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| Obsessed With Light directors Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum with Anne-Katrin Titze at the Quad Bar while composer Paul Cantelon watches their inspiring Loïe Fuller documentary Photo: Ed Bahlman |
At the Quad Cinema in New York, on the evening of SantaCon, Obsessed With Light and Letters From Baghdad composer Paul Cantelon (Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, starring Mathieu Amalric; Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt, and Frédéric Tcheng’s Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel; Griffin Dunne’s Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold) joined directors Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbühl for a post-screening conversation on the significant and wide-ranging influence of Loïe Fuller from Auguste Rodin, Jean Cocteau, and Isadora Duncan to John Zorn (in his Femina Part 4) and Taylor Swift.
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| Zeva Oelbaum, Anne-Katrin Titze, Paul Cantelon and Sabine Krayenbühl at the Quad Cinema Photo: Ed Bahlman |
The visually illuminating Obsessed With Light (a highlight of the 15th edition of DOC NYC) has Cherry Jones as the voice of Fuller and an impressive list of on-camera interviews, which include Robert Wilson on what came first for Einstein on the Beach; Dior’s Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri; designer Iris van Herpen (Architectonics); theatrical lighting designer Jennifer Tipton; choreographers Moses Pendleton (MOMIX), Ola Maciejewska (Bombyx Mori at the French Institute Alliance Française), Bill T Jones, Trajal Harrell and Maite Marcos (Shakira); artists William Kentridge, Elín Hansdóttir, and Marcel Dzama with his permanent mosaic in the MTA subway (at the Bedford Avenue station on the L line); Drift collective founders Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta; puppeteer Basil Twist on Titan et L’Aurore, and theatre producer Jordan Roth, all sharing their insights on the significant impact Loïe Fuller’s creativity and innovation has had on them and their work.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Paul, you just saw the film on the screen for the first time! Why don’t you start with your reaction to it!
Paul Cantelon: Yes, oh I adhere to our wonderful directors. I thought it was really really beautiful. It’s wonderful to work on something and then look at it as if you’d never seen it. Seeing it on a big screen and how it all fits, that was thrilling to me. I came with my dear brother. I thought it was wonderful, an homage to Zeva and Sabine very much.
AKT: There’s a moment in the film when Ola Maciejewska, the Polish choreographer, talks about her work resembling a Rorschach Test. I felt the same way about your film, too, and the different aspects it touches upon. It begins with: It’s all about time. Then, no, it’s about the nature of colour, then it goes into fabric, light, movement. Could you talk a bit about how you were constructing this patchwork of the different approaches to Loïe Fuller?
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| Zeva Oelbaum on Loïe Fuller: ‘All of the Serpentine Dances are original colouring. What we feel, what we think, is that her colours of her performances inspired the earliest filmmakers to hand colour ..’ |
Zeva Oelbaum: One of the things that really interested us about Loïe was that during her time so many people saw something very different in her performance and what she did. Even the shapes that she was making. She appealed to Mallarmé, the poet, she appealed to the owner of delicatessens, because she said they really feel my work. So working on a film about her was really about unravelling section by section all the different aspects. What we loved about the interviewees was that they all responded or were inspired by something completely different about Loïe as well.
AKT: The fashion aspect is fascinating, and also the perception of the body and how the body in dance is seen. Taking control of the female body, the liberation aspect, were you thinking of that before making the film or was it mainly the dance aspect and then the other angles emerged?
Sabine Krayenbühl: Like Zeva mentioned, for us what was always fascinating about Loïe was that you could not put her in a specific category. She was this all encompassing artist. If back then there would have been performance artists, maybe that’s where she falls. But the fact that she also was not in any way hindered by her body and how she was so different from the classical dancer that prevailed at that time and today as well is something so contemporary and inspiring. Also through time, back then and today. It’s something that makes her so modern.
AKT: Paul, a question about the music. Do we know what Loïe Fuller danced to and what her music pieces were like? And was that an influence on your compositions?
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| Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbühl with composer Paul Cantelon and Anne-Katrin Titze inside theater Q as seen perhaps by the ghost of Loïe Fuller Photo: Ed Bahlman |
PC: It’s a wonderful question because she herself wrote music beautifully. There’s a piece in the score, which is one of her pieces. And then there was a great group of the Art Nouveau Impressionist composers: Ravel, Saint-Saëns, César Franck, Johann Strauss III, Satie, Boulanger. And I loved that they called themselves the “Navis,” which means prophet in Hebrew. And they thought music should be like a printed scene that would change with the light. And I quite love that because of course she [Loïe Fuller] knew a lot of these wonderful composers. I think of Ève Curie Labouisse [daughter of Marie Curie]. I was lucky to be a good friend of hers. And in fact, I have Madame Curie’s tea set!
AKT: Wow!
PC: Which I still do. She lived to be 102 and was a great pianist and a great resistance worker during the war. This whole group of musicians, Loïe Fuller would have loved this music and she wrote beautifully. There is the piece at the end …
SK: Which is Armande de Polignac!
PC: Yes, forgive my jet lag. But she would have loved this music and known it well. And Satie, of course, her beloved Satie.
AKT: There is a quote in the film by Robert Wilson where he connects hearing to light! Light helps you to hear better!
ZO: And to see better.
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| Obsessed With Light composer Paul Cantelon with music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman at the Quad Cinema |
AKT: Yes, to see and to hear better, which is quite wonderful.
PC: That’s beautiful, I find that illuminating, with no pun intended.
AKT: At one point we hear the content of a letter from Loïe to Gab and their preferences in respect to what they eat, which made me wonder, was Loïe Fuller perhaps a vegan?
