Frida

Frida

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DVD Reviews of Frida

DVD Review: Visually interesting, hagiagraphy, inaccurate,
Summary: 5 Stars

People I knew who knew her 1938-1942 and the biographies that were written about her before she began to be taken up by the New York hipsters, tended to talk about how the pain and difficulty of her life were expressed in a personality that was not exactly the sweet, sunny, firm clear, fair and always just character portrayed in the movie. The condition created by the Frida Fad of the past 10 years has made her into such a non-person, such a glorified abstraction, that otherwise serious grownups who have no real knowledge other than she is now popular and "collectable" wince when you tell them people world wide for their warmth, judgement, and trust who saw her every day for years could say that Frida was not always fun to be around. No less than the Diego depicted in her film, Kahlo did not really understand the consequences her own personal picadillos and adventures could have on people who had more conventional views of life and love, and who needed stability in life.

The movie and the accompanying DVD background material were either false or ignorant about why Trotsky moved out of the Blue House. He did not move out because of Natalia Sedova's anger over the affair. [ The affair really break Natalia's heart and almost caused a split among the Trotskys, although that split was healed. Trotsky is almost rapsodic in his diary when he realizes his love for Natalya is there emotionally and physically and they are still together.] Trotsky and the Riveras split due to a deep and public political disagreement over elections in Mexico. Diego was making public statements that gave people the impression that Trotsky was backing a right-wing candidate for President of Mexico that Trotsky stridently opposed. Moroever, Diego's actions gave the false impression that Trotsky was publically intervening in Mexican politics, something Trotsky resolutely refused to do. Both Trotsky and the Mexican section of the Fourth International, the world organization Trotsky founded, had to disassociate themselves from Deigo at this point.

This movie uses Kahlo's association with Trotsky to give a gloss to her and Rivera. Unlike the Mexican movie made about her entitled Freida (this is the name Kahlo was born with, not Frida), this film does not tell the view that in the late 1940s, Rivera and Kahlo became ultra-Stalinists. They revived their friendship with David Alfred Siqueros who had attempted to murder Trotsky. Frida Kahlo issued public statements denouncing herself for having had sex with Trotsky and pledged her eternal devotion to Stalin. Of course, this aspect of her life doesn't fit into the kind of marketable hagiagraphy that has less concern with the reality of a person and of politics than it does with a marketable image. It is true you do see a picture of Stalin on a canvas toward the end, but it is not clear to anyone who isn't already familiar with the story.

I also was disappointed in the actor they had playing Diego. He played his part extremely well, but he was just not the right person for anyone to think to be Diego. The person was an English actor, apparently of Italian or Spanish origin.

Diego was mostly if not entirely Indian, whereas Frida was actually half German Jewish. Diego actually did the rough outlines and instructions of his murals and then got very indigenous Indians to paint in the colors with their rough brush strokes.

This attempt to identify with the non-European art and culture and political identity of Mexico was a big part of what Diego and Frida were about, but it gets no play or reference in the movie. Frida adopted the regional dress of one of the most indigenous areas of Mexico,rather than follow the Europe-centered fashions of Mexico's intelligensia. Mexico is a nation where the the vast majority, the scores of millions of people of mixed and all Indian blood have traditionally struggled against an elite which emphasizes its "Spanish" ancestry. Diego's proclamation of his Indianness and his sucess in Mexico as a mostly Indian cultural figure, and Frida's decision to identify with this was central to their lives and impact on their times.

To me what is rather unfortunate is that while Kahlo's art was interesting and beautiful, and great in some ways, Diego is simply lost in all of this. He was one of the great artists of the 20th Century, far more significant than Kahlo in his impact on Mexican, Latin American, and world culture. Moreover, particularly for Mexicans and other Latin Americans, the cultural ideas about reclaiming the Indian identity and linking with the popular masses and the pre-Columbian cultures that he advanced were very important, not just for artists, but in political and literary circles as well. Diego played an important role fighting with his friend Andre Breton in charting an independent and radical artistic and intellectual response to Stalinist theory of "socialist realist" art. Pathfinder Press has just come out with a brand new updated and better noted and glosseried edition of Breton's What is Surrealism which contains the declaration on Art and Artists in the 20th Century that Deigo, Trotsky, and Breton wrote together.

Of course, all of Deigo's work dealt with the political struggle of Mexico and the world's working people to fight against imperialism and capitalism. This isn't very marketable among the upper middle class fadists at whom this film seems to aimed. They prefer a Frida and a Diego whose personal concerns about romance, sex, and personal fame are at the center of their lives, not two fighters for a socialist world!

Description of Frida