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| Frida's father |
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| Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera |
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| Detroit Institute of Art |
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| Man at the Crossroads |
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| Frida with Leon Trotsky, 1937 |
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| Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera |
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| Frida with André Breton |
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| Director/editor Carla Gutiérrez |
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| Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero |
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| Frida Kahlo House, Mexico City |
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| Diego Rivera portrait of Frida Kahlo, 1939 |
FRIDA B USA (87 mi)
2024 d: Carla Gutiérrez
I am not afraid of
death. Even so, I must face the bitter
fact that having many lives would still not be enough for me to paint
everything I want. —Frida
Kahlo
An experimental documentary on Mexican artist Frida Kahlo,
using cinema to reinterpret her paintings through new forms and juxtapositions,
employing montage and visual intervention to blur the line between Frida’s
inner world and her painted self-portraits, using considerable archival footage
that only begins to describe the aesthetic.
What’s surprising about this documentary is how the narration is taken
from Frida’s own personal writings in journals, letters, essays, and
interviews, told through her own words for the very first time, read in the
first-person by Mexican actress Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero, and then
realized mostly using a surrealistic style of animation, which is not something
you see in documentaries, and while it’s unconventional, it doesn’t exactly
work either, but it is a novel approach.
Curiously, Frida Kahlo is probably more popular today than when she was
alive, heavily commercialized like living legend Ché Guevara, yet what she’s most
remembered for is not her art, or politics, but what she represents, her fiery
attitude, her courage and fearlessness, her refusal to be compromised by money
or power, becoming a true force for liberation.
Overshadowing her radical politics, she’s someone who believed in herself
when no one else did, where she lived her life as a true and authentic artist
who was openly bisexual, as her outlook on life was reflected in her paintings,
which revealed a flood of color and emotions.
Peruvian-American Gutiérrez received a master’s degree in documentary
filmmaking from Stanford University, and has been a creative advisor for the
Sundance Edit Lab. Drawing on her
extensive experience as an editor, the director and editor premiered her first
feature film at the Sundance Festival of 2024 where it won the prestigious
Jonathan Oppenheim Award for Best Editing.
There are no known recordings of Frida Kahlo’s voice, so the filmmaker
uses her paintings as a guide, breathing new life into her art as she reshapes
them through brand new digitalized animation sequences created by Sofía Inés
Cázares and Renata Galindo, adding her own artistic touches, like bits of
colorization to monochrome archival footage, which may go a bit too far, yet it
firmly anchors the film within the Mexican artistic tradition to which Frida
was so deeply committed. In meticulously
executed paintings, Frida portrayed herself again and again, “I paint myself
because I am what I know best,” simultaneously exploring, questioning, and
staging her self and identity, carefully crafting a flamboyant Mexican persona,
wearing brightly colored, traditional Tehuana dresses and pre-Columbian jewelry
in a performative display of her identity.
The captivating acoustic music with attention to folk roots comes from
Mexican musician and composer Victor Hernández Stumpfhauser, seen here working
with his wife in the studio, "Casa" | FRIDA |
Víctor Hernández Stumpfhauser
YouTube (1:25).
There have been more than a dozen films made about the life
of Frida Kahlo, yet despite this unusually immersive take into her subjective mindset,
this film doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of an artist with such a
complex legacy. Mostly told in
chronological order, Frida’s early life reflects the influence of her German
émigré father, a professional photographer who allowed his daughter to help out
in his studio, where she learned how to use and maintain a camera, while also
developing a sharp artistic eye by helping him retouch and color
photographs. However, the fact that he
was an atheist in a strongly Catholic country had a profound effect on his
daughter, as it taught her to stand up for her own beliefs, even if they are
unpopular. Because her mother was an
indigenous mestiza Mexican woman (Spanish and Purépecha), Frida identified
strongly as mestiza and incorporated indigenous traditions and themes into her
artistic identity. Frida was a sickly
child who contracted polio at the age of six, which caused her to be bedridden
for nine months, leaving her with one leg shorter than the other and a
noticeable limp afterwards. Encouraged
by her father into sports and more physical activities to help with her
recovery, Frida suffered the most catastrophic event of her lifetime when a bus
she was riding on collided with a streetcar, causing it to overturn, leaving
her impaled by a steel handrail which punctured her hip, causing fractures in
her spine and pelvis, which created lasting damage to her spine, along with
eleven fractures in her right leg, spending more than a year in bed, leaving
her with a tremendous amount of chronic pain that lasted her entire life,
undergoing more than 30 operations in her lifetime. Due to her spinal problems, she wore 28
separate supportive corsets, varying from steel and leather to plaster. It was during her long bedridden recovery at
home that she discovered painting, using it as a catharsis for the trauma she
suffered, acknowledging “I paint because I need to,” transforming her own lived
experience into a visual language of loss and painful artistic discovery,
perhaps most similar to the magical realism of Henri Rousseau, a French
post-impressionist painter in the naïve or folk primitive style. If anyone ever transcended human suffering
into creative art it would be Frida Kahlo, who epitomizes that triumphant
spirit to overcome challenges. A child
of the Zapata Mexican Revolution when a Mexican workers revolt
overthrew the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship in 1911, Frida was a lifelong Marxist
advocating for workers’ rights, claiming “I feel the pain of the oppressed. I feel the need to fight for them. That’s why, as soon as they allowed me to
walk after the accident, I joined the Communist Party.”
