SPAN 561 The Cinematic Pluriverse of Pedro Almodóvar

This seminar will examine the cinematic imagination of Spain's most internationally celebrated filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar. Topics to be considered will include Almodóvar's lensing of gender politics, sexuality, multiculturalism, and national identity in post-dictatorial Spain; his nimble negotiation of the local and the global; his taste for cinephilic self-referentiality and hybridity of genre; and a distinctive tendency toward thematic idiosyncrasy all of which are signature features of his postmodern 'brand.' Significant attention will be devoted to approaches and trends within the vast corpus of scholarly criticism dealing with the filmmaker's oeuvre, and our engagement with film theory will arise organically out of the references from these texts. Some basic tools, techniques, and language of film analysis will be considered, as will a general understanding of field-specific norms of film studies as practiced in North American and U.K. Hispanism.