The Art of Film #3: All About my Mother

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.