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Journal of Popular Film and Television

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Life as Art/Art as Life: Dramatizing the Life and Work of Frida

Kahlo
a
Tina Olsin Lent
a
Department of Fine Arts in the College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester,
New York
Published online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Tina Olsin Lent (2007) Life as Art/Art as Life: Dramatizing the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo, Journal of Popular Film
and Television, 35:2, 68-76, DOI: 10.3200/JPFT.35.2.68-77

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/JPFT.35.2.68-77

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 LIFE
as
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Art/
ART
as
Life
Dramatizing the Life and
Work of Frida Kahlo
By Tina Olsin Lent

Copyright © 2007 Heldref Publications

68
Downloaded by [Central Michigan University] at 04:49 22 December 2014
Abstract: Working from the conventions
of the artist biopic in which intense per-
sonal suffering is the outward manifes-
tation of a (male) artist’s innate creative
forces, Julie Taymor’s film Frida (2002)
heightens the emotional nature of the
female artist even more. Taymor con-
joins Kahlo’s physical suffering with
other forms of emotional excess, most
notably an intense love of, and engage-
ment with, life to establish an intensity
of feeling© that
Copyright 2006 drove
Heldrefher art.
Publications
Keywords: biopic, Kahlo, Frida, magi-
cal realism, Mexican art, Mexicanidad,
Rivera, Diego; Surrealism, Taymor,
Julie, women artists in film.
T
he discipline of art history devel-
oped the biographical narrative
as the mode to illustrate how art-
ists’ innate genius inspired their
creativity, giving a literary form to the
construct of genius. When artistic cre-
ativity became the subject of cinematic
69
This production
still, taken on
the set of Julie
Taymor’s Frida,
shows Salma Hayek
as Kahlo painting
a portrait of her
sister, Cristina.
Photo courtesy of
Photofest.
discourse, the abstract and interiorized
nature of inspiration became a great-
er problem because it was essentially
unfilmable.1 One solution embraced by
the artist biopic was to highlight intense
personal suffering as the outward sign
of the creative forces that lay within.
This occurred in biopics of Vincent Van
Gogh and Michelangelo when drama-
tized versions of their lives made them
popular icons in the 1950s and ’60s.2 It
occurred again with Frida Kahlo, whose
 70 JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television
life was dramatized in seven works of
fiction that appeared between 2000 and
2002.3 In these portrayals of Kahlo the
emotional nature of the female artist is
intensified even further by the conjoin-
ing of physical suffering with other
forms of emotional excess, most nota-
bly an intense love of, and engagement
with, life. Julie Taymor’s film Frida
(2002) went further than the other media
by portraying the fictional Frida’s life as
a work of art itself, and then showing
how her art is a direct transcription of
that life.4 A life lived artistically and
intensely becomes, in Taymor’s film,
the outward manifestation of the cre-
Downloaded by [Central Michigan University] at 04:49 22 December 2014
ative spirit that lies within, validating
her authentic genius, artistic renown,
celebrity status, and appropriateness as
the subject of popular media. It also
shifts the narrative focus from a concern
with the narrow, specific biographical
events to a broader, more generic inter-
est in emotional truth.
Fact and fiction are inextricably
interwoven in any biographical treat-
ment of Kahlo because of the illu-
sion of self-revelation in her paintings,
written autobiographical sketches, diary
entries, and interviews. The semblance
of confession obscures her lifelong
practice of repeatedly reinscribing and
reinventing herself. She was her own
favorite subject. She portrayed herself
with schematic, almost iconic, features
in which her likeness becomes a mask
that hides all vestiges of life, age, and
emotion. The rigidity of her face con-
trasts with the fluidity of her life story,
which she altered at will. She changed
her birthdate to coincide with the Mexi-
can Revolution, transformed her per-
sonal (not painted) appearance to reflect
the state of her marriage, and shifted
the ethnicity by which she identified
herself.5 Subsequent biographers have
embraced and embellished her efforts.
