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.

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.

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