The Art of Film

The magnificent Pedro Almodóvar weaves melodrama, camp, a love of theatre and film, and exquisite human emotion into one of his most powerful, gorgeous, and masterful films. Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a loving single mother and hard-working nurse, has fashioned a comfortable life for herself and her teenage son, Estaban, an aspiring writer. After his sudden and tragic death, Manuela learns that Estaban’s final wish was to know his father, the man she abandoned when she was pregnant 18 years earlier. Returning to Barcelona in search of him, Manuela overcomes her grief and becomes an ersatz mother and caregiver to a colourful chosen family: a pregnant nun (Penélope Cruz), a transgender prostitute (Antonia San Juan), and two troubled actresses. A phenomenal masterwork of beauty, humour and compassion, Almodóvar‘s Oscar-winning film celebrated its 25^th anniversary last year.

All About My Mother represents a pivotal moment in the famous auteur’s developing oeuvre, what some critics have referred to as his “mature ‘blue period’” (as opposed to the earlier, more florid, ‘rose’ films—think Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown).  In addition to the distinct shift in visual palette (from fiery reds to cool blues), All About My Mother, unlike Almodovar’s earlier films, is characterised by a more sombre mood (befitting its elegiac theme) and a greater psychological complexity of its characters. Here, Almodovar moves firmly into the classic Hollywood genre of melodrama which he then, over the next two decades, refines into something unmistakably his own. 

Almodóvar’s psychological examination of grief and loss in All About My Mother has as its focus the thematic concerns of classic Hollywood melodrama: female solidarity; motherhood, family and domesticity; crisis, illness and accident; secrets, lies and chance encounters; theatricality, performativity and identity.  It is a ‘self-conscious’ film, calling attention to itself with its endless cinematic and theatrical intertexts and ‘retroactive’ serial bonds with earlier films, reminding us of our role as active spectators.

Our study will be a closer examination of Almodovar’s use of the melodrama as a vehicle for his persistent concerns: art, performativity, theatricality, gender, sexuality, identity, history, memory (and forgetting, a personal and collective desmemoria associated with attempts to suppress Spain’s Fascist past), and nurturing communal bonds vs. the sense of alienation attendant upon their rupture, often through forced urban migration.

Here are just a few of the themes and questions we will address together:

• Does Almodovar’s film still have the capacity to startle us today with its continued relevance and its initial prescience?
• How does the classic Hollywood genre of melodrama, a rich and potent source of visual and affective pleasure, actually function as a form of resistance against the very societal structures and values it would seem to honour?
• How does Almodovar understand his female characters, articulating an implied political position which privileges a humanist, feminine ethic of care?
• How does the melodramatic mise en scene (set design, costume, props, blocking of actors, lighting and framing) serve to illuminate unconscious dynamics for which the characters have no words?
• How does All About My Mother reflect an ‘elegiac consciousness’; as a highly stylised and formal rendering of grief, in what ways does Almodovar appropriate the tropes of the poetic literary elegy for his own purposes?

JOINING DETAILS:

• The Art of Film #3: Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1999)
• Two 2.5 hour sessions on Zoom led by John Allemand
• Sundays, 1 and 8 June 2025, 4.00—6.30 pm BST
• 2024 marked the 25^th anniversary of All About My Mother (1999): Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film (2000), BAFTA Award for Best Director and Best Foreign Film (2000) and Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director.
• £125.00 for five hour study over two sessions, to include background notes and resources (N.B. participants in this study will be limited to twelve).
• We will show selected clips from the film during the study sessions, but participants are also asked to watch the film closely in advance (available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV and the Criterion Channel).
• To share information about this study please use the link here.

To mark 100 years since the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in 1925, we invite you to join us at the fascinating Cinema Museum London (which is not regularly open and is worth a visit in itself) for a special showing of The Hours on 13 June, the date in 2023 when Mrs Dalloway embarked on her walk through the streets of London.

