翻出大一写作课写的影评，课程主题是残疾在文学和影视里的representation. 现在看有很多尴尬用语和语法错误，但还是记录一下。

The first thing that comes to your mind when thinking about Frida Kahlo might be those half-length self-portraits depicting her iconic unibrow and her determined and almost disdainful gazes. Behind her upright posture and expressionless face, she actually underwent many adversities throughout her life. She contracted polio at six, which caused the unbalanced development of her legs. At the age of eighteen, she suffered a severe bus accident. Her spine was broken and her pelvis was impaled by a metal rod, which confined her to bed for months and left her with disabilities and continual medical problems. The bibliographic movie Frida (2002) shows how she handles pain from her disabled body and her complicated marriage with Diego Rivera while continuing to create artwork that reflects these struggles. Kahlo was once a medical school student, but her life trajectory was completely changed by her disabilities. They prompted her to pick up her childhood hobby, painting, as a career and has been a central theme throughout her artistic career. Disabilities are generally regarded as obstacles to productivity by society, yet Kahlo demonstrates it to be the opposite. The experience of disability is a source of Frida Kahlo’s creative production, shaping her artistic expression. Reciprocally, art supports her to reflect her affects, identity, strengths, and vulnerabilities related to her disabilities.

Kahlo’s disabled body and her artistic creation are interdependent: her body is the source of materials for her paintings, while painting is an indispensable means to channel the pain from her disabled body. In Pain and the Paintbrush, Fernando Antelo points out that patients living with pain are acutely aware of their bodies in ways that healthy people may not be. Multiple scenes in the movie convey Kahlo’s amplified consciousness and sensitivity to her disabled body, such as her confession of “I have a scar” before undressing in front of Rivera, which reveals her inmost insecurity no matter how confident she appeared to be at the party before. Another example is the close-up shot on her feet, which shows how concentrated and careful she is as she tries to walk for the first time after her bus accident. The scene mirrors Kahlo’s awareness and let the audience feel how her emotions and perceptions are closely related to her body and physical conditions. Combined with Kahlo’s interest in human bodies as a former medical student, her continuous attention supports the recurring use of her own body as a subject in her paintings and ensures that her depictions are not repetitive each time.

On the other hand, Kahlo relies on painting to cope with the pain brought by her disabled body. The opening scenes of Kahlo excitedly running through the college hallway and chasing the bus emphasize the energy inside Kahlo’s young body before the accident. Her later inability to move and control her body conflicts with her active nature, amplifying her pain and helplessness beyond the extent of physical suffering. She turns to painting as a way of enduring her mental pain almost instinctively, which is demonstrated through how she responds to the breakup proposed by her college lover. She hastily picks up a pencil and scrawls butterflies on her plaster cast, meanwhile warning him to better believe that she will walk again. Drawing serves as an immediate shift of focus, supporting her to put up a tough attitude against traumas. At this stage, it can be considered as a reflexive self-defense mechanism.

As Kahlo later chooses art as a career and her body as a major subject, she exploits painting to reflect on her body and channel her pain in a more conscious way. In Pain and Knowledge, Eva Marxen examines multiple female artists who express suffering in their art and compares creating art with therapeutic sessions. She suggests that both set a safe and repetitive framework that provides the ground for understanding and transcending pain. Jo Spence, one of the artists discussed in the paper, said that “repeating the same thing again and again allows us to examine its components in order to deconstruct and to understand it”. Kahlo’s art also shows a characteristic of repetition in terms of using her body as the subject. Even with the same subject, her depictions range from her well-dressed body with a background of lush plants to her naked and scarred body in an open plain. These variations of body forms and contexts show Kahlo’s attempt to understand pain by analyzing her body as one of the roots of her pain, and to transcend pain by exploring the possibilities of her body other than a source of pain. In contrast with the variations of her body images are her invariable facial expressions in these self-portraits. She usually gazes at the audience, hardly showing any emotions. This is rare since disabled and female subjects in paintings are usually receivers of viewers’ gazes. Yet Kahlo directly confronts the viewers, showing indifference to any of their responses to her image. According to Hayden Herrera, an art historian who wrote a biography of Kahlo, painting self-portraits might serve as a form of exorcism to project her anguish outward onto an alternative self who can put up with it. Painting gives Kahlo the strength to confront her pain, her disabled body and other’s perceptions of her.

