Film series: Louise Bourgeois goes to the movies 29 November 2023 – 10 March 2024

Delve into a summer of classic psychodramas courtesy of one of the most iconic artists of the past century, Louise Bourgeois (France/USA 1911–2010). Featuring a selection of Bourgeois’s favourite films, this series spotlights her little-known interest in cinema, drawing together Hollywood melodrama, black comedies and midnight movies by the likes of John Waters and David Lynch.

After a long day working in her Chelsea brownstone or her industrial Brooklyn studio on 347 West 20th Street, Bourgeois often went to the pictures, heading midtown to Film Forum or around the block to the Quad. The 1970s and 1980s were a golden age of repertory cinema in New York City, and Bourgeois regularly attended Anthology Film Archives, The Paris Theatre and the fabled Bleecker St Cinema, with its double bills of arthouse and foreign-language films.

This series is both a snapshot of a historical moment of New York film culture and an intimate chronicle of the movies which piqued the interest of a famously erudite, opinionated artist.

It begins, appropriately, with The Wizard of Oz (1939) – a parable of cinemagoing – and ends with Pink flamingos (1972). In between, the series spans hothouse drama (Cat on a hot tin roof 1958, Splendor in the grass 1961), off-kilter rom-coms (Harold and Maude 1971) and clinical thrillers by Robert Altman (That cold day in the park 1969) and Claude Chabrol (Story of women 1988).

Bourgeois had an eye for the cult and the camp, for films exploring neuroses and hysteria with flamboyant style and gallows humour. She was, after all, an artist who once embroidered a handkerchief with, ‘I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.’

She gravitated to films of ferocious emotion: character studies and family dramas probing the relationship between convention and prohibition, social norms and unruly exceptions. Hers is a cinema of ambivalent mothers, vengeful housewives and desiring women reckoning with feelings of rage, abandonment and erotic frustration.

The series is accompanied by a selection of resonant shorts by artists including Edward Owens, Soda Jerk, Maria Lassnig, Jackie Wolf and more. One featured filmmaker, Jane Campion, describes Bourgeois as an art idol: ‘Nothing compares with her uneasy mix of beauty, truth-sharing, dark hidden memories, pain, shame and comedy. She’s gone to the depths. She will lead you there and keep you there.’

This summer, let Bourgeois lead you to the cinema.

The series screened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 29 November 2023 – 10 March 2024, in association with the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day?

Films

• 29 November, 3 December – The Wizard of Oz (director Victor Fleming, USA, 1939, 35mm)

• 6, 10 December – The bad seed (director Mervyn LeRoy, USA, 1956, 35mm)

• 13, 17 December – Murmur of the heart (director Louis Malle, France, 1971, 35mm-to-digital)

• 10, 14 January – Cat on a hot tin roof (director Richard Brooks, USA, 1958, 35mm-to-digital)

• 17, 21 January – Splendor in the grass (director Elia Kazan, USA, 1961, 35mm)

• 24, 28 January – That cold day in the park (director Robert Altman, USA, 1969, 35mm)

• 31 January – Harold and Maude (director Hal Ashby, USA, 1971, 35mm-to-digital)

• 4 February – Sugarbaby (director Percy Adlon, West Germany, 1985, 35mm)

• 7, 11 February – Story of women (director Claude Chabrol, France, 1988, 35mm)

• 14 February – Garden of the Finzi-Continis (director Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1970, 35mm)

• 18 February – Fellini Satyricon (director Federico Fellini, Italy, 1969, 35mm-to-digital)

• 21 February – Fox and his friends (director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1975, 35mm-to-digital)

• 25 February – In a year with 13 moons (director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1978, 35mm-to-digital)

• 28 February, 3 March – Eraserhead (director David Lynch, USA, 1977, 35mm-to-DCP)

• 6, 10 March – Pink flamingos (director John Waters, USA, 1972, 35mm)