Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti - ACE119.2

Commentary says that Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti defy neat characterisation into personal or political. Caption: "This film in about two women whose paths crossed in this mural, painted by Diego Rivera, in the Ministry of Education, Mexico City, 1929." View of the mural (Ballad of the Revolution, 1923-1928) to include the images of Kahlo and Modotti. Caption: "Women, Mexico, Art, Revolution: despite all that they both had in common, their lives and their work are strikingly different." Caption: "Frida Kahlo. The Mexican Revolution gave artists the chance to renew their national culture. Frida Kahlo became a painter inspired by popular traditions." Caption: "Tina Modotti. The new Mexico aroused the enthusiasm of foreign artists. Tina Modotti stayed to become a photographer and revolutionary." Captions: "Each defined herself differently in the face of the necessities and accidents of history and biography, and in relationship top her own body. Yet both were women artists working consciously in the context of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, a time of violent upheaval and cultural awakening." HISTORY. CIVIL WAR AND REVOLUTION. Processed images from actuality material of armed Mexicans; troops and others standing on moving railway trucks; a firing squad; dead bodies; covering over a mass grave; victory processions. Commentary gives some basic facts about the 1911 revolution and the resulting civil war. POPULAR LIFE AND CULTURE. Contemporary footage of village life, market, street traders, fairground roundabout, etc. ROOTS. Caption: "Movement: Frida Kahlo was born in her parents’ house in Coyoacan in 1907. She died in the same house in 1954." Text accompanied by painting My Parents, My Grandparents, and I (1936). Portrait of Frida’s Family (c.1950-1954), set againt the landscape of Mexico, Portrait of Don Guillermo Kahlo (1952), Frida and Diego Rivera (1931), Self-portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937). The Two Fridas (1939): commentary says that Kahlo understood her double nationality (German father, Mexican mother) but also identified very much with Mexico. Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the U.S.A. (1932), My Nurse and I (1937), Roots (1943. The Deceased Dimas (1937). Ex voto paintings including The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939) and Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick (c.1954). The same sequence of paintings shown in reverse order. Caption: "Movement: Tina Modotti was born into a poor family in Udine, Northern Italy, in 1896. She died, stateless, in Mexico, in 1942." Some of Modotti’s photographs of Mexican folk art and customs; photographs of marionettes and their operators; part of a series of industrial photographs made to illustrate a volume of avant garde poetry; political imagery, including the use of symbols of the Mexican revolution and international Communism. The same sequence of photographs shown in reverse order.