'Louise Bourgeois': An Intimate Look at a Provocateur

Chronicling the life and work of Louise Bourgeois, the French artist whose delicate but menacing sculptures stand in cities and museums all over the world, "Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine" is now on view at Film Forum as a complement to the artist's retrospective at the Guggenheim.

Co-directed by the late filmmaker Marion Cajori and art critic Amei Wallach, the film is the product of almost 16 years of work, and comes from hundreds of hours of footage of interviews with Ms. Bourgeois.

For Ms. Wallach, the process of making the film "became like a journey deeper into her psyche, deeper into her work," which, she said, culminated in a scene in which Ms. Bourgeois, in deliberate silence and cinematic simplicity, draws on a tangerine with a felt marker. As she draws, she explains how her father used to do the same thing at family dinners, with 25 people present. Her father would then carve out the figure with a knife and pull it out of the orange, with the core attached, creating the illusion of a male figure with a penis. Calling the carving a "work of art," he emphasized that it had what his daughter lacked, making his "sculpture" more beautiful than she. After recounting the story on film, Ms. Bourgeois leaves the room in tears.

Such saddening and evocative moments are, according to Ms. Wallach, a result of the intimacy and trust that the directors established after years of working with Ms. Bourgeois. They depict the vulnerability and fortitude of the artist, qualities that are as much characteristics of her person as of her body of work.

"Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine" presents Ms. Bourgeois's artistic process as a way of dealing with her past. Each scene is the confrontation of an unresolved trauma evoked by an event in the present.

The process of creating the film began in 1992, when Cajori filmed the artist's work at a show entitled "From Brancusi to Bourgeois: Aspects of the Guggenheim Collection" at the Guggenheim's former downtown branch. Cajori had difficulty getting in contact with Ms. Bourgeois, so she collaborated with Ms. Wallach, who had no filmmaking experience but had written on the artist. When Cajori died in 2006, Ms. Wallach was left with footage in three non-cohesive forms of media, which she edited with filmmaker Ken Kobland. The film's synchronization with Ms. Bourgeois's retrospective at the Guggenheim is a result of luck and hard work. When she heard about the retrospective, Ms. Wallach explained, "We decided come hell or high water, we were going to finish the film in time for the show."