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| Ten years to the screen, a labor of love for Salma Hayek |
Each May, I have a tradition of watching the film Frida with Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina, directed by Julie Taymor (of Broadway's Lion King fame), written by Edward Norton. Frida Kahlo's rebellious spirit and then revolutionary spirit, relationship with Trotsky among others, made her infamous or inspiring, depending on your viewpoint. Regardless of what was happening to her, or what she was getting into, she loved a good party.
What many people love about her work is its dedication to her own personal experience of life, when everyone else was painting huge murals of great social unrest and governmental change. Many of her paintings are very tiny, like her own frame. She pushed her pain-wracked body into the larger world of philosophical circles, travel and celebrity, but she also inserted her personality into that larger world, with a purposefully rustic naturalism.
She stares at us from the cover of Vogue with her unibrow un-retouched, while starlets were shaving theirs to look like Jean Harlow or Marlene Dietrich. She isn't draped in metallic satins and fur, but wears the primary colored dyes of her homeland, with ruffles and embroidery. She wasn't unaware, just determinedly unsophisticated. I imagine it probably took just as much thought and effort to be that way as it was for a Hollywood glamour girl.
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| "A Woman of Power" Vogue Paris issue 1938 |
Like a true Neitzchean, and with a strange twist on her Marxism, the force of her will is what landed her on the currency of her country. Perhaps her fame and the commercial aspect of her image was part of the choice of the Mexican government to use it in its capitalist economy. But the strongest current about her, apart from politics and the trappings of the art world, was her humanity. That is what stamped itself, without boots on the ground, all over the map.
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| Ironically, her portrait is less idealized than her true image |
To see an interview with Salma Hayek, go to the next post.
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