Never well known during her lifetime,
Kahlo’s name slipped into obscurity
after her death in 1954. Art historians
recouped her reputation through the
feminist interventions in art-historical
scholarship in the 1970s.6
Both traditional and fictional biog-
raphies of Frida Kahlo date to the next
decade. The earliest, still best-known,
and most influential full-length scholar-
ly treatment of Kahlo is Hayden Herre-
ra’s Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo
(1983). It determined both the narrative
structure and dominant thematics of all
work that followed, as well as much of
the factual information about Kahlo’s
life. Structurally, Herrera’s book pres-
ents Kahlo’s life story as an extended
flashback within the frame of her physi-
cal decline and death. Thematically, this
establishes Kahlo’s personal suffering
as the motivating force behind her rep-
resentation of self as spectacle, both in
The
semblance of
confession obscures
her lifelong practice
of repeatedly
reinscribing
and reinventing
herself. She was
her own
favorite subject.
painting and in life; Herrera presents
Kahlo’s artwork as a literal transcription
of her lived reality, an autobiographical
act that transmuted her pain into paint
(xii).7 As a secondary theme, Herrera
develops Kahlo’s obsessive love for her
husband, Diego Rivera, and the other
source of her ongoing pain. Both of
Herrera’s themes underline the central
premise behind her biography, that art-
ists’ lives explain their artwork.
Herrera’s biography of Kahlo relies
on the conventions of the art-histori-
cal monograph, the dominant form of
art-historical nonfiction since its revival
from antiquity by Giorgio Vasari in
the sixteenth century. The monograph
posits that an artist’s life and art explain
each other, creating a feedback loop
where the artwork can be explained
only through biography, which simul-
taneously provides evidence for the
veracity of that narrative (Salomon
223; Watson and Smith 11). Further-
more, the monograph conceptualizes
the male artist as one whose inborn
talent—his genius—reveals itself by
chance in childhood and predestines his
future greatness, rendering him godlike;
genius was the engine that drove him
to work in a frenzy of inchoate activity
called divine madness or artistic ecstasy
(Kris and Kurz 25–32, 48–49). Later
monographs secularized and intensified
the passion behind the creative impulse
by ascribing to the artist literal mad-
ness, intense personal suffering, and/or
extreme sexual prowess (Pollock 65).
These qualities also served to sever art
(and the artist) from the constraints of
both ordinary society and history, posi-
tioning the male artist as an outsider
whose self-centered, tormented, soli-
tary existence was the price demanded
by his art (Pollock 65; Stewart 14).
Furthermore, the mythologizing of the
artist also functioned to sever art from
its social and historical contexts by
ignoring the craft-skill training, sub-
ject-matter knowledge, and education
required to prepare artists to undertake
professional practice.
Monographs of women artists con-
form to the generic pattern of inter-
preting artwork through life events,
while diverging from the gender-spe-
cific conceptualizations of the artist as
godlike. For a woman to be defined as a
creative artist, she must be exceptional
among women (while still deficient
among men). Her talent is ascribed to
diligence, not genius, and is initiated by
a male mentor whose vital essence is
needed to energize her (Salomon 226).
To be a famous woman artist requires a
compelling life story and/or attachment
to a male artist/genius (Frederickson
3–4). Her commitment to an artistic
vocation is often the result of a transfor-
mative event, usually sexual in nature,
which permanently prevents her con-
forming to conventional female roles
of wife and mother (Heilbrun 48–49;
Webb 244). Whereas male artists ben-
efit from the link between sexuality and

creativity, women’s association with
sexuality defines them as unnatural and
deviant, eclipsing serious consideration
of their art.
Given the preexisting generic conven-
tions of the artist monograph, it is not too
surprising that artists chosen as subjects
for biographically-based fiction in the
twentieth century were already subjects
of traditional artist monographs and biog-
raphies that paired great accomplishments
with great suffering.8 By the mid-1980s,
the heightened appeal of artists who also
represented groups traditionally excluded
from the art-historical canon by the fact
of their gender, race, sexuality, or national
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origin opened the door to new subjects
for dramatization, such as Francis Bacon,
Basquiat, Camille Claudel, Artemisia
Gentileschi, and of course, Kahlo (Adair
52–55).
Kahlo, a bisexual, disabled woman of
mixed race from a postcolonial society,
is an ideal contemporary choice for a
fictionalized biography. She combines
a multicultural background with celeb-
rity credentials (a sex- and scandal-
filled life) that can be grafted onto an
established monographic literature that
already merged her art and her suffering.
Kahlo conforms to traditional (male)
artist stereotypes through depictions
that view her as self-taught, intuitive,
passionate, rebellious, antibourgeois,
hypersexual, suffering, and exceptional.
She conforms to stereotypes of women
artists through portrayals of her artistic
career as strongly influenced by older
male mentors (her father and her hus-
band). Kahlo’s life story commands
attention through biographers’ focus
on the emotional suffering caused by
her marriage, divorce, and remarriage
to Rivera and on the physical suffering
caused by polio, a trolley accident, and
numerous surgeries (including abor-
tions) throughout her life. The trolley
accident functions as the transformative
event of her life, as it is blamed for her
lifelong physical suffering and inability
to carry a fetus to term; this makes her
an exception to the maternal norm of
early-twentieth-century Mexico, while
it also inspired her to centralize the
childbearing experience in her work.
