The documentary film Obsessed with Light explores the innovative choreographer Loïe Fuller’s life—and her impact on dance, technology, fashion, and the nature of celebrity. Co-directed by Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum, it had its world premiere at the Rome Film Festival in October of 2023, and has since been screened at festivals worldwide. Krayenbühl and Oelbaum sat down to talk about Obsessed with Light in advance of its theatrical release on December 6 at the Quad Cinema in New York City.
Why Loïe Fuller? What makes her work interesting to you?
Sabine Krayenbühl: It has always been our goal to highlight women that have been forgotten in history. I had worked on a documentary called Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies (2008). There was this clip of [Fuller in her famous] Serpentine Dance. [It] was so mesmerizing.
Zeva Oelbaum: We were surprised to discover her influence was all around us. Taylor Swift did an homage to Fuller as part of her performance of the song “Dress” on the Reputation tour. Artist William Kentridge and the work of fashion designer Alexander McQueen also presented themselves.
Where did you start your research, and what materials did you find?
SK: We started our research in 2018. The New York Public Library holds the biggest Loïe Fuller archive. There’s also an archive at the Library of Congress. She was in the newspapers everywhere. Everybody, even in the smallest communities, was writing about her and following her success.
ZO: Something we found interesting is that film clips were distributed through the Sears Roebuck catalog in the early 1900s. We happened upon a scholar in Europe who had collected all the catalogs, and the Serpentine Dance was one of the top film clips in every single one. We also went to the Maryhill Museum in Washington [state], which was co-founded by [Fuller].
SK: At the Maryhill Museum we found a treasure trove: original interviews recorded by a dance researcher in the early 1970s of dancers from Loïe Fuller’s troupe. We have the original voices of these people and their account of what it was like, working with Fuller.
ZO: In our research, we actually came across more than 45 different film clips of the serpentine dance, all hand-tinted in different, beautiful ways.
What aspects of Fuller’s life or work emerged as most surprising to you?
ZO: For me, the thing that was most surprising was what she was able to convince people to do for her. She came from the Midwest. She moved to New York and then to Paris without knowing anyone, without having money, without being considered beautiful. We also became very aware of her challenges—reviewers saying she was fat, that she didn’t have a dancer’s body, and that she was plain and unattractive.
When Fuller was at the height of her fame, how was she influencing young people, women in particular?
SK: It was important to her to promote younger talent. Isadora Duncan was one of the artists she promoted. Another example is that she commissioned Armande de Polignac, a young female composer, to do the music for one of her pieces.
ZO: She signed her own contracts. She was very entrepreneurial. She patented aspects of her work, including her costume and lighting inventions.
How did Fuller’s aesthetic influence the aesthetic of the film?
SK: We wanted to give the audience an understanding of how the work happened. So, we followed one of today’s experts on Fuller, Jody Sperling, and her Time Lapse Dance company as they reinterpreted Fuller’s work. By following the evolution of the piece Time Lapse was making, we could see how difficult it was to dance like that. How do you grapple with the fabric? How do you work with all the different elements, the light, the colors, the music, the shadows? We interviewed artists in front of a black screen—a reference to how Loïe Fuller performed in front of a black velvet curtain.
When you think about Fuller’s influence now and into the future, how do you see her work continuing to wiggle its way into our collective consciousness?
ZO: Anyone who’s been to a rock concert has seen a modern version of Loïe Fuller’s lighting effects. I think the way she thought about technology and combining it with art is very powerful. Our hope is that people will now be sensitized to identify the influence as being from Loïe Fuller.
SK: Yes, hopefully, in a hundred years, people will be saying “That’s the Loïe Fuller dance,” rather than “That’s the serpentine dance,” so this iconic invention actually has a name and a face to it. The influence surpasses dance—it goes to fashion, fine art, theater lighting, and stagecraft.
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