“I think after I die I’m going to be the biggest piece of poop in the world.”
Frida Kahlo left this phrase written and with it the Peruvian filmmaker Carla Gutiérrez closes the documentary
Frida,
presented these days at the Sundance Festival, to then show the omnipresence of her face and art throughout the world more as a brand and an icon than as person, woman and artist.
Frida probably saw it coming.
In recent decades it has become something that, if nothing else, would have caused her to laugh out loud, a continuous laugh, like the one she maintained throughout her life.
Her sense of humor and sarcasm were, precisely, what surprised Gutiérrez the most in the exhaustive research he did on the Mexican artist.
Gutiérrez, who makes her debut as a director coming from the editing room
(RBG, Wonder Women! The Untold Stories of American Superheroines),
and her team visited all the archives in the world that keep documents or art from Kahlo: letters, diaries, which were about all illustrated, but they also contained poems, essays and the few brief interviews they did with him while he was alive.
Frida Kahlo in an image by Lucienne Bloch.Lucienne Bloch
They began with the biography written by Hayden Herrera, who began her research in the seventies, when she was still able to obtain testimonies from friends and direct contacts of Frida: her college boyfriend, Alejandro, with whom she had the accident that would mark her life, her nurse, her lovers... They traveled to the writer's house in Cape Cod and in her attic they found all the notes and complete interviews that no one had reviewed until now.
“It was a big surprise.
Intellectuals and academics should review it,” says Gutiérrez.
The same thing happened to the personal archives of two nonagenarian filmmakers who made a film about Frida in 1976. “They also had interviews with people who had known her and they gave us a box with tapes that had never been seen in these 40 years” , continues the filmmaker.
“There is a lot of work done around the figure of Frida, but all this material was still without being analyzed by anyone.
Our little movie got some first-hand sources sitting in boxes for 50 years.”
Gutiérrez had the intuition that only through Frida's words could they build a film, complete with external voices (Diego Rivera, friends...), but as they discovered all this material they realized that only with words of the artist could achieve it.
The actress Fernanda Echevarría is in charge of dubbing with a humorous tone, with the depth of a chain smoker, with optimistic and sometimes very negative passion the phrases chosen to tell the story of the artist, how she saw herself and how she saw the world. .
Her phrases are heard in
off-screen
while on the screen we see black and white photos of her, her surroundings and her slightly animated pictures of her to direct our gaze towards details to understand what we are simultaneously hearing.
The description of the terrible accident that he suffered as a young man and that broke his life, for example, is represented through black and white images of the time, newspaper headlines and the animation of the painting
The Broken Column.
“It was not violent, but dull or slow,” we hear as we see that long column crack.
And yet, later he wrote: “Now I live on a painful planet, transparent as ice, but that hides nothing,” he says while the nails and tears of that oil painting are painted.
“The crash destroyed me, even if it didn't take me away,” Echevarría recites as he paints before our eyes
The Dream
or
The Bed
that Frida finished in 1940, 15 years after the accident.
“Our goal was to get the audience into Frida's head and her heart into hers,” Gutiérrez explained after the applauded premiere at Sundance.
Kahlo, portrayed while working by Manuel Álvarez Bravo.Archive Manuel Álvarez Bravo SC
Among Frida's words we discover a lot of humor, revolutionary vitality and love, a lot, and pain, so much.
She began by laughing at the Catholic faith of her mother and at the church from which they ended up “pulling” her, kicking her out.
She laughed at the great love of her life, Diego Rivera, whom she called Cara Sapo or Panzas and whom, according to the testimony of one of her friends, she always won back with his humor and her craziness.
But he was also the cause of her pain and sorrow, the one who made her feel less than, the one who wrote feelings of regret for the years they spent in the United States (“Diego is the big poop here […], but I just want to go away to Mexico") and for those who were not painted for her.
“I am learning to be alone, an advantage and a small benefit […].
I have wasted my best years living at the expense of a man,” she wrote.
That rebellion against the sexist system in which she grew up and that she herself embraced for a long time also appears in her letters and diaries.
Like her rejection of the surrealists and André Breton in particular.
“I hate surrealism, a decadent manifestation of bourgeois art,” she wrote.
“Let them eat poop,” she told Breton and his friends after her terrible experience in Paris with them.
Although there was also love in her life, a lot, towards Rivera, of course, and towards her many lovers, who are remembered through the correspondence she maintained with some of them: Georgia O'Keefe, Isamu Noguchi, Nickolas Murray, Josep Bartoli…
She also showed her frustration, pain and anger after her abortions.
Very well explained in a letter that Frida herself wrote to a doctor: “I think it is better to have an abortion, but the doctor told me that it is better to have one.”
Those episodes, Gutiérrez believes, completely marked the emotional drift of her art.
“In my life I have painted the honest version of myself […].
I paint because I need to.”
And with this phrase the documentary begins.
The definition of Frida Kahlo's art and of her as an artist and as a woman.
Painting completed a life that she lived passionately and offered her an escape from the pain that she also passionately suffered.
She painted “without ambition for glory.”
The film hopes that we will stop seeing it as a mere icon or brand.
And if we do it, at least we do it with his sense of humor.
Director Carla Gutiérrez has thoroughly researched the artist's life to direct the documentary. Leo Matiz