Not only did Kahlo describe her paint-
ing as compensation for her lost chil-
Life as Art/Art as Life
dren but also in her work she conflates
herself with her mother and Rivera with
her child (Herrera, Biography 317).
The trolley accident can also be con-
strued as rape trauma (Pratt 24–25). The
deformation of her leg from childhood
polio, exacerbated by the legacy of the
accident, also set her apart (in her own
mind) as grotesque; and her choice
of behavior, costume, and career have
been interpreted as efforts to restore her
lost sense of wholeness (Yang 127–28).
Her well-known bisexuality and numer-
ous extramarital affairs branded her
as hypersexual, hence an exception to
norms of heterosexuality, monogamy,
and female passivity. Kahlo’s recur-
rent images of nature, fecundity, Aztec
figures, and death tie her to the green-
world archetype found in earlier female
Kunstlerromane (Pratt 16). Finally,
Kahlo,
a bisexual,
disabled woman
of mixed race from
a postcolonial
society, is an ideal
contemporary
choice for a
fictionalized
biography.
Kahlo’s seemingly confessional, self-
revelatory, written and painted work
(in combination with interviews from
people who knew her) provide evidence
of a private life of pain and excess that
included hypochondria, Munchausen
syndrome, drug and alcohol addiction,
and suicidal episodes.
Kahlo’s appeal became so appar-
ent in the popular culture of the early
71
1990s that she could be said to have
attained cult status (Tully 126). Not
only had numerous new biographies
and monographs been published,
but also Kahlo herself had become a
well-known icon as her face appeared
almost everywhere. For example,
two new books featured photographs
exclusively of her; fashion spreads
appeared featuring the “Frida-look”
in Elle (May 1989) and Vogue (Febru-
ary 1990); billboard advertisements
for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s
1990 blockbuster exhibition Mexico:
Splendors of Thirty Centuries promi-
nently featured her face; and finally,
Madonna spent three months in 1990
publicizing her purchase of two Kahlo
paintings and announcing plans to play
the lead role in a film of a Kahlo biog-
raphy to which she owned the rights.
“Fridamania,” reached a fever pitch by
the end of the decade, laying a secure
groundwork for Kahlo’s incorporation
into fiction by making her familiar to a
mass audience (Plagens 54).9
Taymor’s film Frida, released in 2002
at the height of “Fridamania,” benefited
from Kahlo’s contemporary celebrity
status and the widespread popular famil-
iarity with her life story, particularly
the lifelong physical pain she endured.
Like the Herrera biography of Kahlo,
which the film credits as its source,
the film’s narrative is bracketed by
Kahlo’s physical decline and pending
death in the final fifteen months of her
life. Although death frames the story,
Taymor does not centralize Kahlo’s
suffering as Herrera’s biography did.
Her thematic focus is on the love story;
how Kahlo’s love of both Rivera and
life inspired and drove her to transform
her pain and suffering into creative
energy. In an interview with Bill Moy-
ers, Taymor stated that she conceived
the film as a love story where life tran-
scended pain, and art was created out
of the worst of circumstances. Taymor
believed that Kahlo’s enduring love for
Rivera was an integral part of who she
was and that their love was ultimately
triumphant (Taymor, AFI interview).
Taymor intended the film to convey
the passion of Frida Kahlo, in both the
religious and secular sense (Taymor,
Moyers interview).
 72
Taymor develops Kahlo’s intense
engagement with life as the outward
manifestation of her creative spirit. Her
passion to embrace life’s vicissitudes
was part of the same “genius” that
drove her art. Passion and art become
synonymous. Frida’s passion for living
transformed her life into art, and her
art was a literal representation of that
life. Taymor explicitly states that the
film does not interrogate the puzzle of
Frida’s creativity because the audience
already knows why she did the work:
Frida’s paintings are understandable by
knowing the events that led to them
(Taymor, AFI, interview). This is why
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Taymor rejected the idea that the film
was a biopic. Rather than being an
objective account of Kahlo’s life, it was
a subjective account, told from Frida’s
point of view, to convey an emotional
truth (Custen 6–8, 75; Taymor, AFI,
interview). The production designer
reinforced this point, describing the
film as an attempt to enter Frida’s mind
to see what material ultimately inspired
her paintings (Fernandez).
