Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine
Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine is a cinematic journey inside the life and imagination of an icon of modern art. As a screen presence, Louise Bourgeois is magnetic, mercurial and emotionally raw. There is no separation between her life as an artist and the memories and emotions that affect her every day. Her process is on full display in this extraordinary documentary. As an artist, Louise Bourgeois has for six decades been at the forefront of successive new developments, but always on her own powerfully inventive and disquieting terms. In 1982, at the age of 71, she became the first woman to be honored with a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In the decades since, she has created her most powerful and persuasive work that has been exhibited, studied and lectured on worldwide. Filmed with unparalleled access between 1993 and 2007, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine is a comprehensive and dramatic documentary of creativity and revelation. It is an intimate, human and educational engagement with an artist’s world.
This film is not currently available from Zeitgeist Films or Kino Lorber.
Marion Cajori
Marion Cajori was an independent filmmaker who founded the non-profit Art Kaleidoscope Foundation in 1990 to produce in-depth cinematic portraits of individual creators and their art. Her film, Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter, won the prestigious 1993 Pratt-Whitney Grand Prize at the International Film Festival for Films on Art in Montreal and was cited as âOne of the Ten Best Films of 1993.â In 1998, PBS/WNET broadcast her Emmy-nominated special, Chuck Close: Portrait in Progress. A few weeks before her death at the age of 56 in August, 2006, she completed a full-length feature about Close and the community of artists he is associated with. Chuck Close opened at Film Forum in New York on December 26, 2007 and received rave reviews in publications from The New York Times to Newsweek. The film profiles Elizabeth Murray, Tom Friedman, Klaus Kertess, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kirk Varnedoe, among many others, as Close completes a painting from beginning to end, with a miniature camera attached to his brush.
Amei Wallach
Amei Wallach is an award-winning art critic, filmmaker, and television commentator. Her critically acclaimed films, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here, remain in international demand. In her articles, books, media appearances – and more recently in her films – Wallach has chronicled, and known, artists from Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner to Jasper Johns and Shirin Neshat. As an art writer, she watched Robert Rauschenberg make prints in New York and paintings in Captiva, Florida. She is uniquely able to tell this story. Wallach has written or contributed to more than a dozen books and was an on-air arts commentator for the PBS MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. Her articles have appeared in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Art in America, and ARTnews. Taking Venice is her newest film.
Editor Ken Kobland
Cinematography Mead Hunt and Ken Kobland
Additional Photography Nick Blair, Marion Cajori, David Leitner and Kipjaz Savoie
Line Producer Kipjaz Savoie
Produced by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach
Executive Producer George Griffin/The Art Kaleidoscope Foundation
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