While I had heard about Frida Kahlo a long time ago, I watched the movie Frida for the first time this semester. Up until this point, whenever I heard the story of her life people always chose to begin with her accident. While definitely an important part of her life, the moments before the accident also played a role in her relationship to art. By choosing to make her accident the beginning point of her life, it frames her life as one defined by pain and suffering. As if her art stemmed entirely from these defining factors. While this may be the case, I really liked that in the movie chose to begin a moment before the bus accident. It showed her as a preconscious young woman. I think this precociousness and fearlessness are of equal importance in her art as the pain that she dealt with her entire life.
I felt the same way! I also really appreciated that, for the first time, I wasn’t presented with a biography about Frida Kahlo that began with her accident.
I totally agree with this! In some ways, I feel like her precociousness and fearlessness, as you say, are so apparent in all of her art, but so often ignored because its so easy to say that all of her art comes as a result of the accident and not the person that she grew to be before the accident even happened.
I, too, had just watched the movie for the first time this semester and appreciated the way it didn’t start with her accident and use that as the main focus. When I first learned about Frida Kahlo, I was taught about her mostly in reference to her accident and how she transferred her pain to the canvas, so this movie was a great deviation from the norm.