New documentary by Carla Gutiérrez frida would in theory be the right occasion to examine the entirety of Frida Kahlo’s life. It’s getting a big spot at the Sundance Film Festival this week, and it’s being brought there by Amazon Studios, no small distribution company. Such a large canvas should provide a good opportunity to re-examine the famous Mexican artist, whose biography often seems stranger than fiction.
But unfortunately, the film tells the same story that has already been told about Kahlo, without adding much new material along the way, except for some kitschy animations of her paintings. His Wikipedia page remains more insightful.
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Gutiérrez said he came to make the film by diving into Kahlo’s archives: he read her diaries and colored black-and-white photos. This is a noble cause, because since the rise of Fridamania in the 1980s, we’ve lost sight of what makes Kahlo really important.
As Carolina A. Miranda wrote in ARTnews in a 2014 article titled “Saving Frida Kahlo from Her Own Celebrity,” Kahlo’s overnight rise from “obscure Mexican painter to popular saint” caused her mere mention to be met with scorn: “Recently, when I told a fellow art writer. who was working on a story about Kahlo, she replied, “You know, I cringe when I hear the name. I’ve felt that way in the past, too, not because I’m not a Kahlo fan, but because few have been able to to properly treat the artist with such a complex legacy.
Recent exhibitions prove so. A 2016 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston came closest to looking at Kahlo through a more critical and historical lens, but even that blockbuster was occasioned by the museum’s acquisition of its first Kahlo , as opposed to a serious curiosity about her. Art. Meanwhile, an exhibit on Kahlo’s fashion sense has been traveling since 2012, but it also hasn’t offered much insight, beyond attesting to how sharp she was. Still, it managed to draw big crowds.
These programs often do not feature the words of Kahlo herself, which is one of the few positive aspects of the new documentary. That has value, but she and her legacy still need to be criticized and analyzed. There is much to unravel in Kahlo’s story, not only because her politics were complex and deliberately opaque at times, but also because she often self-mythologized, embellishing her own biography in ways that require questioning. For the sake of this film, an easy solution would be to bring in some experts, but Gutierrez doesn’t do that.
To understand Kahlo and her art, it is essential to see her in the context of Mexico after the Revolution. He was born in 1907, three years before the Revolution began, but at one point in his life he redid his birth to 1910 to arrive in the world together with the Revolution. At a time when the new Mexican government was obsessed with building a national identity through the arts – look no further than the work of Los Tres Grandes, the painters David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco and her future husband, Diego Rivera —. a significant detail, if not essential. Although Kahlo was often dismissed as Rivera’s wife or a second-rate surrealist painter during her lifetime, she was equally committed to the cause of a new Mexico. That is not mentioned in the movie.
An important topic in frida it is Kahlo’s own self-formation. Throughout her years in medical school, when she was the only female member of a group of friends called Las Cachuchas, she decidedly dressed in a carcass. Kahlo met Rivera in 1928 and showed him four of his paintings. He was so taken by her that he almost immediately painted her in one of his murals.
They married the following year, and it was around this time that Kahlo began dressing more femininely, adopting the Tehuana dresses of the Zapotec indigenous people as her daily attire. Later in the documentary, we learn that Rivera accepted Kahlo’s bisexual identity. His iconic painting Self portrait with cropped hair (1940), in which the artist appears dressed as a man, appears on the screen. The year before she painted this, Kahlo and Rivera divorced, only to remarry months later. This second marriage was intentionally sexless (to avoid jealousy on Rivera’s part), which probably means that now that Kahlo was no longer the object of Rivera’s desire, she was free to dress more freely. The film does not provide enough information about how often Kahlo dressed in suits after 1940.
In 1930s Mexico, the act of adopting Tehuana dress was seen as another way of constructing José Vasconcelos’s notion of the cosmic race (cosmic race), in which all other races would amalgamate into a fifth that would be superior to all others. Gutiérrez does not address that story, or its neocolonial, racist, social Darwinist underpinnings, or even the simple fact that Kahlo’s appropriation of Tehuana dress and culture would have added insult to a group that by then had been significantly affected . for the redistribution of land, displacement and violence.
In general, Gutiérrez has a strange way of dealing with Kahlo’s politics. As he reproduces a fragment of a speech by Emiliano Zapata, one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution, we learn that Kahlo decided to join the Communist Party. Not much else is said on that front. Later in this mostly chronological documentary, we also hear that Kahlo and Rivera were instrumental in getting the Mexican government to grant asylum to Leon Trotsky, who lived for two years in the couple’s Casa Azul and with whom Kahlo had a relationship. The details of his quarrel with Trotsky are rushed fridaand Gutierrez omits the fact that Kahlo and Rivera were initially suspected of carrying out the assassination of Trotsky in 1940, although they were later cleared.
Between 1931 and 1933, Kahlo and Rivera lived in the United States while Rivera worked to complete various commissions. Gutiérrez does not shy away from how stylistically ambitious Kahlo was during this period. The filmmaker even takes the time to highlight the backstory of three quintessential Kahlo paintings: Henry Ford Hospital, My dress hangs theree Self-portrait on the border between Mexico and the United States (all 1932), which filter Kahlo’s feelings of isolation in the US. Kahlo’s diaries show that she considered the wealthy curators of these paintings to be “rich little morons,” but the contradiction of a communist associating with the elite is not questioned, as it often is.
Bewilderingly, in the end, frida turns Kahlo’s death into a metaphor by considering one of her most famous paintings, The Wounded Deer (1946), in which Kahlo’s face is transposed onto the body of a deer that has been shot with nine arrows. Painted eight years before his passing and a year after an important operation, the painting, as happens with other works of the time, such as The Broken Column (1945), is a reflection on her declining health, an issue that became increasingly important to her after the death of her father in 1941.
Gutiérrez, however, treats this work differently. In one of the film’s 48 animations, she removes the arrows from Kahlo’s deer. This seems like a way to free Kahlo. For Kahlo to be famous, Gutiérrez seems to assert, she had to suffer. But that’s just a rehash of the uninspired tortured artist trope, and it’s not very interesting.
A successful artist documentary should look at how the subject’s biography affects their work. But I also shouldn’t be afraid to look at the subject’s warts: their flaws, what makes them human. Any subject is an unreliable narrator of his own biography, and it should be the job of someone like Gutierrez to reveal myths rather than feed them, as he does in the deer animation. frida it’s a film that’s good at portraying what we think we know about Kahlo. Too bad he can’t portray what we do too should know, too
