Pain and glory, autobiography, autofiction or audiovisual autobiographical fiction?

Abstract

Pain and Glory (2019) by Pedro Almodóvar is a self-referential work of fiction. Our objective is to establish which category it belongs to, especially from the three most frequent forms: autobiography, autofiction and autobiographical fiction. We start from the postulates of Philippe Lejuene and the theory of autofiction to carry out a filmic analysis, and we have also considered some texts by Almodóvar himself and interviews which, as paratexts, help us to understand what is personal in his films. We will also take into account The Law of Desire (1984) and Bad Education (2004) as two previous works with which Pain and Glory would form a trilogy. From The Law of Desire, where the empirical author appears on the scene, he will no longer have a presence in his works and the previous self-portraits will disappear, but he will maintain the representation of some experiences through delegated characters. In this first stage we find self-portraits and later we will see autobiographical moments and autofictions in which some of his characters adopt those experiences. The result of our study is that it transforms own, close and of others experiences into fictional narratives. The conclusions are that there is no autobiographical account, in some cases we find autofiction and, mainly, there is autobiographical fiction.