Frida, Still Life

13th July, 1954. The coffin with the body of Frida Kahlo is brought to the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Diego Rivera covers it with a communist flag. This is the second Leduc’s fiction film and his most acclaimed. His baroque approach—akin to Werner Schroeter’s—allows to escape the conventions of biopic via disjointed narrative and extensive use of mirrors in mise-en-scene. Reflections are always important in Leduc’s oeuvre: who looks at whom? Since Frida Leduc loses interest in words (mainly Leon Trotsky retreats to a speech) and starts using circular composition, abolishing the linear concept of time.