Pedro Almodovar ...winner of a BAFTA for Best Director, 2000 All About My Mother ...Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, 2000. The huge international success of his latest feature, All About my Mother, has finally granted Pedro Almodovar the recognition he deserves, as the most artistically ambitious and commercially consistent film-maker in Europe. Frequently comic, always visually glorious, his films range from the screwball comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown to the classically austere Live Flesh. And, while questions of gender, nationality and sexuality are always Almodovar's concern, new subjects have been addressed in his more recent work: the corrosive effects of a deregulated media, the transition from dictatorship and, in All About my Mother, uncompromising explorations of the process of mourning. This new edition includes four additional chapters and new illustrations. The only study of its kind in English, it argues that beneath Almodovar's genius for comedy and visual pleasure lies a film-maker who deserves to be taken with utmost seriousness.

Author Biography

Paul Julian Smith is Professor of Spanish and Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Cambridge University. His previous books include Vision Machines: Cinema, Literature and Sexuality in Spain and Cuba, 1983-1993 and The Moderns: Time, Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture