How is art constituted in the movie frida

Sequelae and disabilities resulting from the accident suffered when she was 18 years old were reproduced in different moments of her life. Pain is an unpleasant sensation, however essential for survival. Physiologically, pain may be expression of any real or potential tissue injury 6 6. Rev Dor. Canguilhem G. Escritos sobre a medicina. Pain definition by the International Association for the Study of Pain IASP says that "pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience expressed by the individual as representing a real or potential injury, or described in terms of such injury" 8 8.

Pain terms: a list with definitions and notes on usage. Sensory system for pain is broad. Because pain is an individual experience, it is understood that its perception varies according to the interference of several factors, such as ethnicity, gender and age, among others. In fact, pain experience is far reaching and its interpretation by individuals is multidimensional - acquiring different qualities and intensities - being expressed with different characteristics, established by affective-emotional, cultural, subjective and behavioral elements 6 6.

In addition, illness produces a state of emotional pain, directly related to the awareness of human finitude and frailty 7 7. Frida: I don't even remember how it was before the pain 4 4. The reach of her suffering was expressed - in artistic terms - through exposed organs and bleeding bodies with scars 9 9. In the painting The broken column - figure 3 -, Frida expresses the severe pain she felt. In this painting, the artists portraits herself using a steel corset - which was indicated to control pain - with emphasis to her open body were a Ionic column is inserted broken in several places, symbolizing her damaged spine.

Pain is present through nails pierced on her naked body, translating the endless martyrdom. Frida's body is divided, bleeding, pierced and isolated, thus showing the physical torture which has never left her throughout life - " I don't even remember how it was before the pain" 4 4.

Solitude, represented by the desert scenario, reinforces the suffering of her condition. In the efforts to relieve her own pain, she has been submitted to several orthopedic surgeries - aiming at repairing the spine - both in Mexico and in the United States, without improving her complaints.

The open body suggests the surgery 10 Lomas D, Howell R. Medical imagery in the art of Frida Kahlo. Fibromyalgia in Frida Kahlo's life and art. Arthritis Rheum. In the attempt to explain the reasons for her chronic pain, some authors suggest that Frida has suffered from post-trau-ma fibromyalgia, which is characterized by persistent generalized pain, chronic fatigue, sleep disorders and the presence of tender points in well-defined anatomic regions.

This concept of fibromyalgia - such as it is currently understood - was possibly unknown by physicians of early 20 th Century. It has been also suggested that nails pierced on her body could represent typical fibromyalgia tender points - "trigger points". This hypothesis would explain her chronic pain and deep fatigue, as well as her poor therapeutic response 11 Frida: Who knows. Let's go with one desgrace at a time.

Plaster me so that I can paint. Physician: This is gangrene. I will have to amputate it. Lucky you that the leg is spared 4 4. The artistic identification and the Mexican and communist ideals of Frida and Diego are probably among the ingredients of the intense and troublesome relationship lived by both, full of betrayals, hopelessness, pain and abandonment.

Until the end of her life, Kahlo has unconditionally loved Rivera and, as a consequence, her suffering was so intense to the point of considering the romance as the "second accident" of her life. The marriage of Frida and Diego was marked by several vicissitudes, three spontaneous miscarriages and three major surgeries - portrayed in several paintings in different ways 1 1. Several are the artworks expressing the anguish and suffering of dependence links cultivated by the artist, deserving special attention a canvas which stands out for the deep despair and delusion lived by the painter: The heart Figure 4.

There, Frida illustrates a huge broken heart at her feet, expressing, it is believed, the intensity of her pain due to the romance of her husband with her sister Cristina. This fact has reinforced the rivalry between both, since the early birth of the youngest sister - as already mentioned -, led Frida to feel herself neglected, especially due to the breakage of maternal link between Frida and her mother 5 5.

It is equally important to comment that in this same painting Frida has short hair, a way to spite Diego. At her side there are her European-style clothes, making reference to the time when she was separated from Diego, who preferred dresses of the Tehuana tradition.

Her left foot is over the water with an apparatus and, together, they look like a sailboat, making reference to a left foot suergery. Her school uniform at the background could be a representation of the time she met Diego, still a school girl.

Frida: I had two tragic accidents in my life. The trolley car and you. And you were the worst 4 4. The painting The Two Fridas Figure 5 , in special, portraits very well the pain of separation. The canvas was painted after divorcing from Diego Rivera. Afterward, Frida has admitted that the painting was the reflex of her emotions about her separation and of her emotional crises. The artist has painted herself with two different personalities - through two opposite women - one represented by the Mexican Frida to the right - holding an amulet with the picture of Diego as a child - and an European Frida to the left.

She used to sign them and identify the sitter with an old XIX century tradition used in Mexico which consisted on adding a label on top or bottom of the painting. She started painting with a realistic style, almost inspired by the photographs of her father, Guillermo Kahlo. She took the courage to bring her painting to be critiqued by Diego Rivera, one of the most famous Mexican muralists at the moment.

Rivera was also a socialist leader and founder of the Socialist Party in Mexico. This moment was the beginning of a turbulent relationship between Frida and Diego involving friendship, camaraderie, passion, mutual admiration and love. Diego introduced Frida to his leftists-bourgeoisie, intellectual upper middle class group of friends that included international artists like the Italian photo journalist Tina Modotti and the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

They were all members of the Communist Party, some of them Stalinist and some, including Rivera, Trotsky followers. They lived a bohemian life style, with openness to sex relationships and an admiration to the Russian Revolution socialistic goals; similar to the ongoing socio-cultural changes lived in Europe at the turn of the century. When her health problems started escalating, her paintings shifted from her initial realism, into more personal depictions of either herself or representations of the Mexican people and their suffering.

During her painful life, she developed a unique mix of expressionistic-surrealist style, mixed with the characteristic folk, art and culture of her beloved Mexican population.

Most of her paintings are self-portraits and are like a visual auto-biography. On the movie, Frida is depicted as bisexual. She had an affair with Tina Modotti and other women, not only in Mexico but also during her trips to the United States and France. Frida also had a share of lovers of both sexes, including the communist leader of the Russian Revolution Leon Trotsky.

The movie plot adheres close enough to what I found in the literature about this controversial artist. It is clear that the self-centered Rivera, idolized by many, including Frida, was a very conflictive person and he was the source of the extreme emotions for Kahlo. She is depicted wearing the attires the Native Mexican women wore, or cross dressing with some of the European traditions. Parallel, the movie emphasizes her love for the Mexican traditional food and the Mexican culture.

Kahlo painted her pain and in some of the paintings, she made her pain universal. In a way although from very different points of view, both writers confirmed that through the self-observation and being observed, Frida explored her reality, her vulnerabilities, her dreams and pain, turning herself into a mythic symbol and an unknown persona, more desirable because of the unknown beyond her paintings.

How we position ourselves to circumstances and events as they occur is one aspect of perspective, while how we position ourselves after they occur is another. Throughout the film both types of positioning in relation to subjectivity, simultaneous and retrospective, are explored by means of Frida's body.

In a revealing scene, Frida enters her house carrying groceries and overhears Trotsky and his wife arguing in Russian about Frida's affair with Trotsky. Frida flinches when Trotsky slams the door on his wife and then her body slumps when she hears Trotsky's wife sobbing.

Her body gestures the dual sense of perspective in her initial and subsequent positions, first revealing her dawning knowledge — the content of the argument — and then her reaction — compassion for Trotsky's wife. This duality of perspective continues in the following scene where Trotsky and party are departing. Diego and Frida stand outside the pink walled house on the cobblestone street.

As Frida and Diego converse about why Trotsky leaves, it becomes apparent that Frida is positioned by the camera to come out on top of the conflict: at the end of the scene she stands above him in the frame, facing us, almost as tall as Diego whose back is to us because of the shot's visual perspective, on a diagonal receding into the distance.

Her body or face is the dominating feature of most of the shots to suggest her viewpoint, her perspective, not his. Frida: [cut to Frida turning toward camera in close-up. But why? It was just a fuck, like a handshake! You've been my comrade, my fellow artist, my best friend. But you've never been my husband.

By revealing the nature of her infidelity, Frida chooses to hurt Diego, who has hurt her repeatedly by his own infidelity with her sister Cristina and numerous other women.

As Frida and Diego square off to one another on the stoned-lined street — their bodies standing outside the home, symbolizing their joint inability to remain faithful to shared domesticity — they are positioned as equals. Frida retains her personal power by telling Diego she has an affair with Trotsky simply because "they wanted to.

In interviews regarding Frida , Taymor says she strove to capture Frida's point of view. The film begins and ends with fairly similar images of Frida gazing at her reflection in the mirror above her bed, suggesting that Frida objectifies herself with frequent regularity, meaning that she negotiates her own identity through simultaneously perceiving and responding to herself.

This emphasis on gazing into the mirror suggests that Frida uses herself as a primary locator of subjectivity, suggesting that what changes have taken place from the film's beginning to end are in fact revealed through Frida's reflections.

