Amei Wallach on Filming Louise Bourgeois

Amei Wallach on Filming Louise Bourgeois

Courtesy Amei Wallach

Director Amei Wallach with Bourgeois's "The Quartered One"

Courtesy Art Kaleidoscope Foundation

Louise Bourgeois in the documentary film "Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine"

Chuck Close Joan Mitchell Ilya Kabakov Emilia Kabakov Louise Bourgeois Tate Pats Itself on the Back, Plans Ahead Singapore Takes the Stage The Material World

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Bourgeois the person, now 96, is indeed small in stature, but Bourgeois the artist and grande dame can seem epic in proportion. The Spider, whose release coincides with the opening of a full traveling Bourgeois retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Musuem this week, presents a spitfire of a woman, a playful octo/nonagenarian dressed in hot pink faux fur, spouting off sassy one-liners about the meaning of life, and alternately captivating and repelling everyone around her. “She generates energy, and she generates psychological energy,” says curator Robert Storr, dean of Yale Art School. “She’s also a vampire. She sucks up psychological energy.”

Amei Wallach, a longtime art critic, commentator, and curator who’s written books about Bourgeois and Ilya Kabokov, among others, co-directed and co-produced the film with Marion Cajori, the director of biopics about Joan Mitchell and Chuck Close who succumbed to cancer in August 2006 at the age of 56. Together they clocked countless hours at Bourgeois’s Manhattan home and now-defunct Brooklyn studio between 1993 and 1998, photographed her work at home and abroad from 1992 to 2008, and conducted interviews with the likes of Storr, MoMA curator Deborah Wye, Louise’s son Jean-Louis Bourgeois, and her longtime assistant, Jerry Gorovoy.

The result is a broad overview of Bourgeois’s work and a penetrating look into her psyche, culminating in the sort of breakthrough — told over the eponymous tangerines — that we seldom see from even our most intimate acquaintances, let alone the artists we admire.

Wallach spoke to ARTINFO about the challenges and rewards of filming Bourgeois and of becoming a first-time filmmaker.

How did the film come about?

I’d been writing about Louise and doing the art commentary for the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, and she wanted to be on it. I told her I’d like to make a film, because she’s as good a character as Buñuel ever wrote. And she said sure. But I didn’t know how to make a film so I went to the people who were running the Art on Film program at the Metropolitan and they recommended Marion Cajori, whose film on Joan Mitchell had just come out. Marion had already been filming the work for a year, but she hadn’t been able to get access to Louise.

Do you feel confident as a filmmaker now?

Well, I’ve started my next film! It’s about Ilya and Emilia Kabokov. He’s having a huge four-venue show in Moscow in September, so we’re going to be filming there most of the summer.

What was the hardest thing for you in making the Bourgeois film, as a first-time filmmaker?

Learning how scenes go together to build a trajectory, not necessarily in a logical way at all, but in a way that is intuitively correct.

You filmed Louise for many years, and she aged in those years, but the sequence in the film does not necessarily correspond to the chronology.

We decided that it was more important to get deeper and deeper into her psyche. If we’d just been chronological it wouldn’t have gripped you in any way.

I’m assuming you didn’t plan for the project to take as long as it did.

No, it took that long because of fund-raising. The MoMA show was in 1982, but she still had no collectors by 1993, except some museums. We raised just enough money to film, but we often didn’t have enough to develop. So we just kept on shooting, which actually turned out to be a great thing.

How did you know you were done?

We continued shooting until there came a point where we didn’t want to do it to Louise anymore.

What was your shooting schedule like? How often did you see Louise?

Well, that first summer we had these elaborate shoots in the studio – around four of them. After that, Marion would take a high 8 camera and we’d go every few months and talk to her. We have loads of footage we didn’t use.