Taymor’s strategy for constructing
Frida’s life lived as art rests on the
association she develops between Frida
and premodern Mexico. Frida is char-
acterized with an appetite for life, a joie
de vivre (alegria) that sets her apart
from other characters, whose embrace
of life is tepid by comparison. Frida
experiences life with such an emotional
intensity and unrepressed earthiness
that she transforms the ordinary into
the extraordinary, turning the banal-
ity of existence into an art of living.
In her vitality, intensity, emotionality,
and rawness, Frida is the embodiment
of the spirit of premodern Mexico that
dominates the film’s mise-en-scéne. In
this, Taymor merely extends Kahlo’s
own embrace of Mexicanidad, the ide-
ology held by intellectuals and artists
in Mexico’s postrevolutionary period
that recognized the Indian and folk
heritage of Mexico as its true cultural
patrimony, while rejecting as formative
the influences of European politics and
arts during the Colonial era (Herrera,
Biography 24). Physical elements of
pre-modern Mexico, such as folk arts,
crafts, clothing, and rituals, abound
in Taymor’s mise-en-scéne and con-
JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television
stitute the raw materials Frida uses to
self-consciously fashion her life as art.
Even the saturated colors of premod-
ern Mexico that permeate the film,
created through digital enhancement,
reflect Frida’s vividness (Taymor, AFI,
interview).10 Examples of indigenous
architecture abound in the film and
include her home, the Casa Azul (which
only is painted bright blue when Frida
owns it); the local bars (pulquerias);
and the Pre-Columbian Pyramid of the
Moon at Teotihuacán. Folk art appears
throughout the film, from the papier-
mâché Judas figures, skeletons, and
calaveras that Frida collects, to the
pottery and pre-Columbian artifacts in
the Casa Azul, many of which share the
central patio with indigenous plants and
animals such as the itzcuintli (Mexi-
Taymor develops
Kahlo’s intense
engagement with life as
the outward
manifestation of her
creative spirit. Her
passion to embrace life’s
vicissitudes was part of
the same “genius” that
drove her art.
can dogs) and monkeys. Folk music
and folk characters are also abundant:
the song La Llorona (referring to the
Indian mistress of Cortes who cries
for her lost children) is sung twice
by different characters, one of whom
is La Pelona, the Mexican figure of
death. Mexican holidays, folk and reli-
gious rituals, and daily rituals of the
masses are also apparent throughout the
film.11 Although in real life Rivera was
intimately associated with Mexicani-
dad, he is associated in Taymor’s film
with international political and artistic
movements, particularly communism
and modern art, as opposed to the more
purely Mexican Frida.12
Even more intimately associated with
Frida’s life as art are her costumes,
jewelry, and hairstyles that are the most
consistent reminders of her identifica-
tion with her mestiza background and
premodern Mexico. Kahlo’s Mexicani-
dad was most strongly manifested in
her personal appearance, particularly
after she met Rivera (McCracken 244).
He encouraged her adoption of the dis-
tinctive, colorful, multitiered Tehuana
skirts and huipils as her signature style
after their marriage in 1929; years later,
he observed that her dress embodied
the national splendor (Tibol 25, 134).
Kahlo wore necklaces constructed of
large, pre-Columbian unpolished beads
made of jade, coral, and bone. She also
wore elaborately braided, beribboned,
and flower-decked coiffures. In the film
(as in life), Kahlo transformed herself
into a spectacle, literally becoming an
animated piece of Mexican folk art.
Taymor emphasized this point in scenes
where Kahlo is juxtaposed against con-
temporary settings in Mexico and the
United States and looks singularly, but
decoratively, out of place. Prior to her
marriage and during periods of separa-
tion from Rivera, Kahlo wore contem-
porary styles of dress.
One of the film’s most striking eli-
sions is the remarkable ease with which
the actress Salma Hayek became a sim-
ulacrum of the historical Kahlo, who is
shown to have transformed herself into
spectacle in a similarly effortless way.
