Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and The Tangerine
Leonard Nimoy Thalia |
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“Uncommonly elegant and evocative!” —The New York Times
2008. USA. Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach. 99 min. Color and B&W.
A film journey inside the life and imagination of an icon of modern art. As a screen presence, Bourgeois is magnetic, mercurial, and emotionally raw. She is “the real McCoy,” as Jerry Gorovoy, her assistant of 30 years, puts it. There is no separation between her life as an artist and the memories and emotions that affect her every day. As an artist, she has for six decades been at the forefront of successive new developments, but always on her own powerfully inventive and disquieting terms. At the age of 71, in 1982, she became the first woman to be honored with a major retrospective at MoMA. In the decades since, she has created her most powerful and persuasive work.
As director/producer Amei Wallach notes: “We filmed intense—and sometimes hilarious—encounters with Louise and her work in both her Brooklyn studio and Manhattan home starting in 1993. We videotaped conversations where she trusted us with the childhood sources of her pain and invited us into the ritualistic process by which her memories become embodied in objects and installations. We filmed her friends and her work here and abroad through the autumn of 2007.” This film is a drama of creativity and revelation. It is an intimate, human engagement with an artist’s world. It builds to a searing climactic scene then rebounds in joy and reconciliation.
“My emotions are inappropriate to my size. My emotions are my demons. It is the intensity of the emotions that are much too much for me to handle, and that is why I transfer the energy into sculpture.” —Louise Bourgeois
Studio Daily: Animation Imitating Poetry for The Spider
