FRIDA_ a film by Julie Taymor

Hello Everyone,

Congratulations, everybody picked up really good movies so far and I'm very excited to see the results.

Since our last class, I watched a lot of old and new movies, the ones that I saw and watched over and over and also some I never watched before.. It's true Tamar, there are LOTS of great movies out there, it was hard to pick one up.

For the ones who don't know I would strongly recommend Brooklyn Library's Media Library department which is downstairs of Brooklyn Library building, it's open till 11 pm during weekdays and there's a great archive. You can watch either there or take DVD's, VHS's out with your student ID's for free..

Saying that I would like to talk about the movie I picked for this assignment, it's FRIDA. It's a film made by Julie Taymor in 2002 based on the book Frida by Hayden Herrera which tells the real-life story of artist Frida Kahlo(1907-54).

The reason I picked this movie is first, because I really like Frida's paintings a lot and I thought that would be a great element to play with in the opening credits.

The movie is great as well, it won Academy Awards for Best Makeup and Best Music, Original Score. It was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Salma Hayek), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Costume Design and Best Music, Original Song..

The Movie focuses on the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera whose lives were bound up with some of the great issues of the twentieth century. The Mexican and Russian Revolutions, Trotskyism and Stalinism, socialism and art.

Besides providing a skeletal biography of Frida Kahlo, essentially devoid of historical, political and artistic analysis, another reason for me to pick up this movie was how director Taymor spiced up the movie with some great graphics, animation and puppetry that would help me to build up the graphics for my version of opening titles for this movie.

Frida begins and ends with the artist’s trademark colors surrealistically grafted onto scenes of her courtyard, where monkeys and peacocks magically wander among the flowering cactuses. A masterful use of puppets occurs in the unsettling dream sequence when chattering Day of the Dead figures minister to Kahlo in the hospital after her near-fatal accident. In a jarring manner, paintings come into being in “real time.” Kahlo’s famous self-portrait with fetus springs forth graphically from the misery and pain of her miscarriage. Human beings flatten into painting surfaces and paintings become three-dimensional. In New York City, Frida’s emotional state concerning Diego’s womanizing is given visual expression in the King Kong mechanical cut-out sequence, with Kong-Diego terrorizing the city and meeting his demise atop the Empire State building.

Despite this rich usage of graphics in the movie, the original opening titles integrate with some simple script font to the footage at the start of the movie. It's a great camera movement and compositionally it works very good but I'm still curious how it would look with a graphical approach.

I want to make a good search of Frida's paintings, her early and late works that I could use in the opening. I read that some of the paintings used in the movie were made by Salma Hayek, so I will take a look at those as well, and may be draw myself to get things work, it sounds exciting, we'll see..

good luck

nesli