In the film, the conventional, modern
Frida becomes the Mexicanidad Frida
simply by changing her clothes. This
conforms to the traditional cinematic
portrayal of beauty and the desire to
be a spectacle as innate, natural char-
acteristics of actresses and women in
general, rather than the end result of
makeup, wardrobe, lighting, and act-
ing (Wexman 145). That beauty is
constructed, and spectacle the product
of effort, is slighted as Taymor’s Frida
never reveals the hours it took to create
her public persona. She is also never

shown gauging its success: she is por-
trayed as if this was a presentation of
her “natural” self that required no artis-
tic intervention. The artifice of Kahlo’s
constructed persona asserted her politi-
cal beliefs, her national identity, and
her full immersion in art while draw-
ing attention away from her physical
deficiencies (the artistic failures), such
as her rotting teeth and foul breath,
the leg withered from polio, and the
corsets/braces from her surgeries (Her-
rera, Biography 223). To become the
public Frida, to persist in reprising the
spectacle, was Kahlo’s greatest asser-
tion of her passion for life. That she
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was fully aware of what she was doing
is manifested in her diary, where she
referred to herself as la gran oculta-
dora (the great concealor), and in her
images that perpetuate the enigma and
unchanging appearance of this con-
structed persona (Lowe 26).
The widespread belief that Kahlo’s art
was a transcription of her lived reality
relies heavily on the facts that she was
the subject of most of her paintings, that
the art-historical monograph tradition-
ally relied on biography to explain an
artist’s oeuvre, that Herrera’s influential
biography based its analysis of Kahlo
on the premise that she subsumed her
pain into paint, and that Kahlo herself
claimed that she merely painted her
own reality (Tibol 134, Herrera 266).
The simplest way Taymor communi-
cates that Frida’s art transcribed her life
was in showing the strikingly made-up
Hayek become a series of animated self-
portraits as she moved through settings
familiar from those paintings. Without
ever showing Frida painting one of her
several dozen self-portraits, they are
nevertheless always present. Taymor
ties Kahlo’s art literally to events in her
life in three ways: first, several scenes
in the film used the stylistics of Sur-
realism to show Frida’s point of view of
events, confirming that her subjective
point of view was different from every-
day realism and essentially aesthetic in
its distortions; second, Frida’s artistic
ability develops intuitively from her life
experiences, not from any training or
artistic influences of others; and finally,
the film’s repeated use of tableaux
vivants literalize the process by which
Life as Art/Art as Life
Frida used her life events as the direct
source for her art.
Taymor relied on the stylistics of
Surrealism to convey Frida’s subjec-
tive point of view. As filtered through
the sensibilities of the popular media,
Surrealism privileges the irrational, the
intuitive, and the dreamlike as mani-
fested in repressed emotions and desires
suddenly freed from the unconscious
Frida’s viewpoint is
expressionistically
distorted; hence when
she paints what she
sees, she is intuitively a
surrealist. These scenes
effectively undercut the
intellectuality and inten-
tionality that characterize
creativity in the arts.
(Stokstad 543). The first introduction of
the surreal occurs early in the film, in
the scene depicting Kahlo’s devastating
trolley accident. The realistic portrayal
of the causal events (one trolley pass-
ing another) gives way to a surrealistic
impression of the events. The normal
movement of Frida’s bus changes to
slow motion, while the normal sound-
ing crash becomes a cacophony of
distorted voices and music. A series
of disjointed, fragmented images fol-
low—a close-up of a bluebird released
from a hand, window glass shattering
like crystal, oranges rolling on a rough
wooden floor, people flying, and gold
pigment suffusing the air. Then, all
stops on a single, long overhead shot
of Frida who lies motionless on the
broken floor covered with blood and
gold, the only movement coming from
73
the gold pigment silently showering
down on the wreckage. As all color
slowly leaches into blue, the image dis-
solves into the next sequence, more sur-
real than the preceding one. Animated
Day of the Dead-style skeleton puppets,
with garish, blood-red tongues, appear
as doctors and nurses. They carry out
hospital work against a background of
distorted music until the scene finally
resolves into visual and aural clarity
as Frida regains consciousness in the
hospital after the accident. Both of these
sequences are startling departures from
the Hollywood realism that preceded
them and allow the viewers to experi-
ence the events through Frida’s per-
spective.13 Another perfectly surrealis-
tic moment shows Frida drinking in a
bar after Diego has requested a divorce.
She sees a skeleton in the mirror, super-
imposed over her own face, that dis-
solves into the face of an old woman
(identified as La Pelona in the credits)
singing La Llorona. Frida’s viewpoint
is expressionistically distorted; hence
when she paints what she sees, she is
intuitively a surrealist. These scenes
effectively undercut the intellectuality
and intentionality that characterize cre-
ativity in the arts.
Taymor also directly ties the genesis
of Kahlo’s painting career to her life
events. Frida only begins to draw after
the trolley accident; using her cast as
a canvas, she draws a butterfly as her
boyfriend announces he is leaving her.
