Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jeanne Silverthorne

SOURCE: "Onwards and Sideways: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar," in Artforum, Vol. XXVIII, No. 7, March, 1990, pp. 146-50.

In the following excerpt, Silverthorne states that, "Almodóvar's world is a soup of tenses. His films simultaneously lock us in the past; celebrate our having come through, and wait for us to be born."

… Almodóvar is very conscious of his cultural surround: a new Spain, only recently released from fascism. He has observed in interviews that the generations now taking over in the country are "unrelated" to earlier ones; however, although he is clearly presenting his vision of a polymorphously perverse post-Franco generation, it is not exactly the case that his characters "utterly break with the past," as he has claimed. Where precisely in time do Almodóvar's films take us? Back to the future? Forward to the past? His approach to history is adaptive, a kind of use-it-up-and-wear-it-out attitude that...
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