The first two times the artist Ida Applebroog saw the documentary about her life and work, she couldn’t remember anything she had just seen. “Watching yourself for 70 minutes on screen as the sole focus, that can be disconcerting,” says Beth B, Applebroog’s daughter and the director of “Call Me Applebroog,” which premieres at the Metrograph in New York City on June 10. But when the film had its world premiere, at the Museum of Modern Art on February 26, as part of the institution’s Doc Fortnight festival, Applebroog’s vision cleared. “In the middle of the film, she leaned over to me and said, ‘It’s great! It’s a great film!,’ ” recalls her daughter. “It was as if she was seeing it for the first time.”Part of Applebroog’s amazement might have been that the project was actually finished. Beth B — who began her career shooting 8mm films with her former partner, Scott B, as part of the No Wave scene in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s — began shooting footage for the documentary 15 years ago, before she even knew she was making a film about her mother. She was simply documenting Applebroog’s work for archival purposes, including exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth in 2010 and Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany in 2012. “As time went by, I felt like I was painting a portrait of her, and I started thinking more about what that portrait might be,” Beth B says. “I became more interested in the moment when she was in her studio, the interactions between her and her staff, and trying to get at more of her backstory, which most people don’t know about.”Applebroog was born in the Bronx in 1929 to Orthodox Jewish parents and worked briefly as a designer before marrying and having children. Despite this seemingly full life, she suffered crippling depression. The American Dream, she discovered, did not bring happiness. But it sometimes produced work. Applebroog’s exhibition in 2008 at Hauser & Wirth featured sketches of her vagina that she created after leaving the hospital where she was treated for a bout of depression in 1969. Applebroog did not even remember making them until they were pulled out of storage one day in 2008. “For me, personally, that show was so intimate and had so much of her history,” Beth B says. “The work brought up a lot of questions about my childhood, my relationship to her, her role as an artist, and how she really had to struggle with the concepts of ‘mother’ and ‘wife.’ She had to rebel against those concepts in order to succeed as an artist.”It was after that show that the film began taking shape. But Applebroog was still hesitant. “Ida’s a very private person, very shy,” Beth B says. “In the past, people have been cooperative and wanted their work and who they are to be documented. Ida didn’t want that. She really didn’t start to open up until quite recently. I think she started to feel that it was time for the things she considered to be secrets to come out and became public.”Even with her mother’s eventual — and, as evidenced in the film, still reluctant — participation, the documentary remained difficult to finish. “The film is from my point of view, the point of view of a daughter, a colleague, an artist, a best friend, a filmmaker. I was in all these different roles and had some confusion at times about how it would all fit together,” recalls Beth B. Last summer, she found herself caring for her father, who was dying in the hospital. “This emotional experience of his dying over two months catapulted the film into the form it finally took,” she says. “I’ve edited films before, and there is often a more conscious progression. But with this, I would come home late at night from the hospital and just edit. It was more intuitive than sequential.”Beth B’s biggest joy in making the film has been sharing the experience with her mother. “There were many years when Ida didn’t want to talk about what was below the surface, the difficult things in her past,” she says. The film can be hard to watch and is an unusual portrait of an artist. But Beth B insisted on digging, knowing the revelations she unearthed would be important. “I think a lot of my films are about giving voice to subjects that people don’t want to hear about, voicing the unheard,” she says. “Sometimes that can be very uncomfortable, but that is my job as an artist and a filmmaker. I don’t paint pretty pictures. I don’t make pretty movies.”“Call Her Applebroog” opens at the Metrograph in New York City on June 10.
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