Week 6 focused on the existence of queer spaces. We watched the film All About My Mother by Pedro Almodóvar, and read the piece Queer Time and Place by Judith Halberstam. All About My Mother is a mellow dramatic film full of relationships never depicted before. It gives breath to the statement “Cinema makes queer spaces possible”. Which is what Halberstam discusses in Queer Time and Place, it’s a piece about director Almodovar and themes across his different films, but it focuses on All About My Mother.
We discussed the importance of repetition in All About My Mother, everything happens more than once, just not always in the same way. The repetition builds important motifs in the film, journeys or traveling being one of them. There are many journeys in this movie, physical between cities, symbolic in relationships, and journeys with gender and identity. Not all this traveling has an end point, continuity and liquifying previously clear boarders is central to this film. We are invited to create a space where the ideas of authenticity and a strong binary do not need to exist.
The name of the film implies its content will be all about someones mother, but the someone we assume the film will be told from the point of view of, dies in the beginning part of the film. For the rest of the film we must then ask, well whose mother is she? Manuela fills many maternal roles throughout the film, while still mourning her son, but she becomes so much more than just a mother. We are able to see many maternal, caring, relationships, without the presence of a mother and kin dynamic. In many ways, Manuela becomes everyone’s mother.
Queer Time and Place points out there are no male relationships in this film, and there is no depiction of male desire. This is the reason I enjoyed this film so thoroughly. The female characters, and therefore the audience vicariously, got to explore their identities without the presence of male desire, a privilege real life women barely get to experience–if ever. Especially in media, the male gaze is so present, for the majority of films it was designated as the point of view films should be designed for. Women are consistently objectified and sexualized. For trans women and drag queens, they are traditionally only allowed to exist as sex objects, or objects to mock or awe at, like circus performers. Seeing their identities treated with respect, and not something up for debate, is an incredible and liberating site to see. The liquefaction and destruction of solid boarders and definitions of both identities and relationships in this movie is a rare but important modern presentation. This film allowed women to exist not as love interests or mothers, but as whole people.
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