Painting is shown to be a direct and
intuitive outgrowth of both her physical
and psychological injuries, and when
her butterfly-covered cast is finally
removed, Frida “emerges” as a full-
blown portrait painter. She surprises her
family with both her spontaneous talent
(with which she plans to support herself)
and dramatic demonstration that she
can walk again. Painting has “healed”
her; she takes her canvases to Rivera
whose approval and love stimulate her
“rebirth” as an authentic artist. The
extent of Frida’s formal artistic train-
ing in the film consists of her standing
in the darkroom with her photographer
father and watching Diego painting a
mural at the Preparatoria.
Taymor’s final formal strategy for
developing her thesis that Frida’s imag-
 74
ery was a literal and intuitive tran-
scription of her lived reality is her
extensive use of tableaux vivants used
in conjunction with canvases carefully
selected for their ability to be related
to actual events. The film’s first use
of this technique occurs in the wed-
ding sequence, which opens with Frida
wearing a traditional European bridal
gown. After a cut away, Frida reappears
wearing the green dress and red rebozo
worn by the maid in the first shot. The
next scene opens with what appears to
be a still shot of Kahlo’s painting Frida
and Diego Rivera (1931), accompanied
by dance music on the soundtrack.
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As the lighting subtly changes and
a slow dissolve begins, people dance
into the background behind the cen-
tral figures, who have now morphed
into the “live-action” Frida and Diego
(Hayek and Alfred Molina). Taymor
presents the painting as a literal record
of their wedding, despite the fact that it
postdated their marriage by two years;
that photographs of the wedding show
Kahlo wearing different clothing; and
that current art historians hypothesize
that the purpose of the painting was
not to celebrate Kahlo’s position as the
traditional adoring wife of Rivera, but
to assert her role as an artist, in direct
challenge to such traditional female
stereotypes (Lindauer 18–19).
The tableau vivant is used in con-
junction with the majority of Kahlo
paintings that appear in the film to illus-
trate their derivation from her life expe-
riences.14 For example, Taymor uses
Henry Ford Hospital (1932) to illus-
trate Frida’s miscarriage in Detroit; My
Dress Hangs There (1933) literalizes
Frida’s longing to return to Mexico; and
Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940)
records Frida’s response to discovering
Diego’s affair with her sister—leaving
him and altering her appearance. In
the film, Frida sits at an easel in her
almost empty, new apartment—wearing
a man’s suit, drinking, and cutting off
her long hair (destroying the Tehuana
persona). We see Frida in front of a
mirror followed by a tracking shot to
the painting Self Portrait with Cropped
Hair, then after a pause, the figure
in the painting (now the live-action
Frida) slumps in desolation and misery.
JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television
This occurs despite numerous anachro-
nisms and alternative interpretations of
the painting’s purpose as a challenge
to restrictive gender roles (Lindauer
40–43). Taymor uses The Two Fridas
(1939) to introduce the motif of blood
into a montage sequence that links
Frida’s despair over Diego’s request for
a divorce with the murder of her for-
mer lover Trotsky. The Broken Column
(1944) is animated to show fissures
representing Frida’s worsening medi-
cal condition. Finally, a model of The
Never does Taymor
go beyond the most
literal use of Kahlo’s
work, and never
is Kahlo credited with
the intellectual,
innovative, creative,
symbolic, or interpretive
work that constitutes
art practice.
Dream (1940) is animated with fire-
crackers exploding and the live-action
Frida smiling to close the narrative
by evoking Frida’s death and crema-
tion. Never does Taymor go beyond the
most literal use of Kahlo’s work, and
never is Kahlo credited with the intel-
lectual, innovative, creative, symbolic,
or interpretive work that constitutes art
practice.
Although her story centers on a
woman artist, Taymor’s film is more
concerned with explicating the woman
than the artist. In developing the Kahlo-
Rivera relationship in terms of a period
love story, Taymor relies heavily and
uncritically on the conventional gen-
der binaries that ascribe to men the
active, rational, creative, and generative
force of culture and to women the pas-
sive, irrational, and procreative force
of nature—along with the potential for
victimization. Taymor interprets Frida
as a woman whose emotional intensity
explains her life and her art. In this, the
film owes a debt as much to the film
genre of melodrama as to the biopic.
Frida utilizes melodrama’s emphasis
on excessive and exaggerated emotion-
alism, valorization of love and family
over success, and its concentrated focus
on the domestic realm to move viewers
to pathos for the suffering of its female
protagonist—who is so beset by over-
whelming forces that she is rendered a
victim (Leibman 16–17, 31; Williams
42). Additionally, the combination of
love, suffering, and death in Frida’s life
story follows the formula for the sub-
genre of romantic melodrama (the so-
called weepie or woman’s film), which
has a long cinematic history.
