffrey Whitman, an undergraduate at Northeastern University, with whom I spent a summer studying all of Almodóvar’s films. It was a pleasure to discuss the films with Jeff, who not only feels totally comfortable disagreeing with me, but who also, unlike his teacher, understands Spanish. I learned more than I could ever consciously acknowledge from his work. In addition, I wish to thank the Body/Embodiment Group at Northeastern and Uppsala Universities, for whose volume this paper was written. In particular the group’s leaders, Lisa Folkmarson Käll, Linda Blum, Ann Grenell, and Lihua Wang, have been excellent role models. The problems and flaws in this paper I acknowledge my own.
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Fleche, A. (2016). The Author’s Body: Almodóvar, Film Theory, and Embodiment. In: Käll, L. (eds) Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities. Crossroads of Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22494-7_8
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