The beauty of Rodrigo Prieto's cinema

by Cláudio Alves

Our look at 2005's Best Cinematography Oscar nominees continues. First, we explored the filmography of Australian wonder Dion Beebe, and now it's time to shine a light on another master cineaste, this one from Mexico. 

Throughout his career, Rodrigo Prieto has worked with a variety of artists and projects, spanning from independent shorts to internationally acclaimed auteur cinema, from pictures full of Oscar buzz to Taylor Swift video clips. His big breakthrough came in 2000 with Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Amores Perros and, since then, he's become a name known to any cinephile worth their mettle. In those early projects, Prieto's style was mostly identifiable by a passion for high-contrast imagery with coarse, grainy textures, but, over the years, he's evolved into a creator of sober imagery that's more interested in evoking a severe elegance than dazzling with aggressive stylings.

Here are 10 highlights from Prieto's enviable filmography…

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By a nose...

by Cláudio Alves

When presenting the Best Actress Oscar during the 75th Academy Awards, Denzel Washington famously said "by a nose" before announcing Nicole Kidman as that year's winner for her work in The Hours. It was a reference to the way that, throughout that awards season, the actress's prosthetic enhanced transformation into Virginia Woolf had caused much controversy. Some people appreciated how Kidman left vanity at the door and allowed herself to be made unrecognizable, while many others found it to be distracting. In any case, it was a good booster to her Oscar campaign. The quality of a performance notwithstanding, there are few things that the Academy loves more than beautiful celebrities de-glamming.

Unfortunately, as it sometimes happens, while the performer was showered in gold, the team of makeup artists that made the physical transformation possible was left unrecognized. In the case of The Hours, they were even made ineligible…

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The Furniture: On Frida's Mirrors and Diego's Walls

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Nearly 20 years on, Julie Taymor’s Frida remains both breathtaking (those Quay Brothers puppets!) and befuddling (why isn’t it in Spanish?). It holds up better as a visual experiment than as a biopic, despite the richness of Salma Hayek’s performance. Filmmakers have long struggled to bring the lives of visual artists to the screen in dynamic, resonant ways. Some fail.

When Frida does succeed, it’s largely due to its Oscar-nominated team of art director Felipe Fernández del Paso and set decorator Hania Robledo. Their work doesn’t simply represent the art of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, but interprets it. By transforming Kahlo’s paintings into the stuff of cinema, they directly engage with their meaning - or, rather, Taymor’s own interpretation of those meanings. The result is a film with a lot to say about materiality and identity, the value of brick and the value of life.

We begin with Frida’s bedridden journey to her first solo show in Mexico City. She is carried out of the house aloft, head resting on an embroidered pillow that reads “Amor” and “Tesoro Mio.” But then we see her through her eyes, as she looks up to the mirror into the canopy of her bed, the flowers reflected back at her.

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Revisiting "Frida"

by Ilich Mejía

Frida came out in my native Honduras towards the end of 2003, nearly a year after it was released in the United States. Back then, it wasn’t uncommon for Honduran theaters to get films much later, but it was uncommon for them to show anything that wasn’t a blockbuster—regardless of the amount of Oscars or movie stars under their belt. Despite featuring niche themes like political art and unconventional family dynamics, Frida offered Latin American audiences something else: visibility in an optimistic, familiar context. This was not a film about a Latin American drug lord knowingly putting their family’s life at risk to meet wealth or about an immigrant leaving their roots behind to see if the American dream is a real thing: it was the story of a woman trying to make her native Mexico proud, ironically funded by Hollywood to be seen by more without the condescending, stingy distribution of a foreign film.

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In Context: The Contentious Making of "Frida"

by Ilich Mejía

The New York Times published an op-ed by Salma Hayek where she discloses how working with Harvey Weinstein, then head of Miramax, affected the production of her passion project Frida. The film, centered around the life of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, was released in 2002 with Hayek portraying the titular character. In the article, Hayek relates her refusals to Weinstein's inappropriate proposals (massages, showers, sex) to his explicit sabotaging of the film and its release. Up next, we contextualize five of Hayek's most poignant tellings of how Weinstein's ruthless power machine compromised the making of a promising film.

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