In a similar vein, other popular media
portrayals of Kahlo privilege the woman
over the artist in their treatment of her.
The vitality and endurance with which
Kahlo dealt with love, loss, pain, and the
constant presence of death become the
constants in all fictional treatments of
her. In several novels in 2000 and 2001,
including those by Fuentes, Delahunt,
and Mujica, Kahlo’s artwork (usually
the same paintings used by Taymor)
appears as a direct outgrowth of her life
events, carefully transcribed on canvas,
testifying to the authenticity and pas-
sion with which she lived her life. No
effort is made to understand the motiva-
tions that drove Kahlo’s creative work.
Her artistic identity remains an unex-
amined “given” in her character, while
all attention is focused on unraveling
the mystery of her ability to live pas-
sionately despite her suffering. Popular
works focusing on Kahlo published in
2002, such as those by Faucher, Maso,
and Braverman were even more con-
cerned with the audiences’ ability to
relate to the emotional nature of Frida,
to the point of merging audience and
subject to facilitate the vicarious expe-
rience of Frida’s life; Frida’s paintings
became completely irrelevant to the
authors’ efforts and usually were elimi-
nated from the text.

The attraction that Kahlo has exerted
on contemporary writers and filmmak-
ers focuses on her fervent embrace
of life despite the omnipresence of
death. They have constructed fictional-
ized Fridas to provide their audiences
with opportunities to vicariously relate
to the intensity of her feelings. The
fictions overlay her physical and men-
tal anguish with her joie de vivre and
vitality. The question they pose is not
how she endured a life of suffering, but
what aspects of her character drove her
“lust for life,” or what personality traits
allowed her to endure the agony of her
life in anticipation of its ecstasy. This
Downloaded by [Central Michigan University] at 04:49 22 December 2014
question constitutes what John Updike
has called the “could not be known” of
traditional biographies (98). In the case
of Kahlo, this has fueled the efforts to
use fiction to reveal the emotional truths
of her life. It is the mystery of personal-
ity, specifically a female personality,
not the mystery of artistic creativity,
that has driven the writers and film-
makers to construct their own Fridas
from traditional biographical sources.
All seem to have found enough pas-
sion and pain in her life to frame any,
and every, story they wanted to tell,
convinced that it would also appeal to
contemporary popular tastes. In the
process, the sources of Kahlo’s creativ-
ity and the meaning of her art remain as
enigmatic as ever.
NOTES
1. While life events could recount the
awakening of genius and frenzied gestures
could record the creative results, the inter-
nal nature of the process was essentially
unfilmable.
2. Lust for Life (Vincente Minelli, 1956);
The Agony and the Ecstasy (Carol Reed,
1965); both were based on novels by Irving
Stone.
3. Kahlo has been called the female van
Gogh by several writers, including Debo-
rah Solomon (31), Peter Plagens (54), and
David D’Arcy (49). A film, four novels,
prose poems, and a play all used a fictional-
ized Kahlo as a prominent character and all
defined her emotionality as the key to under-
standing her life and art. These include the
film Frida (Taymor, 2002); the four novels
Carlos Fuentes, The Years with Laura Diaz
2000, Meghan Delahunt, In the Casa Azul:
A Novel of Revolution and Betrayal (2001),
Barbara Mujica, Frida (2001), and Kate
Braverman, The Incantation of Frida K.
Life as Art/Art as Life
(2002); the book of prose poems, Beauty
Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo
(2002); and the play, Sophie Faucher, La
Casa Azul (2002). These were predated
by an earlier film, Frida: Naturaleza Viva
(Leduc, 1984).
4. For the purpose of this paper, “Frida”
refers to the fictional character portrayed
in Taymor’s film and other popular media,
while “Frida Kahlo” or “Kahlo” refers to the
actual, historical person.
5. Kahlo’s father was a German Jewish
immigrant to Mexico and spoke Spanish
with a heavy accent. Her early schooling
was European based, and she spoke and
read German fluently. Under the influence
of Mexicanidad, she shifted her ethnic iden-
tification away from her European ancestors
and toward the Indian heritage on her moth-
er’s side. She even changed the spelling of
her first name from the original Frieda.
6. Among the earliest treatments of Kahlo
are Hayden, “Frida Kahlo,” and Harris and
Nochlin (335–70). In both, the dominant
Kahlo themes are already present.
