Carla Marcantonio: New Angles on Film

Broken Embraces, the latest film from acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, offers a wealth of possibilities for critical analysis.

by Art Taylor

Carla Marcantonio: New Angles on Film

Broken Embraces, the latest film from acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, offers a wealth of possibilities for critical analysis. Interweaving several stories, it’s a study in narrative structure. Drawing on film noir, it provides a twist on a classic genre. And one central subject of the film is filmmaking itself: The narrator is a famous director, remembering his love affair with the leading lady of an earlier film (Girls and Suitcases), a relationship that caught on videotape as part of a “making of” documentary —ultimately a film about a film within a film. Another twist: That filmmaker/narrator has been blinded by an auto accident — perhaps a metaphorical statement?

“From a critical perspective, it’s very self-reflexive about the process of making movies,” says assistant professor Carla Marcantonio, whose dissertation studied Almodóvar’s work and who’s been teaching film studies at Mason since 2007. “The main character is a stand-in for Almodóvar himself, and the film is partly a meditation on what it would be like for the director who depends on the visual to lose his eyesight.”

 But while Marcantonio’s scholarship has delved deeply into the director’s career, another opportunity — outside the classroom — has not only yielded unique insider perspectives on his creative process but also made her a part of that process herself.

In 2002, while still a graduate student at New York University. Marcantonio served as an interpreter at the New York Film Festival for one of the actors in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her. For his next two films, Bad Education and Volver, she assisted the director himself during press interviews and audience q&a’s. And with Broken Embraces, those duties were further augmented, with Marcantonio translating an early version of the script for U.S. distributors.

“I get to hear all the back stories about how he comes up with ideas, how much time he spends writing, how he puts it all together,” she explains. “What I’ve discovered is that how we’re taught to analyze the finished product often has nothing to do with the creative process. When you watch Broken Embraces, the first thing you might say is that it aspires toward film noir, but when Almodóvar talks about the origins of the film, it has nothing to do with genre. He said it was inspired in part by a photograph he took 10 years ago of a beach at Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands. He was vacationing after the death of his mother, and here’s a beach with all this black sand, and later that day, when he had the photos developed, he saw that there was a couple embracing on the beach. What was the story behind that couple? He thought about this for years. Then in 2006, he was suffering migraines that forced him to be in the dark, without light, not ever in front of his computer. To pass the time, he started telling himself stories. One of them was about a blind director. And then a third strand: He’d always wanted to make a ‘making of’ movie, one where that’s all that the audience would know about an action movie being made. All of that comes together here, but analyzing only the finished film, you’d lose everything about the origins of this story.”

Translating the script offered even more glimpses into a creative journey that often spans eight to ten years, with Almodóvar drafting scripts numerous times before choosing the actors, and then reworking further to incorporate each actor’s persona into his or her character.

“The script that I translated was the one just before the actors were brought in,” Marcantonio explains. “He’s rewriting constantly, so a couple of times I got an email from his assistant telling me, ‘Stop! He’s made changes.’ It was ultimately a six-week process for me, and then he still revised it another five times. Part of the fun of watching the film the first time was to discover which scenes never made it into the final film and how things were moved around or rewritten.”

Marcantonio’s most recent trips to the New York Film Festival put her in the limelight — she’s onstage with Almodóvar and actress Penelope Cruz during a discussion broadcast on the New York Times website — and she recently appeared with the two of them on The Charlie Rose Show. She also got behind the scenes of a different project: an adaptation of the director’s early film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, into a musical at Lincoln Center. Marcantonio interpreted the meetings between Almodóvar and Tony Award-winning director Bartlett Sher, talking about how to adapt film to theater, what works in one medium and why it doesn’t work in another. The show is scheduled to premiere later this year. [Note that article comes out in 2010.]

“When you’re teaching, you’re always giving,” says Marcantonio. “But with all this, I feel like I’m a sponge, absorbing information. It’s work — a lot of work, taking the train back and forth to New York each week, juggling classes, scheduling make-up classes — but I’m learning so much it’s worth it."

Originally published in the Spring 2010 issue of Not Just Letters, the English Department's semi-annual newsletter.