ZO: That question never crossed our minds! It was part of a series of very charming postcards that Loïe wrote to Gab [Bloch], playful and sort of witty. It just sort of indicated to us their relationship, which was very loving.
SK: And they were in the same place. They were writing to each other in the same location.
AKT: I thought it was funny how she wrote:”You eat the meat, I eat the vegetables. You eat the cheese and I eat the fruit.” There’s a lot we don’t know about her and little footage of her on film. Maybe because SantaCon is going on in the city outside, it made me think, what if Loïe Fuller came into this room tonight and you had one question to ask her, what would you want to know, after all this research you have done?
ZO: Instead of a question, I can say something that I love: What we did at the end of the film, that would be a statement from her. What we were able to do with the two images, one of her smiling and one of her not smiling. At the very end she breaks into a smile through motion graphics and I always feel that she’s saying, “You see, I told you so! I was famous and I continue to be famous!” I just really like that. For me that’s sort of quintessential Loïe.
AKT: That’s a beautiful answer to my silly SantaCon question! You can see her spirit in the photographs. In the one with her father early on, you sense how determined she is.
SK: Yeah, what is also interesting is that not just she traveled with her mother everywhere, but that seemed to be a very common situation. Isadora Duncan went all around with her mother. The idea that mothers were chaperones but also at the same time 100% supportive of their daughters doing things that in Loïe’s case are really breaking boundaries in a way that hasn’t been done before - it’s wonderful, it’s a beautiful image.
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| Sabine Krayenbühl (who also edited the film) on Loïe Fuller: “What was always fascinating about Loïe was that you could not put her in a specific category. She was this all encompassing artist.” |
PC: I have a trivia, a little tidbit, that her first brave and courageous performance was singing Mary Had A Little Lamb in Sunday school at the age of three! From there it evolved into the obsession with light, I think it’s wonderful.
AKT: You have a long career giving us the score for films about very remarkable, strong women. From Zeva and Sabine’s previous film, Letters from Baghdad on Gertrude Bell, to Joan Didion, Jane Fonda, Diana Vreeland, the woman who makes flies for fly fishing in [Eric Steel’s] Kiss the Water, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Effie Gray, [plus the group of wonderful fictional women in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly]. Is this something you are particularly attracted to?
PC: Yes, very much so! My late wife was the wonderful Scottish singer Angela McCluskey, who passed away this March. And she was not only a great artist and this great conduit when she sang, but she was wonderfully strong, enormously. I think it’s a privilege to know strong women and frankly, you gals are superior to men anyway. So here’s to you! I wish the world could be run by you! As it will be some day. Not to be mean to all the men here. I think it’s wonderful to celebrate strong women and Zeva and Sabine do this so utterly wonderfully and I love to try and support this very much.
AKT: Let’s open it up to the audience! Are there questions?
Music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman: In the end credits you have a credit to John Zorn. How did you work him into your film?
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| Obsessed With Light post-screening event with Zeva Oelbaum, Sabine Krayenbühl, Paul Cantelon, and Anne-Katrin Titze at the Quad Cinema |
ZO: He had composed a song that said “homage to Loïe Fuller.”
SK: It was part of an album called Femina and he celebrated different women and one of them was Loïe Fuller. That’s the song we are using when Loïe travels with her muses to San Francisco and has great success over there.
ZO: We were very concerned that he would like the clip, because he wanted approval, of course, of how we were using his music, and he loved it. And all was well.
AKT: I have a question about the archival footage and the hand-colouring. She was a pioneer in that aspect, did you colour some of the archival footage for the film?
ZO: No, all of the Serpentine Dances are original colouring. What we feel, what we think, is that her colours of her performances inspired the earliest filmmakers to hand colour, because this footage was among the very first ever hand coloured. There are maybe three clips in the film that we enhanced the colour of the ocean! We didn’t touch the colour of the Serpentine Dances. They are just absolutely extraordinary, which is why we are so grateful when people see the film on the big screen. Because our whole intent was to create an immersive experience and have people bowled over by how beautiful it was.
AKT: The early film history connections are also fascinating. Did she ever meet Lotte Reiniger, who was making these marvelous shadow puppet movies, full-length animated features of tales, ten years before Disney’s Snow White. Some of Fuller’s shadow work reminded me of it. Was there a connection?
SK: Actually no, as far as we know, we never came across that connection. But what we know is that Loïe herself was not very fond of cinema. In her eyes it was painful. She didn’t connect, except when she made her own film, it was more of an experimentation in form. And what she did, which was so fascinating, she used the negative to project, which was unheard of.
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| SantaCon in the NYC subway Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
She went up to [Léon] Gaumont, the great studio head of Gaumont Films in Paris, and asked him: I would like to project the negative because I like how it is inverted and how the bodies, the subjects shine! Of course he was freaked out and she went ahead and did it anyway. Today it is still considered one of the first times this was done. And Germaine Dulac, who was a famous experimental filmmaker who came a little bit after Loïe, considers Loïe as a pioneer in this art form.
AKT: It’s fascinating to see the people she influenced during her time and the people she is influencing now. That is something I loved about your film, how it ties together Rodin and Cocteau to Taylor Swift and links them through Loïe Fuller.
On Tuesday, December 17 Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum, along with Linda Murray (Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library) will participate in a Q&A moderated by Eve M. Kahn (scholar and New York Times contributor) following the 8:00pm screening at the Quad Cinema.
Obsessed With Light runs through Thursday, December 19 at the Quad Cinema.
Obsessed With Light will open at the Landmark Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles on Friday, December 20.
