Call For Papers, nº 31 - 2025: All about Almodóvar

This monograph from the Fotocinema Journal, led by the Research Group “GECA: Gender, Aesthetics and Audiovisual Culture” (www.ucm.es/geca) of the Complutense University of Madrid, will collect academic articles resulting from research that analyze and deepen in the cinema of Pedro Almodóvar, addressing the importance of his filmography in audiovisual studies and in contemporary Spanish cinema, focusing mainly on the evolution that his audiovisual creation has had in a period that will cover, when this monograph is published, more than 45 years of film production.

 

The importance of Almodóvar's work has only grown in recent years, especially on the international scene, with international awards, presidency at top-level film festivals around the world, awards, exhibitions and samples around the world, including in countries where his works are not officially shown, his films circulate.

 

Almodóvar's movies are works of international repercussion without abandoning either his roots or his own methods of production and direction, which has led him to reject international offers to direct a film (whether to direct a proposal by an international production company or with a more personal origin) and, in this way, be faithful to his own ways of doing and understanding his work as a director and storyteller. In this sense, it is worth highlighting the union between work and author (with a clear sense of “authorship”) and the desire to have control of all the aspects that operate in his audiovisual projects.

 

From an academic point of view, interest in Almodóvar's work has also grown throughout the world; just check the number of doctoral theses, scientific publications and conferences around the world where concern for Pedro Almodóvar's cinema is present, both in Spain and international abroad.

 

The topics that are usually addressed in academic approaches to Almodóvar work are very broad, from historiographical issues to aesthetic issues, from studies on his narrative or script writing, to film analysis, from issues of social representations to gender through cultural or politics problems, etc. And all this from all the methodologies that usually operate in film and audiovisual studies: textual, semiotic, narratological, sociological analysis, critical content analysis, cultural and gender studies, feminist, queer and all the long etcetera.

 

In this way, we invite, as an indication, but not exclusively, the sending of texts on the following issues:

 

• The Almodovarian aesthetic and its characteristics and keys
• Narratives and analysis of the different films, both from the point of view of script and film analysis
• Production issues and studies on the production company El Deseo
• Almodóvar as director
• Almodóvar as a storyteller and his relationship with literature
• Almodóvar's relationship with different arts and cultures
• The use of music in Almodóvar’s movies
• Policies of representation and construction of characters
• Representations of gender, women and feminism, men and masculinities, and LGBTIQ+ studies
• Almodóvar's cinema and age studies
• Almodovarian geographies
• Fashion and design in the Pedro Almodóvar universe