Tina in Mexico

Combining historical fact, conceptual filmmaking, archival footage, and narration read from diaries and journals, this unusual documentary is true to the creative soul of its subject, avant-garde photographer and revolutionary political agitator Tina Modotti. Anything but a standard, linear biography, Tina in Mexico does draw from a timeline of Modotti's life, but is more interested in understanding her as an artist, a woman, and an activist, and in looking at how these facets often clashed and overlapped. Director Brenda Longfellow uses tasteful, silent reenactments (in parched, grainy black and white) to give context to Modotti's work and to portraits of her taken by long-term lover Edward Weston (the famed photographer who cultivated her talent) or painted by sometimes-lover Diego Rivera. In fact, the film gets inside her head, her bed, and her heart quite remarkably (her journals are full of affairs, frustrations, and idealistic communist politics), but also presents other points of view, such as those from Weston's own papers in which he writes that she has become obsessed with "sentimentality over the proletariat (and the) deification of the Indian." Longfellow does a fine job of measuring Modotti's influence on Mexican art and politics, as well as the reasons for her eventual expulsion from the country and departure from photography. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (R. Blackwelder)