At the film's opening, Frida's gaze embodies a past reflection on her life up to that point, told in flashback , while at the film's closing, her gaze embodies a future prediction; she smiles knowingly at her impending death. The ending in a sense opens rather than closes, just as Kahlo's life and art continue beyond the physicality of her life and one's viewing of the film.

Taymor occasionally stops the flow of the narrative, calling attention to the continued play of subject and object, how events shape both Kahlo's perception and ensuing reality.

In the final animation scene that shows the painting "The Dream" come to life on the screen, where Frida's life and death merge in her dreamscape, we view one type of narrative pause. The montage of Frida's life in Paris is streamlined to focus on another aspect of her subjectivity, her plural sexuality: Frida was attracted to both men and women.

Taymor collapses the distance of subject and object in yet another way. When Frida is happy and energetic, the screen is dominated by the bright colors she wears and those that surround her: bright blues, reds, and yellows. When she is sad and immobilized the screen is dominated by much subtler grays, greens, and browns. Taymor also relies on innovative film technology to draw out the changing states of Frida's mind. Live action sequences that slow into the form or look of a painting, or, conversely, paintings that become moving film are other key methods that Taymor relies on to emphasize Frida's subjectivity, in relation to her life and art.

The final animation of Frida's painting "The Dream," discussed above, begins with a superimposed excerpt from her journal, suggesting that Kahlo constructs her own impending death: "I hope the exit is joyful. And I hope never to return. Despite such moments of agency, Frida's numerous bouts of confinement in her four-posted bed suggest the presence of opposing social constraints.

While Frida cannot do anything about her initial confinement after her near fatal trolley-car accident, she begins to complain about the necessity of repeated operations. Frida's repeated confinement suggests repeated efforts to "normalize" her through medical and social rehabilitation, wherein an impaired body is forced to become an able-body by any means available Hughes By emphasizing what makes Frida's disabled body more abled — endless operations — Taymor contests two key aspects of disability discourse in her film: the first concerns the nineteenth century method of confining the disabled body or removing it from active society; the second concerns the twentieth century strategy to "fix or improve the 'performance' of broken bodies and thus make them 'fit' once again" Hughes Because Taymor does not make clear in the film whose decisions are behind Frida's many operations, however, the matter remains open to interpretation.

In one scene Frida complains to Cristina that the operations and not her body are the source of her endless pain. In an early scene where Taymor dramatizes the significance of Kahlo's first major operation after the trolley-car accident, the young Frida overhears the doctor tell her parents that they are not concerned whether Frida will walk or not, but whether she will live at all.

Other than the initial operation that seems to be life-saving and the one near to the end of her life, the amputation of her foot due to gangrene, the reason for the operations remains unrevealed.

Possibly Frida had succumbed to social pressures, what Nancy Mairs characterizes as society's attempt "to infantilize those with physical or mental limitations and none do so more than doctors and their adjuncts" For better or for worse, folks listen to and follow their doctors' advice. Herrera suggests that Kahlo sought solace from the emotional painful realities of her life through seeking unnecessary medical operations, known as Munchausen syndrome Paintings However, the gaps in the text of her life and film allow readers or viewers to offer other interpretations.

On the other hand, Taymor shows Kahlo's weaknesses, the effect of ongoing pain, emotional Diego Rivera's presence in her life and physical numerous operations, recuperative periods, and failed attempts to bear a child. Taymor's decision to weave the known the operations she undergoes with the unknown the necessity of the operations with respect to normalizing her body's disability alerts the viewer to both ideological and medical realities of the day.

Ultimately, Taymor's film shows Frida submitting to the many efforts to confine and rehabilitate her so as "to improve the performance of her broken body" Hughes In many of Kahlo's self-portraits which make up a third of her oeuvre, Kahlo offers an alternative allegory of the disabled body that rejects medical notions of the broken or impaired, and instead replaces them with paradigms of wholeness or healing, in effect claiming what Brecht insisted, that art can subvert an array of hegemonic interests; art is not intended to mirror reality but to change it McCaughan 2.

Kahlo's construction of counterhegemony is done through her conflation in the painted body of the political — national symbols and myths — with the personal — incidents from an individual's biography, but also intensely private states of mind and heart. Similarly, Taymor's structural use of Kahlo's pictures, where the layers of figurative and literal body merge, suggests the possibility of a matrix of difference comprised of the national and individual body.

Taymor's portrayal of the tensions Frida negotiates in her life and art combats devalued notions of disability and instead replaces them with juxtapositions of political and personal agency. Kahlo and Rivera's Marxist political leanings are not only well-documented in the film, but Taymor suggests that the mutuality of their ideas informs their initial romantic intimacy they are viewed marching arm in arm in the streets of Mexico to contest governmental tyranny as well as their coming together after their first substantive break-up Frida permits the politically volatile Trotsky and his entourage to live in her parents' house.

