Frida Kahlo
Isolte Avila as Frida Kahlo: still from Frida Kahlo's Corset.
Frida Kahlo's Corset - a film by Liz Crow
An award-winning short film about the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo will accompany a major exhibition of the artist's work to be held at Tate Modern in London on show until October 2005. Colin Hambrook saw the film and caught up with the artist, for a brief moment in her busy schedule.
Frida Kahlo's Corset by Liz Crow is a short experimental drama that follows a journey of transformation by the painter (1907-1954) who wore a series of orthopaedic corsets because of impairment. Frida Kahlo was an artist I paid special attention to during my college days, so when I first saw Liz Crow's film at the LDAF Film Festival a few years ago, I was very excited to find another artist who appreciated the richness of the colour and symbols Frida Kahlo thrilled in, with all the beauty, intensity and pain which underpinned her life. I related to her painting, because she used the medium in a surreal and poetic way to make very tangible statements about her life's experience.
Talking about her motivation for making the film Liz Crow says:
From her 30s until her death at 47, Kahlo wore a series of orthopaedic corsets, including a plaster cast version, that surrounded her from chest to waist. For someone as colourful, sensual and all-woman as Kahlo, this harsh and clinical object must have been an assault. But she painted the casts with motifs from her paintings and her life, turning them into an extension of her self.The film evokes a woman who revels in her identity as an artist and as a disabled person. With relish it displays various quotes from Frida Kahlo's diary, which sum up the strength and passion of her personality:This was something that rang so true to my own experiences of impairment and self-image that I wanted to bring it to film. So much of what is written about Kahlo is about tragedy and suffering and I wanted to present a very different perspective. She struggled, true, but as an absolute survivor, not a victim. This film shows a transformation as she establishes a new sense of self.
Frida Kahlo's Corset has won the Picture This Short Film Award and received an Honourable Mention at the Calgary Film Festival. Frida is played by Isolte Avila from Sign Dance Collective. The film has also screened at Arnolfini, Bristol (alongside Miramax feature film Frida); National Film Theatre; Brief Encounters Short Film Festival; British Federation of Film Societies; Munich Festival of Short Films; Herland Festival, Canada; Disability Film Festivals (London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Calgary, Toronto, Moscow); Bird's Eye View; and on HTV and Sky Television.All the cripples of Mexico have come to kiss me. For only a mountain can understand a mountain.
In gringo land the people wear the faces of uncooked bread. There I'm cut and wrapped and bound. My blood oozes a tale of others' fears.
Oh this crab shell it captures my pain, my pictures, my pleasure. But did you not know that crabs scuttle sideways.
I am sun, moon and curious morning, winged pillar a thousand years wise, portrait of Mexico. See me fly.
Frida Kahlo's Corset will be screened as part of Angel of Fire Programme, Sundays 10 July, 7 August, 4 September, 9 October, at 3.00 pm in the Tate Modern Starr Auditorium.
Related links
To see the film, plus an analysis by Deirdre Guthrie go to Liz Crow's site at: www.roaring-girl.com
last updated: 2005-03-01 00:00:00
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