Loïe Fuller was a unique, fascinating, and contradictory personality, who profoundly marked her era. Her life and artistic work were driven by a single, consistent urge: the search to express the spirit through light.

Of the three women featured in this year’s silent cinema section, Loïe is perhaps the least known, at least in terms of cinema. Dance, her principal activity, was undergoing a period of profound revolution, and found in her a new form of expression which brought liberation from the rigid canons imposed by ballet. Fuller inspired the most influential artists of the day, in the fields of photography, sculpture, and architecture, so that she quickly became the Muse of the Belle Époque. Her importance is now justly recognized by contemporary critics and writers. The cinema, however, has not yet adequately valued her work, and consequently has misunderstood her role in its own evolution. One reason has probably been the difficulty of establishing a corpus of works conveying this influence, and also that this affinity was effectively made concrete in film only in the full maturity of her career. But other examples illustrating this profound link exist.

The simultaneity of the birth of cinema and the Serpentine Dance, which made Fuller famous starting in 1892, goes beyond the purely chronological aspect. The two spectacles are in fact based on the same fundamental essence: movement and light. The available records of Fuller on film are not direct as a basis for study, since many do not show Loïe herself as the executrix of her famous dances. Nevertheless, the enormous popularity of the Serpentine Dance as a theatrical spectacle made it one of the emblematic subjects of early cinema. The principal production companies, such as Gaumont, Pathé, and Edison, and their most important directors, filmed innumerable, more or less similar, versions, interpreted by a host of imitators.

Yet it is worth underlining how the cinema, through this subject, advanced its own first steps. The alternation of the symbolic figure of the dancer, gushing forth as if by magic from the unceasing movement of veils, and the phantasmagoric spectacle described by Mallarmé, lead us to speculate on the use of light and the application of colour to film. Filmed dance was one of the principal expressions of early cinema, one which could be defined as a true and distinctive genre. Early dance films were strongly influenced by Fuller’s original choreography, as demonstrated by the numerous films by imitators of the celebrated Danse du papillon (Butterfly Dance). The rediscovery and restoration of a fragment of Le lys de la vie (1921), Fuller’s only known surviving feature film, is a unique highlight of this programme, and offers us the possibility to (re)discover this artist of the dance also as an auteur.

Massimo Piovesana