From Laura Mulvey'sFrida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1984), directed past Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen

In my experience, it'south hard to come across an analysis of Frida Kahlo that doesn't obsessively fixate on her biography. Simply a 1984 movie by the filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey intrigues me for its specific angle: Kahlo'due south relationship with the political photographer Tina Modotti. You might have caught a very different glimpse of this in the Hollywood movieFrida, but Mulvey'southwardFrida Kahlo and Tina Modotti is not only more essayistic and thoughtful in tone, simply offers actual footage and photographs of the two artists in Mexico Urban center. Similar all of Mulvey's films, this one is staunchly feministand sets out to show how both artists "provoked and defied swell categorization" about what it meant to exist a woman and an artist and then.

Screening this Th at the Seward Park co-operative of the New York Public Library in 16mm, the movie (co-directed by Peter Wollen) is also insightful of mail-revolutionary Mexico, a both violent and culturally vibrant time. It compares Kahlo's and Modotti's corresponding responses: the sometime painting in her blue house in Coyoacan and the latter traveling the world to return to United mexican states City and document social change with her camera.

Both women were also romantically involved with Diego Rivera, and both announced in his 1929 landscape at the Ministry building of Pedagogy in Mexico Urban center. But every bit the writer of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" — amongst the first essays to apply a feminist psychoanalytic reading to movies and to critique Hollywood'south subjugation of women — Mulvey makes sure to not make Rivera a focus.

When:Thursday, May 17, half dozen:30–8pm
Where: Seward Park Library, Community Room (192 Due east Broadway, Lower East Side, Manhattan)

More info at the New York Public Library.

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Elisa Wouk Almino is a senior editor at Hyperallergic. She is based in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram. More by Elisa Wouk Almino