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Abstract

This dissertation is a depth psychological analysis of the films of Pedro Almod贸var, with a particular focus on All About My Mother and Volver. The writer examines the stylistic, narrative, and thematic ties between these films and suggests that they represent a sustained meditation on the nature of loss, grief, memory, and desire, one whose primary affective and aesthetic tone is elegiac in nature. The study employs a hermeneutic approach grounded in the principles of depth psychology鈥攑sychoanalysis, analytic psychology, and the archetypal psychology of James Hillman鈥攖o elucidate Almod贸var鈥檚 poesis, or myth-making of mourning. The generativity of image and its relation to desire and memory in the cinema is a pervasive theme in depth psychological approaches to film; the medium lends itself to a kind of nostalgia in which those necessary losses, conscious and unconscious, so central to the development of the self, activate a search for origins, whether intrapsychic, interpersonal, or collective. The films in question were examined as 鈥渢exts鈥� to be read and interpreted; Almod贸var鈥檚 texts are heavily intertextual in nature. The researcher distinguished between film as text, cinema as 鈥渁pparatus鈥� (mechanical representation), film theory and criticism as 鈥渄iscourse,鈥� and cinema as 鈥渋nstitution or ritual.鈥� Relevant concepts from related arts disciplines (drama, fiction, visual art) were used to amplify new meanings generated by a depth psychological study of the texts.