In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

Figure 39. Image from the “Epilogue.” Courtesy Mexican Picture Partnership.
frida kahlo’s girl with death mask
A perfect counterpoint to these images from the “Epilogue” is a painting
by Frida Kahlo done seven years later, one of her minor and lesser-known
works entitled Girl with Death Mask (1938). In it we see an isolated image
of a little Mexican girl wearing a mask exactly like the masks from the
Day of the Dead, with a similar mask placed on the ground next to her.
She is surrounded by a harsh and deserted landscape, and the combination
of the infantile tenderness of her little body, the delicacy of her frilly
dress—which is either festive or perhaps just a nightgown—and the
helplessness and uncertainty of her clasping a fl ower with both hands
are in sharp and uncanny contrast to the solid lifelessness of the mask
she is wearing. The sky in the background is very similar to the sky in
the execution sequence of Eisenstein’s “Fiesta.” The painting achieves
the same remarkable crossing and blurring of the various boundaries as
Eisenstein’s images—between life and death, between the human and
the nonhuman. The death mask, central to the painting, serves a variety
of functions similar to those in Eisenstein. It is a reference to baroque allegory
whereby all, the young and the old, the rich and the poor (the girl
in the painting, like Kahlo herself, is coded through her dress as decidedly
middle class) are equal in the face of death. The painting ironically
reverses conventions: the skull is also a sign of non-Western cultural
otherness, functioning similarly and possibly in reference to the African
the “epilogue” : 173