In her early teens, Frida was the only woman member of a social
group called Las Cachuchas, subverting the rigid dress code of the period,
where she dressed in a decidedly masculine style. Frida first met famed Mexican muralist Diego
Rivera when he was painting a giant wall-sized mural at her high school,
reconnecting again six years later when she wanted an honest opinion about her
art, which was mostly a series of self-portraits. Rivera was enthusiastic about what he saw,
encouraging her to continue, inspired by the originality and personal aspect of
her work, indicating “Her canvases revealed an unusual expressive energy,”
while she was enamored with his artistry as well, entering into a relationship,
though he was twenty years older, both sharing a Marxist vision for a better
society, quickly getting married, despite his reputation as a serial womanizer. Both seemed willing to put up with noticeable
flaws in the other, but together they were a unifying force, each in radically
different ways, making a collective statement about the transformative power of
art. Together they visited New York
City, as Rivera was having an exhibition at MOMA, and later moved to Detroit
for Rivera’s commission of twenty seven panels on the four walls of a massive
courtyard inside the Detroit Institute of Arts, with a local Detroit newspaper
headline indicating "Wife
of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art...” Frida grew tired of the blatant moral
hypocrisy she discovered in America, where luxurious wealth was thrown in
people’s faces by the sneering wealth and extravagant gowns and costumes people
wore, while at the same time displaying a haughty, derogatory attitude towards
the workers who built the country, undermining them at every turn. Frida yearned to return to a simpler life in
Mexico, but Rivera kept getting new commissions, leading him to San Francisco
and then back to New York, where Nelson Rockefeller commissioned a mural
entitled Man at the
Crossroads inside the RCA Building at the Rockefeller Center, only to have
it destroyed one morning when Rockefeller learned it included a special tribute
to Lenin, which led to the cancellation of other commissions. Returning back to Mexico, Rivera was
instrumental in helping to obtain asylum for Leon Trotsky when no other countries
were interested, allowing him to live with them, with the ever-curious Frida
having an affair with him, even though he was accompanied by his wife. While that may seem scandalous today, it
reflected her unashamed pursuit of freedom, which literally consumed every
moment of her waking life, Reclamation
| Frida | Prime Video YouTube (1:45).
After a devastating miscarriage, she became obsessed with the whole idea
of starting over, seeing things anew, discovering her own voice and indomitable
passions, reflecting the anguish and vulnerability of living with chronic pain.
While enlisting the help of art historian Hayden Herrera, the
preeminent Frida Kahlo scholar who wrote the definitive 1983 book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, the
artist remains an enigma, where there’s so much more than is presented here,
never really delving into what makes her so vitally different, despite the
personalized diary entries. There is a
running commentary of Frida’s internal thoughts throughout this movie,
accompanied by an ever-changing series of paintings, given new life by surrealistic
animated artwork that literally makes it come alive, where she was embraced by
the Surrealist movement, with theorist and co-founder André Breton visiting her
in Mexico championing her work, captivated by the visceral, deeply personal
nature of her art, arranging exhibitions for her in New York and subsequently
in Paris. But like New York, she found
the French art scene pretentious and hypocritical, describing Breton’s circle
of Surrealists as “artistic bitches,” claiming they are “so damned
intellectual…They sit for hours in the ‘cafés’ warming their precious behinds,
and talk without stopping about ‘culture,’ ‘art,’ revolution,’ and so on and so
forth, thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic
nonsense, and poisoning the air with theories and theories that never come
true… Shit and only shit is what they are,” finally reaching a conclusion, “I
hate Surrealism. It’s a decadent
manifestation of bourgeois art” “They
thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t.
I never painted dreams. I painted
my own reality.” On a personal level,
however, Frida developed a deep connection with Breton’s wife, the artist
Jacqueline Lamba, blossoming into a romantic affair, coming at a time when her
marriage was on the rocks, as Rivera crossed a line of no return, having an
affair with Frida’s younger sister Christina, which left her bitterly enraged
in disgust, immediately demanding a divorce.
But Rivera apologized profusely afterwards, leading to a quick
remarriage. Over the next several decades,
Frida would produce a relatively small yet consistent and arresting body of
work, attending her last art exhibition, her only solo exhibition in Mexico
during her lifetime, from her hospital bed, having her right leg amputated at
the knee a year before she died prematurely at the age of 47. She enjoyed international success
beginning in the 1940’s, but her reputation soared posthumously, beginning in
the 1980’s with the publication of numerous books about her work by feminist
art historians and others, where her modern attitudes towards sexuality and her
ability to openly explore them within her life and work have solidified her
status as a truly liberated female queer artist, fearless in the face of power,
never limited by gender, always a free spirit roving between the creative energies
of both men and women, ultimately becoming an iconic figure having a lasting
impact on LGBTQ artists.