Taymor's cinematic reproduction of Kahlo's painting "My Dress Hangs There," wherein Frida's tehuana dress hangs on a line with New York City in the background, constructs the uneasy mingling of Mexican versus American nationalistic discourse and suggests "the personal is political.

Such a program of positive personal identity centers on both universality and diversity, meaning that identities are supplanted by a politics of coalition, that is to say, a host of issues and campaigns centered around housing, health, welfare, education, employment, immigration, reproduction and media representations.

A program of universal justice that accounts for difference suggests identity is rendered multiple and fluid, and typically is constituted by postmodern and feminist underpinnings The scope of postmodern society is more fragmented, more diverse, and full of differences where living as process is achieved through the negotiation of an array of individual and cultural tensions rather than through the negotiation of limiting socio-political trends and attitudes.

Taymor does not merely contest current media representations of disability as separation, but also the nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of disability as in need of rehabilitation. Taymor's strategy of disrupting the flow of narrative through special effects suggests that Frida's disability led to her ability to re-signify the unity of her body in art. A version of this paper was delivered at the Film and History Conference.

Besides the disability film, Frida of course partakes of other genres, principally the artist biopic and the feminist biography see James, Vidal. The latter two genres are combined in only a few other films, such as Carrington and Artemisia In Artemisia's "competing and overlapping textual layering" of desire and fantasy, Vidal notes, it is possible "to get beyond the question of identification, and move into the wider possibilities of reconstructing historical identities as composite hybrid entities" One other film combines all three genres, if not all that successfully: Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus , which deals with the photographer's relationship with a 'lion man' plagued by hypertrichosis.

On Frida as an artist biopic, see Looking at Movies , ch. The genres of disability, film, and feminist biography merge in Frida when she says to her philandering husband, "There have been two big accidents in my life, Diego. The trolley, and you. In the U. Despite the undeniable value of services rendered under this law, it continues to promote the notion of difference as deviancy, largely because interventions are needed to make things "right" for those with disabilities.

See Marinelli and Dell Orto, The Psychological and Social Impact of Disability for a thorough discussion of the need to reframe cultural definitions of disability. See Longmore , who mentions these depictions of disability under a rubric of "monster characterizations. In the studio where I practice yoga once a week, a poster of Kahlo's work, labeled only "San Francisco Museum of Art," hangs in one of the bathrooms. Ironically the painting reproduced, "Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird" , is one of those where Kahlo suggests an intimate connection not with commerce or even human society but rather with nature see Faris.

The technique also suggests the permeability of Frida's life and art, which the film inevitably 'capitalizes' upon, while also perhaps defamilarizing it through the use of such an unconventional technique. Reproduced in Frida , — but note that actress Salma Hayek impersonates Frida on the cover. See Roland Marchand's "The Parable of the Democracy of Goods," in which he argues that one of the primary visions of America's democracy since the turn of the 20th century — the paradoxical principle of separate but equal — has been exploited relentlessly by advertisers so as to equate democracy with wealth.

Marinelli and Dell Orto note that "more than two-thirds of disabled adults of working age do not have jobs" 6. Riley and others write that many invoke their right to privacy and do not report their disability for fear of discrimination 19, Frida's right leg was withered by childhood polio and then broken and her foot crushed in the trolley accident of Ultimately the leg was amputated in Herrera 14, 47, Herrera Heretofore Kahlo's wearing of native clothing most frequently has been attributed to her desire to please her husband and hide physical deficiencies.

However, this dress can also be seen as a political statement: Kahlo's sartorial endorsement of postrevolutionary ideology. Photographs of her in native dress when she and Rivera first visited San Francisco, from November to June , communicated Mexican revolutionary cultural tenets as clearly as did Rivera's murals" 8.

The film shows Frida first trying on a traditional white wedding dress, then wearing the tehuana costume instead, as in her painting "The Wedding Portrait" , which Taymor depicts as a tableau. Compare also the steel and leather corset she wore during a subsequent rehabilitation, shown in the film along with the painting depicting it, "The Broken Column" reproduced in Frida Here Taymor takes some poetic license; according to Herrera, Frida was carried on a stretcher and placed onto her bed that had been set up in the art gallery ix.

Frida's first words spoken in the film, to the workers carrying her in her bed, are "Careful, guys. This corpse is still breathing.

Drifting in and out of consciousness after the bus accident, Kahlo sees doctors as chattering skeletons and hears disembodied voices relaying her grim prognosis. For a thorough discussion of the historical evolution of subjectivity, see Donald Hall's Subjectivity.