The centenary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway has given us a perfect opportunity to approach the innovative and multi-layered text of this ground-breaking book with new vigour. As part of our celebration of the anniversary we will show The Hours, the 2002 film based on Michael Cunningham’s acclaimed novel. Adapted by David Hare and with a stellar cast including Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore, the film portrays the lives of three women, all facing heart-breaking realities at different times, their different stories bound into a whole by the novel Mrs Dalloway.

The evening will begin at 7.00pm with a presentation about the film and its relationship to by novel by LitSalon founding director Toby Brothers and fellow LitSalon facilitator, Woolf scholar Karina Jakubowicz. Toby and Karina are particularly interested in examining the shifts between Woolf’s original idea for Mrs Dalloway and how this vision has been reconsidered across time and in different genres. Aspects that may have seemed muted in Woolf’s original construction – perhaps most notably the expression of female desire – become more vivid in later interpretations. What are the risks of this kind of re-writing? What are the possibilities?

There will be opportunities for questions from the audience before a short intermission (refreshments available) and the film will be shown from 8.00pm. We expect the event to finish at around 10.00pm.

The Cinema Museum is located in Kennington, an easy walk or bus ride from Kennington or Elephant and Castle tube stations.

EVENT DETAILS:

• Presentation and film, Friday 13 June 2025, 7.00-10.00pm (doors open at 6.30pm)
• The Cinema Museum, 2 Dugard Way (off Renfrew Road), London SE11 4TH
• Tickets bookable in advance at £15.00 each (plus £0.95 booking fee) using the Cinema Museum’s booking system here.

‘When shall we three meet again?’ Joel Coen’s visually arresting adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth opens, perhaps ironically, on sound and text in an otherwise black void. After the fleeting appearance of the single word, ‘WHEN’, audiences are encompassed in darkness, cut through by Kathryn Hunter’s smoke-shattered delivery of the witches’ famous line.

Audiences are drawn from this blackness into a noirish tale of blood and betrayal. Reinvented by Coen’s sharp vision, the terrifying Macbeth (Denzel Washington) and his formidable wife (Frances McDormand) are caught in a claustrophobic nightmare that is literalized by the frames that confine them to their fate: shot in the squarish ‘Academy ratio’, the Macbeths are cornered by a destiny that at turns thrills and horrifies them.

In his first solo venture away from his brother Ethan (with whom he brought us such celebrated works as Fargo and No Country for Old Men), Joel Coen draws on Shakespeare’s verbal artistry and his predecessors’ masterful film interpretations to deliver a raw-boned and redefined version of this great tragedy, one that feels both familiar and strange.

Join John Allemand and Julie Sutherland in a 2-week study of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021). As with previous Art of Film studies (Thelma & Louse, The Graduate), Julie and John will show select clips for discussion during the study, as well as leading a conversation about the film more generally. This study is for cineastes and Shakespeare lovers alike. No previous knowledge of the play is necessary, but participants are requested to watch the film in advance of the study.

As a separate but complementary series, Julie Sutherland is offering a 7-week study of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, beginning shortly after the film study closes (Wednesdays, 13 August-24 September). Participants in the Art of Film’s The Tragedy of Macbeth may be interested in joining this related event.

Questions to consider:

• Does Coen’s visual ingenuity complement, challenge, or compromise Shakespeare’s verbal mastery?   
• Coen’s Macbeth was written and released during the height of COVID-19. (The play itself was potentially written during an outbreak of the plague.) How evident is the concept of pandemic in Coen’s adaptation?
• In Coen’s adaptation, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are in their sixties. What is the effect of presenting an unusually ageing Macbeth and Lady Macbeth?

JOINING DETAILS:

• A five-hour LitSalon ‘Art of Film’ study over two sessions
• Friday 1 August and 8 August 2025, 4.00-6.30pm (UK/BST) on Zoom
• Discussion led by Julie Sutherland and John Allemand
• Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is available on Apple TV as well as on some Amazon Prime subscriptions. Films can be rented on Apple TV without a subscription.
• £125 for a two-session, five-hour study, including background notes and resources (N.B. participants in this study will be limited to a maximum of 12).
• Please use this link to share details of the study.