Diálogos entre literatura e cinema: a construção do feminino em Pedro Almodóvar

Abstract

Cinema is established as a prominent art form, warranting attention from literary studies in the relationship between the literary and the cinematographic. Increasingly, their constitutive elements are interconnected, whether in plot or style. From the perspective of the intersection between these two languages, this study focuses on three literary works: Carne Viva (1987), Tarântula (1984), and A Voz Humana (1930), which inspired Carne Trêmula (1997), A Pele Que Habito (2011), and A Voz Humana (2020), respectively, films by Pedro Almodóvar Caballero. The artistic career of this Spanish filmmaker is characterized by representations of desire, femininity and her connection to the body depicted in a unique way. This work proposes to analyze the female literary characters adapted for cinema, describing the construction of the female image and its artistic representation in a new interpretation by a filmmaker whose themes and style are already established in the history of cinema. This study will examine the representation of women in contemporary cinema and, specifically, in Almodóvar's cinema, focusing mainly on the film adaptations of the aforementioned literary works. The theoretical argument is based on the reading of Roman Jakobson (1975), Julio Plaza (2003), Charles Sanders Peirce (1974; 1977), Linda Hutcheon (2013) and Robert Stam (2006). The elements guiding the transformation of the female figure from the literary to the cinematographic plane and the director's relationship with aesthetics will be addressed. The study also explores the posters of the mentioned films. During this study, these posters were analyzed according to visual parameters established by the theoretical basis, confirming the relationship that exists in the visual creative process. In the study of the female characters adapted by the director, the treatment of the body and various sexualities (female, male, trans), the filmmaker’s stylistic traits in transferring literary female characters to the seventh art, and the impact of the cinema on the adaptation of these works will be described, analyzing both similarities and differences in the construction of the female image in the mentioned films.