Director Carla Gutierrez Examines Frida Kahlo’s Life Through Film

Quite a lot, it turns out. Premiering at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Frida won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award for U.S. Documentary. Streaming now on Amazon, it was nominated for the Truer Than Fiction Award at the upcoming Independent Spirit Awards. 

“It feels really great to have gotten here,” Gutierrez tells Art & Object. “I’m so proud of the film, and I’m enjoying any recognition it gets, and especially the team I put together. The creative team is all Latinx, except for two people, so that has been really special.”

A cradle-to-grave biopic, Frida covers the great artist’s early life with her German father and mestiza mother, her schoolgirl and formative years, and the legendary bus accident that left her in pain for the rest of her days. Husband Diego Rivera plays a charismatic if caddish role in her life which was defined by pain, frustration, passion, and loneliness up until her premature death at the age of 47.

What sets Gutierrez’s film apart is its emphasis on her diary and correspondence, providing a personal look that has rarely been achieved on film. The cornerstone of most scholarly research on Kahlo is Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biography, Frida. 

Gutierrez and her team relied so heavily on it that they decided to contact Herrera and see if there were more documents to mine. She told them she sent everything to the Smithsonian, but she was mistaken. A subsequent search turned up transcripts from interviews that had not been used in previous films. 

For Kahlo, sun is happiness, brown is molé, yellow is sickness, red is blood, and black is nothingness. Color and tone matter, which is why the film’s animators went out of their way to visit museums in Mexico for verification. 

“The whole concept of animation was to bring it into a cinematic state, which moves very differently than looking at a painting in a museum. So, it took a lot of conversations about what she meant, and what it is that we’re taking from the painting emotionally. For me, the paintings were a voiceover ‘cause they were so connected to her life and her feelings.”

Kahlo’s 1931 trip to New York with Rivera left her with a sour taste for the U.S. and its people. While there, the two communists found themselves mixing with wealthy capitalists while bearing witness to the squalor of the city’s poor and indigent. 

“She came from Mexico with an empathy for the oppressed. So, for her spending time in New York with rich people, she could see the economic disparity, especially during the Depression. As an immigrant, I can say you see it when you get here,” says Gutierrez, who came from Panama to the U.S. to pursue a career as a film editor. Among her many credits is the Oscar nominated RBG about late Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg. 

“It was a shock when I came to America and I went to the grocery store. It was shocking to see so many products and everything wrapped in three levels of plastic. I think she experienced the extremes. We’re in the belly of the monster when we talk about capitalism and coming to America. 

And I can tell you, coming from the global south to here, it's very present all around you. I think she had a similar impression. How many clothes you’ll own, how many pairs of shoes, it’s very different from other parts of the world.”

Kahlo had many lovers, male and female, including people like Georgia O’Keeffe, Isamu Noguchi, and Leon Trotsky. But, her one true love was the man who caused her almost as much pain as the crippling accident of her youth— her husband. 

“Some people see that relationship as a model for openness, but it wasn't like she was content and happy with the open marriage. There was jealousy. She felt sadness and abandonment, and at the same time, she sought out the feeling of love and other people's attention. If he hadn't been in other relationships, I don’t know how much she would have gone outside the marriage. 

I think she would, because she responded to her desire. A lot of people think her relationship with Diego was very equal and open, because of who she was. But, it fell into gender normative dynamics of a heterosexual couple. He had the power, she didn’t.”

Kahlo’s artwork means different things to different viewers. André Breton insisted she was a surrealist, despite her own reservations about being labeled such. Some see the flowers and monkeys that often crowd her canvases as signifiers of a free spirit. But Gutierrez sees something else.

“Somebody facing pain straight on, that’s how her work spoke to me,” she observes. “It’s a combination of physical and emotional. There’re a lot of paintings that are based on emotional wanting, and a lot of it is because of Diego. Facing her own personal pain is what made her the artist that she was.”

Some say the months of bedridden convalescence following her bus accident as a teenager were instrumental in making her an artist. While it marks a shift in her attention away from medicine, she was painting mostly portraits, honing her craft. Gutierrez notes a separate incident she believes marks the most significant shift. 

“The miscarriage in Detroit made her the artist that she became for the rest of her life. It was when she looked inward dealing with her pain— you see what the surrealists called surrealism, but she called her own reality. Everything she feels she puts openly on the surface.”

At the end of her life, she had her right leg amputated. She was dependent on painkillers and the controlled brush strokes cultivated since childhood, when she used to retouch her father’s photographs, became blurrier. 

She had pneumonia and was in generally poor health at the time of her death, though some believe she committed suicide, despite the lack of evidence, pointing only to the fact that she had attempted it twice before. 

Frida Kahlo was found dead in her bed at Mexico City’s Hospital ABC the morning of July 13, 1954. Her last drawing was a black angel accompanied by the words, "I joyfully await the exit— and I hope never to return – Frida."

“There was an interview we found from her lover who talks about going to the hospital and having a sexual moment,” Gutierrez smiles. “Even though she just had surgery, she was still feeding her desires. She never lost that passion she had.”