7. Throughout the biography, Herrera reit-
erates Kahlo’s obsession with her own suf-
fering and her use of art as both a means of
transcending pain and as a vehicle for the
frankest expression of herself, particularly
her lack of fulfillment (263, 283, 317, 346).
8. Biopics and historical novels of white,
European, male artists dominated the period
between the mid-1930s and the mid-1980s.
Van Gogh is the artist who has inspired
the most fictional treatment over time: as
Adair explains (51–52), biopics of Van
Gogh include: Lust for Life (1956), Vincent
(1987), Vincent & Theo (1990), and Van
Gogh (1991). Other traditional artist biopics
include Rembrandt (1936); Moulin Rouge
(1952), about Toulouse-Lautrec; The Moon
and Sixpence (1942), based on Gauguin,
from the W. Somerset Maugham novel;
Montparnasse 19 (1958) about Modigliani;
Caravaggio (1986); and Pollock (2000).
9. This occurs in conjunction with a contem-
porary reconceptualization of celebrity that
increasingly focused on narratives of tragedy,
confession, and female victimization.
10. In the AFI interview, Taymor said
that the color of 1920s Mexico was unpol-
luted and impossible to get in contemporary
Mexico. She was after the “true” colors of
Mexico, and those could only be obtained
through color correction done digitally.
11. For example, the film shows a scene
including a Day of the Dead celebration;
the Artesanias market where Frida pur-
chases papier-mâché Judas figures; open-air
markets; and the preparation of mole, a
traditional Mexican dish, as Lupe, Diego’s
former wife, teaches Frida how to prepare
his favorite meal.
12. For instance, the houses he builds for
them after their marriage are designed in the
contemporary Bauhaus style. Rivera and the
other Mexican muralists (such as Jose Cle-
75
mente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros)
were the artists most closely associated with
Mexicanidad. Rivera not only inspired Kah-
lo’s self-identification with the movement
by encouraging her to dress in indigenous
clothing but also suggested she paint on
metal to make her works look more like the
indigenous Mexican folk art called ex-votos
or retablos (Herrera, Biography 150).
13. Later in the film, Taymor again empha-
sizes Frida’s surrealistic worldview through
animated photo-montage sequences. One,
accompanied by Frida’s voice-over descrip-
tion, shows how she and Diego invaded
Gringolandia in 1930. This montage is
paired with a shorter one later in the film of
Frida’s trip to Paris.
14. There are a few paintings that are
shown, in passing, as completed works, such
as The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939), and
What the Water Gave Me (1938) which are
examined by Andre Breton.
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After close to five decades of relative stability and despite the incursions of
cable, the very nature of American television seems to be in flux. Industrial
practices that guided the medium since the 1950s are being abandoned.
Network production models, from primetime to documentary, are being
radically redrawn. Patterns of audience usage are shifting dramatically, to
the bewilderment of network executives who seem willing to embrace new
models of viewership (and economic support) at the drop of a hat. From iPods
to streaming video, the pursuit of a youthful demographic abounds. Viewing
trends that have been formalized for years in audience-behavior patterns,
such as flow, now appear washed away with the click-accessibility of Internet
TV. Even the very ways in which television can be watched seem to straddle diametrically opposing concepts, from theater-like
grandeur with massive high-definition screens to barely perceptible cell phones providing an image often no larger than a
postage stamp.

But in the midst of so much change, a deeper question emerges, particularly as the hours spent watching television continue to
grow and durable genres continue to remain, well, durable. Is the television experience dead and we just do not know it yet?
Are there still rules to follow in terms of network economic and programming practices?

This special issue is designed to focus on these concerns, exploring areas such as the following:

• With programs being watched on cell phones and high-definition televisions, what constitutes the viewing
experience today?
• What is national and international about twenty-first-century television? Is there now a global programming
structure which straddles all nations?
• What programs are representative of twenty-first century television and why?
• Have the boundaries between entertainment and news been erased forever?
• What traditions from the past can provide models for the future?
• If television programming is in flux, how has the economic foundation of the industry changed?
• Does the academy have to devise new theories to analyze twenty-first-century television?

We welcome a variety of academic, historical, critical, analytical, and theoretical approaches, as well as submissions from
authors in the popular press. Submissions should be limited to twenty-five pages, double-spaced, and conform to MLA style.
Please include a fifty-word abstract and five to seven key words to facilitate online searches. Send three copies (along with SASE)
no later than August 1, 2008 to:

Brian Rose
Department of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University
113 W. 60th Street, New York, NY 10023
bgrose@gmail.com
Ron Simon
Museum of Television and Radio
rsimon@mtr.org