Creative madness and esthetic rigor in Pedro Almodóvar: the composition of the female character in Matador

• Grant number: 19/00368-4
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Effective date (Start): May 01, 2019
• Effective date (End): December 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Comparative Literature
• Principal researcher: Gabriela Kvacek Betella
• Grantee: Kennya Severiano de Sousa
• Home Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In Matador (Pedro Almodóvar, 1986), some author labels are well-known, among them the correspondence between one of the most controversial symbols of Spanish identity - the Tauromaquia - and the ritualistic "bloody spectacle" of death as a climax of sexual delight. In this research the intention is to reveal the construction of the relations between those marks in the fifth feature film of the Spanish director through the analysis of two fictional categories, the main female character and the plot that re-elaborates the myth of the fatal woman. It take into account some approximations with the literature of criminal fiction, in which characters and its realistic distinctions and traces of a metropolis literature with figures of a more uncultured field, which in the transposition for the cinematographic work characterized the so-called cinema Noir. Almodovar, who is strongly influenced by these fields, mobilizes them to revolve concepts and definitions that permeate society, especially in his post-Franco era and still marked by an exiguous identity, which the director incorporates through an eccentric audiovisual language and an overly insulting trait.