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Photography, postmemory and touch in Pedro Almodóvar's Madres paralelas
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Whittaker, Thomas (2023) Photography, postmemory and touch in Pedro Almodóvar's Madres paralelas. Screen, 64 (4). pp. 446-461. doi:10.1093/screen/hjad037 ISSN 0036-9543.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjad037
Abstract
Pedro Almodóvar’s recent melodrama Madres paralelas/Parallel Mothers is haunted by the touch of photography. While the theme of motherhood is central to much of its narrative, Spain’s unresolved legacy of historical memory also looms large in the film and is explored through its intermedial dialogue with photography. Produced and released in 2021, the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the film stars Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit as the two mothers to whom the title alludes. Not only is the character of Janis (played by Cruz) a photographer, the presence of family photographs is a crucial element of the mise-en-scene and drives the film’s narrative. Almodóvar’s most political work to date, Parallel Mothers is the first Spanish fiction film to make explicit reference to the thousands of unrecovered mass graves of Republican civilians killed during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Their memory is invoked through the film’s deployment of real-life photographs that drive the protagonist’s search for her great-grandfather’s remains. Almodóvar has commented that, when writing the screenplay, all of the documentation that he consulted about the war and the mass graves was photographic.1
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Subjects: | D History General and Old World > DP Spain and Portugal P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Motion Pictures |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > School of Modern Languages and Cultures | ||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Almodóvar, Pedro -- Criticism and interpretation, Madres paralelas, Motion picture producers and directors -- Drama, Historiography and photography -- Spain, Spain -- History -- Civil War, 1936-1939 -- Art and the war, Collective memory -- Spain | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Screen | ||||||
Publisher: | Oxford University Press | ||||||
ISSN: | 0036-9543 | ||||||
Official Date: | 21 December 2023 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 64 | ||||||
Number: | 4 | ||||||
Page Range: | pp. 446-461 | ||||||
DOI: | 10.1093/screen/hjad037 | ||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
Re-use Statement: | This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Screen following peer review. The version of record [insert complete citation information here] is available online at: xxxxxxx [insert URL and DOI of the article on the OUP website]. | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 17 October 2023 | ||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 12 February 2024 | ||||||
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