BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Unrecognizable bonds: bleeding kinship in Pedro Almodóvar and Gregg Araki

    Asibong, Andrew (2009) Unrecognizable bonds: bleeding kinship in Pedro Almodóvar and Gregg Araki. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 7 (3), pp. 185-196. ISSN 1474-2756.

    [img] Text (Refereed)
    Asibong_-_Bleeding_Kinship.pdf - Published Version of Record
    Restricted to Repository staff only

    Download (96kB) | Request a copy

    Abstract

    Up to the early 2000s, Pedro Almodóvar’s and Gregg Araki’s films, for all their colourful queerness, could be read as symptomatic of a quasi de rigueur trend in art-house cinema towards the gleeful deconstruction of the love story. But more recent work by the two auteurs suggests that each is increasingly interested in more demanding visions of how humans might achieve something like loving relations, visions based neither on cinema’s return to traditional narratives of romance nor on its brittle championing of post-modern desire, but rather on its dreaming of a shared survival of – and identification with – something like unrepresentable suffering. This article argues that the shift by Almodóvar and Araki into new cinematic representations of non-realist and unthinkable forms of love, beyond either singularizing romance or multiplicitous desire, is both ethically and politically crucial in an era of the increasingly easy leftfield posture of post-ideological disillusionment.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Almodóvar, Araki, desire, post-romance, aesthetics of trauma, ethics of relation
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Research Centres and Institutes: Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture (BIRMAC) (Closed), Aesthetics of Kinship and Community, Birkbeck Research in (BRAKC)
    Depositing User: Andrew Asibong
    Date Deposited: 03 Jan 2013 17:20
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:32
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/5435

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    1Download
    6 month trend
    332Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item Edit/View Item