By creating another self with art, Kahlo consciously controls how she wants her body to be perceived by others. Although her paintings are autobiographical, they are artistically manipulated by Kahlo. Through some of her self-portraits, it is hard for the audiences to realize the extent of Kahlo’s disabilities because of her choice of frame, which only includes the nondisabled part of her body above the shoulder. Besides painting, Kahlo uses clothes to shape her image. Her distinctive look is wearing a Tehuana dress, a traditional Mexican costume that has long skirt and square blouse. A magazine article reporting a V&A exhibition of Kahlo’s clothing mentions that her adoption of this dress expresses her ethnic roots and, more importantly, hides her feeble legs and medical corsets underneath. The same is demonstrated in the movie: Kahlo only wears knee-length skirts before the bus accident. These show that her artistic expression is affected by her awareness of disabilities. She doesn’t want others to perceive her body merely as disabled and therefore builds distinctive self-images to redirect their attention to what she wants to show, such as her Mexican pride, and her serenity and confidence expressed in her close-up portraits. In this way, art empowers Kahlo over her audiences. Her body turns from an object receiving nondisabled gazes to a subject that conveys her opinions and feelings to people. Art also empowers Kahlo over her disabilities. In paintings like Henry Ford Hospital and The Broken Column, she turns her body inside out, cutting it up, and placing her organs and veins outside of it. Her manipulation of body parts can be interpreted as her resistance against her limited control over the body in the reality. Kahlo’s disabilities shape her self-representation in art, and art gives her the power that would otherwise be limited by her disabilities.

Beneath the self-images intentionally shaped by Kahlo, her art still exhibits the complexity of her identity, which can be caused by the experience of disability. In Frida Kahlo and Pendular Disability Identity, Elizabeth Jones applies Karen K. Yoshida’s model of pendular reconstruction of self and identity to examine Kahlo’s expression of identity in her diary. The pendular model consists of five different identity reconstruction outcomes for adults who were not born with their disabilities, which makes it appropriate for analyzing Kahlo’s situation. I will discuss three of the outcomes in this essay, which are “the supernormal identity”, “the disabled identity as part of the total self”, and “the disabled identity as the total self.” “The supernormal identity” is manifested when an individual wants to overcome their physical limitations. Kahlo is determined to not be constrained by her disabilities during her recovery after the bus accident, as she tells her father that “I hope to be a self-sufficient cripple one day”. She comes up with creative ways to overcome the inconvenience to paint with her disabilities. A mirror is installed above her bed, allowing her to observe herself even when lying on the bed. Another scene also shows that she paints in a poor health condition and in an uncomfortable position on her stomach as her head is held fast by straps and wrapped in bandages. The process of creating arts despite her physical difficulties shows that Kahlo tries to achieve the supernormal self.

Yet, the pendular model suggests that the person with disability may oscillate between the five identity views depending on their life situations. “The supernormal self” is not Kahlo’s only view of herself. Kahlo creates The Broken Column after she knows that part of her leg has to be amputated as a result of gangrene. Unlike her other expressionless self-representations, the Kahlo in this portrait is crying. Kahlo gives up on holding on to a stoic self-image, explicitly showing both her physical and emotional vulnerabilities. When her health condition is worsened, she takes “the disabled identity as her total self”, admitting her helplessness to her body and expecting others to empathize with her. In other periods of her life, she seeks the balance between transcending and yielding to disabilities, accepting her “disabled identity as an aspect of the total self”. At the end of the movie, Kahlo cannot attend her first solo exhibition in Mexico because she isn’t allowed to leave the bed. She thereupon hires workers to move her bed with herself lying on it to the exhibition, telling them “careful, guys. This corpse is still breathing”. She acknowledges her physical limitations but doesn’t want to sacrifice her pursuit of art because of these limitations. Her self-mockery shows that her sufferings make her feel closer to death, yet she uses art to document her survival from the pain. Kahlo’s different self-perceptions show a dynamic relationship between her and her disabilities, which is reflected in her artwork and art journey, and gives them dimensions.

