Obsessed with Light
Directed by Sabine Krayenbühl & Zeva Oelbaum
Featuring Cherry Jones, Bill T. Jones, Robert Wilson, Maria Grazia Chiuri
Runtime: 89 minutes
Premiering at the NY Quad Cinema on December 6

 by Christine Freije, Staff Writer

It is refreshing to hear, about halfway through the new documentary Obsessed with Light, that even the prolific theatrical lighting designer Jennifer Tipton finds light mysterious. As someone who barely scraped her way through high school physics, I have always been content to view light not as a scientific phenomenon but as sort of a miracle. It’s a force that has a radical impact on our feelings, our perceptions, and our basic ability to see, but it takes incredible awareness and vision to understand its possible uses and effects. It takes someone with an artistic intuition and a ravenous scientific curiosity, and, at the turn of the 20th century, that someone was the choreographer, dancer, and lighting designer, Loïe Fuller.

Obsessed with Light is an artistic exploration of Fuller’s life, work, and enduring legacy, and it’s a worthy project; though I had never heard of her, her most famous work, the serpentine dance, has been referenced by everyone from Taylor Swift to Shakira to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Watching the documentary, the dance–which involves the performer twirling and waving huge fabric wings that catch the light and obscure the body–immediately seemed familiar, so ancient and intuitive that it was almost surprising that anyone had invented it. But of course someone had, and, the film argues, part of Fuller’s forward-thinking genius was to patent her innovations in lighting and stage technology. 

The filmmakers, Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum, capture testimony from visual artists, puppeteers, fashion designers, and choreographers who created work directly inspired by Fuller. These works, shown throughout the documentary, are wildly diverse in style, form, and tone, and it’s moving to learn that they all draw inspiration from the same artistic ancestor. The filmmakers beautifully depict how a person’s artistic legacy can live on even after their name has been largely forgotten.

The film is slightly less successful in portraying the life and work of Fuller herself. Much of her story is told from Fuller’s perspective through letters and writings read aloud by the voice of Cherry Jones, and we also hear words from several of her students and collaborators, including her life partner, Gab Bloch. Though this choice allows us to hear Fuller’s story in her own words and those of her intimate acquaintances, at times I craved more context and detail about Fuller’s actual inventions and innovations. At one point, Jones’s voice as Fuller describes a visit she paid to Thomas Edison that inspired her interest in using glowing phosphorescent salts as a part of a dance costume. Moments later, we see archival headlines pop up on the screen that describe Fuller’s performance of a “Radium Dance,” but we never learn what that dance was like, what technological innovations she used to make it possible, or how it differed from her other work. 

The archival footage used throughout the documentary is uneven in its effectiveness. Most notably, though there are many dance sequences captured on film, including the serpentine dance, I only learned later that none of those sequences were of Fuller herself (according to scholars, there is no extant footage of her). In a film that attempts to make an argument for Loïe’s distinctiveness, it was confusing to see footage of other dancers as we hear narration from Fuller’s perspective about her work.

Strangely, the film paints its clearest portrait of Fuller not through its voiceovers and archival footage, but through its documentation of rehearsals for a new dance piece by the choreographer Jody Sperling and her company Time Lapse Dance. Sperling is a committed scholar of Fuller’s work, and watching her create a new dance intended to be in conversation with Fuller was one of the more dynamic threads of the film. In these sections, Fuller’s work went from feeling theoretical and distant to seeming embodied and alive. We watch the dancers struggle with the unwieldy weight of their large costume “wings” and we watch the choreographer and lighting designer test out different combinations of movement and light to best create effects of texture, color, and shadow. It’s here that we get to see and feel the experimental process that was at the heart of Fuller’s work, and it’s in these moments that the film comes to life, bathed in the light of trial, discovery, and imagination.