Frida Kalho: the look of cinema

Abstract

The film biography titled Frida [2002] produced by the American director and director Julie Taymor, relates the life of the Mexican painter while
being inspired mainly by the book which devoted Hayden Herrera to him. It recounts the tumultuous life of the artist since his young student life,
his accident and his passionate relationship with the muralist Diego Rivera.
Numerous references to Frida Kahlo’s paintings are included in the scenography and recall the richness and complexity of her work: more than one
hundred and forty paintings, of which fifty are self-portraits, which come in different themes: politics, Mexicanism, love, nature, suffering, femininity or even death.
It is from the analysis of a particular scene [which galvanizes the radicality of the abortion test and offers a framework for the expression of the temporality specific to this event, which I qualify as traumatic] that this article, which stands at the crossroads of cinema and psychoanalysis, explains a
decisive stage in the creative process in Frida Kahlo.
Here, the examination of the dialectic between creative process and trauma, allows us to grasp, in the nascent state, the implementation of modes of
pictorial creation which sign a new temporality in his pictorial art.
Beyond that, the challenge of the biopic is to succeed on the one hand in weaving, modeling, staging and images the life of this extraordinary artist;
and on the other hand to allow the spectator to discover the entanglement between the creative subjectivity of the artist and his work.