Kahlo’s art is centered around herself, and she constantly expresses that her work can’t mean anything to anyone but herself. However, her paintings turn out to evoke empathy and have a huge influence on people with or without disabilities. This power of her works lies in her courage and honesty to directly depict disabilities—one of the taboos—and pain—one of the most difficult topics in life. Kahlo lived in mid-twentieth-century Mexico. The government promoted strong bodies to be the crucial parts of a strong nation after the Mexican Revolution. Some provinces even adopted a eugenics-based sterilization law. Studies also indicate that ambivalence over emotional expression is associated with greater pain and maladjustment. People with pain fear the consequences of expressing their emotions even though they desire to. It is hard to not internalize the shame of disabilities in this environment, which makes Kahlo’s revelation of her disabled body in paintings especially courageous. To keep her authenticity, she stands out to make a different voice, choosing to convey what she is most concerned about even though it is sensitive and stigmatized.

By showing her feelings through art, Kahlo confronts things that are difficult for both herself and her audience. Although painting might be therapeutic in certain ways as mentioned before, each of her examinations on pain is not always easy. Just like how therapy is helpful, but the process can still be challenging. It takes courage for Kahlo to revisit some of her most painful experiences, and reflect them in depth in order to paint them. This is visualized in the scene in which Kahlo depicts her miscarriage and her bodily weakness in her painting Henry Ford Hospital. The painting’s subject is her unborn child, which forces her to look directly at the source of her sorrow. Some of Kahlo’s paintings are difficult not only for her to create but also for the audiences to view. A Few Small Nips was created after Diego cheated with Kahlo’s sister, in which a bare woman covered with blood and wounds lies on a bed beside a male killer. Lupe Marin, Diego’s ex-wife and Kahlo’s friend, comments that “They [your paintings] are tough. I mean look at this, what the hell is this.”The straightforwardness of Kahlo showing scars, blood, and broken body parts demonstrate a sense of cruelty in her paintings, which evokes emotional disturbance among people. Kahlo’s works are impactful since people can feel her courage to transform her physical and emotional vulnerabilities into art, and her honesty to share them with the world.

Many artists with disabilities are excluded from the mainstream, yet Kahlo’s art gains popularity and influence. People tend not to view her depictions of her disabled body as social spectacles or label her art as disability art. What makes her art break through the public’s stereotypical views is that she goes beyond the one-dimensional representation of the disabled body, discussing the universality and complexity in disabilities. Kahlo’s self-portraits with stoic faces are touching since her disabled body speaks for her. The injuries and illness are the appearances of her body; the audience can also perceive the underlying emotions and reflections, which are the essence of her depictions. As Trotsky comments on Kahlo’s arts, “your paintings express what everyone feels, that they are alone, in pain.” Though not everyone’s loneliness and pain come from disabilities, these emotions are universal, and therefore the art connects different people. Another thing Kahlo does in art is intertwining her disability identity with her other identities. Kahlo painted her corset with an image of a fetus at the position of her womb, combining her identity as a mother with her disabilities. In Marxism will give health to the sick, Kahlo wears her corset but is held upright with two huge hands that symbolize Marxism. She takes advantage of her physical image to demonstrate her political standpoint. Though disability is a central theme in Kahlo’s art, it is not the only theme; similarly, though disability affects Kahlo’s life in a profound way, it does not define her life. By incorporating disability with other aspects of herself, Kahlo’s art is enriched so that it cannot be described by a single label of “disability art.”

The experience of disability serves as a source of Kahlo’s artistic creation, and reciprocally, art supports her to deal with disabilities. Through art, she copes with her emotions, shapes her self-representation, discusses her identities, and demonstrates her strength as well as vulnerabilities that are related to her disabilities. The courage, honesty, universality and complexity in her works make people acknowledge her art. Besides Kahlo, the experience of disabilities also shapes many other artists’ expressions. In modern arts, Edgar Degas and Claude Monet’s well-formed styles were altered by their loss of vision. Their disabilities changed their palettes and made their paintings increasingly abstract and rough, taking their impressionism to another level. Since the disability art movement started in the 1970s, more disabled artists create art in a variety of forms to reflect their experience. The attitude towards disability is shifting: It is not regarded as an impediment to creation but a meaningful subject for creation. Though the motivation to create art is not the same for all artists with disabilities, disability provides them a different scope to perceive and present life.

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