Review Questions for The Flower of my Secret.
 

Read the "Notes" and the "Interview with the Director" from the official SONY web site.

I. Andrew Ross has written in No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular Culture, “the camp effect is created...when the products of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to dominate cultural meaning, become available, in the present, for redefinition acording to contemporary codes of taste” (139).
Sontag Sontag wrote in Against Interpretation, “the experiences of camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement” (291)
How can we read Almodóvar’s film according to these conceptualizations of “camp”?

II. How are race and class intertwined in the film? How do they affect the interactions of the characters?

III. How is the question of  “crisis” dramatized in the film?  What cinematographic techniques does the film use to underline it? What different forms of crisis? Personal crisis? Artistic crisis? Socio-economic crisis? Political crisis? Crisis of representation? How are they inter-related in the film? How are they resolved?

IV. Examine the construction of “gender” and “genre” in the film. What parallels are drawn in the film? Are there any challenges to the cultural expectations that have traditionally constructed them?

V. What role does the cultural location play in this film ?  Examine the dualities of city center/suburbs, city life/rural life, private/public space, and the location of cultural “roots”.  How does the mise-en-scene reflect this problematic?

VI. How does the film problematize the representation of reality, the concept of authorsip, cultural production and the mass media, High/Low culture?

VII. Examine the use of color in respect to race, cultural milieu, gender and genre.