ABSTRACT

Almodóvar’s shorts and personal displays, cheerfully celebrated by the audience, anticipated the blissfulness of his feature-length films, which may be seen as the expression of a postmodern carnival or Baroque saturation framed by Spanish, Latin American, and North American popular culture. Hence, from Pepi, Lucy, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980) to The Flower of My Secret (1995), the blend of romantic music such as the Castellan cuplé, the Caribbean bolero, and the Mexican ranchera alludes to

Almodóvar’s celebration of sentimentality. On the other hand, the recycling of Hollywood films from the 1940s and 1950s brings to his movies the Spanish nostalgia for the MGM and Twentieth-Century Fox productions that enlivened, with the glowing red lips of their stars, the darkness of Franco’s dictatorship.