Women in motion: Loie Fuller and the "interpenetration" of art and science

Camera Obscura

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 73-104

  Coffman, Elizabeth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TAMPA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949799775     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-17-1_49-73     Document Type: Review

References (73)

1. F. T. Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 138.
2. While this paper does not discuss the questions of racial representation and modernity, it is a topic that has been explored in some detail in other works interested in "primitivism." See my "Uncanny Performances in Colonial Narratives: Josephine Baker in Princess Tam Tam," Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 3.3-4 (1997): 379-94.
3. Artists and writers who represented Fuller in their work include Paul Colin, Jules Chéret, Raoul Larche, Pierre Roche, Auguste Rodin, Stéphane Mallarmé, Roger Marx, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. For the most complete listing of materials representing Fuller, see Richard and Marcia Current's Loie Fuller: Goddess of Light (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997)
4. Margaret Haile Harris's Loie Fuller: Magician of Light (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Art, 1979).
5. See Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
6. Perloff considers futurism as an international movement and includes French and British artists along with the Italians and Russians during the period before World War I. See also Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: Dutton, 1971).
7. Martin Battersby, The World of Art Nouveau (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), 164-65.
8. Program notes for Fuller performance in Kiel, Germany, Loie Fuller Collected Papers, New York Public Library Dance Collection, Lincoln Center.
9. See video with Sally Sommer and Michael Kirby, Visual Urge: Scenic Innovations, Eye on Dance Series, No. 220 (10 April 1987), New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, New York.
10. Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Ideas and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 624.
11. Fuller had a number of lifelong, intimate relationships with women, most notably her thirty-year relationship with her collaborator, Gabrielle Bloch. Current and Current, Loie Fuller, 388-89.
12. Except where noted, all of the films discussed in this paper are held in the Paper Print Collection, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Many are available for downloading from the LOC Web site: www.lcweb.loc.gov.
13. Unfortunately, I have been unable to see this film and will not discuss it in any detail in this essay. According to Marcia Current (in a personal communication, November 1999), the second reel of The Lily of Life was found recently in France and has been restored. A copy is housed at the Cinémathèque du Danse in Paris. The Currents discuss the film in Loie Fuller, 278-81.
14. Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," in Culture/Power/ History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry Ortner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 128.
15. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (New York: Routledge, 1988).
16. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 23-59;
17. see also Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions," Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986): 63-70.
18. Mary Ann Doane, "'.When the Direction of the Force Acting on the Body Is Changed': The Moving Image," Wide Angle 7.1-2 (1985): 42-58.
19. Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
20. Several books review historical materials that document the important shift occurring around the turn of the century in the visual representation of women and their new participation in work and leisure activities. Martha Banta covers the iconography of women in literature, photography, and popular journals up to 1910 and tracks the transformation of the Victorian ideal into a number of modern "types," which include images of women in motion. Banta, Imaging American Women.
21. Kathy Peiss charts the increasing participation of working-class white women in dance hall culture and at movie theaters throughout New York City. See Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
22. Both books cite numerous examples of women in motion: women dancing, women walking, and women working in ways that seemed to many early writers both provocative and progressive. See also Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981).
23. Genevieve Stebbins, Delsarte's System of Expression (New York: Dance Horizons, 1977), 67. Emphasis mine.
24. For a connection between physical culture, antimodernism, and anti-immigrant sentiment, see T. Jackson Lear, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981).
25. Roberta E. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 18-37.
26. Paula Welch and Harold Lerch, History of American Physical Education and Sport, (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1981), 103.
27. Current and Current, Loie Fuller, 22.
28. Constance Balides, "Scenarios of Exposure in the Practice of Everyday Life: Women in the Cinema of Attractions," Screen 34.1 (1993): 19-37.
29. Gertrude Käsebier, Dancing School, exhibited and archived at George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.
30. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
31. Marey's work also proved inspirational to the futurists. See William A. Ewing, The Fugitive Gesture: Masterpieces of Dance Photography (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 19;
32. Hillel Schwartz, "Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century," in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, vol.6 (New York: Zone, 1992), 71-127;
33. Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Bonanza, 1989), 7;
34. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
35. See also Linda Williams's chapter on Muybridge in Hard Core.
36. Kemp R. Niver, Motion Pictures from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection: 1894-1912, ed. Bebe Bergsten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 352-59.
37. Constance Balides mentions specifically Physical Culture Lesson (US, 1906),
38. Physical Culture Girl, No. 3 (US, 1903),
39. Getting Strong (US, 1904).
40. She also notes that not all physical culture films are sexually provocative. One example is Physical Culture Girl, No. 3 (Balides, "Scenarios of Exposure," 22).
41. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 9.
42. Charles Musser identifies several imitators of Fuller's Serpentine Dance in Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998). The earliest Edison Serpentine Dance was Film no. 49, filmed in the summer of 1894. Film no. 339, Serpentine Dance, No. 4 was produced in May 1897 at the same time as Sun Dance, Film no. 340, with Annabelle the Dancer, a frequent Fuller imitator. Other versions were made in 1895 and 1896.
43. Felicia McCarren, "Stéphane Mallarmé, Loie Fuller, and the Theater of Femininity," in Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, ed. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 225.
44. See also Stéphane Mallarmé, "Considérations sur l'art du ballet et la Loie Fuller," National Observer, 13 March 1893.
45. Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture As Woman: Modernism's Other," in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modeleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 188-208.
46. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 237.
47. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: 1890-1930, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1974), 48.
48. Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 236-37.
49. Harris, Loie Fuller, 31.
50. According to Terry Ramsaye, Fuller was offered the chance to make a film with Edison, but sent her sister instead, who made a film under the name of La Loie in 1896.
51. (Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture through 1925 [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926], 253).
52. believe that this film is actually of Loie Fuller. The dancer and costume are identical to what we see in other Fuller productions and photographs. David Robinson mentions that Ida Fuller, a well-known imitator of Loie (but not her sister) shared the stage with "Edison's Greatest Marvel," the Vitascope, on 23 April 1896 in New York City (From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996], 7).
53. M. Rastignac, "Courrière de Paris," L'Illustration, 30 January 1893;
54. Ted Shawn, Every Little Movement: A Book about François Delsarte (New York: Dance Horizons, 1910).
55. Loie Fuller, Fifteen Years in the Life of a Dancer (Boston: Small and Maynard, 1913), 25-42.
56. Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 299-300.
57. Felicia McCarren, Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 171.
58. Niver, Motion Pictures, 68.
59. See Physical Culture, August 1919; 65.
60. Quoted in McCarren, Dance Pathologies, 217-30.
61. See also Mark Franko, "Mimique," in Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, ed. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 205-16.
62. Fuller, Fifteen Years, 72.
63. Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 107.
64. See also Kirby, Parallel Tracks, 174-78.
65. Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," 145;
66. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left, 1973), 165.
67. Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 9.
68. See also Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
69. Richard D. Mandell, Paris 1900: The Great World's Fair (Toronto: University of Toron to Press, 1967), 55-56.
70. Bernhard Rieger, "Envisioning the Future: British and German Reactions to the Paris World Fair in 1900," in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, ed. Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001), 152.
71. Button Benedict, "The Anthropology of World's Fairs," in The Anthropology of World's Fairs: San Francisco's Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915 (New York: Scolar, 1983), 53-54.
72. Mandell, Paris 1900, 58.
73. Phillipe Jullian, The Triumph of Art Nouveau: Paris Exhibition 1900, trans. Stephen Hardman (New York: Larousse, 1974), 88-89.