Cinema is a medium of light: it’s a notion that’s often repeated, and that still holds a certain enchantment. With DOK Leipzig opener Tracing Light, shot mainly between Scotland and Germany, Thomas Riedelsheimer ventures to get to the bottom of what light actually is in relation to human perception, and as a material for making art. It’s a solid documentary threaded through with quiet, awed wonder, but grounded in a steady respect for the expert labour of science and creative practice.
The German director’s previous works include documentaries about artists who sculpt using the natural environment and elements (including River and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time and Leaning into the Wind (2017) on Andy Goldsworthy, and Breathing Earth (2012) on Susumu Shingu). For Tracing Light, he brings two creative duos who work with light into conversation with physicists in Great Britain and Germany. Blending footage of immersive installations and site-specific art with impressive imagery of the unbeatable visual displays of nature itself, he also involves exchanges from within high-tech research centres that lean into the rigorously explanatory. Thankfully, the latter only serve to deepen the mystery around light as an elusive and unknowable phenomenon.
At the Advanced Research Centre at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, who make up the artistic duo Semiconductor, meet up with Daniele Faccio, a professor of Quantum Technologies who is leading an “Extreme Light Group” of researchers, to pick his brain on light, speed and time. Meanwhile, at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen in Germany, a futuristic-looking tower of white walls, Johannes Brunner and Raimund Ritz, who collaborate together as Brunner/Ritz, are treated to a game of laser table football by scientists they have come to quiz about the properties of darkness. The documentary is not overly weighed down by the nerdily didactic, because as soon as we may start to feel like we are back in a school lab, glints of surrealism courtesy of the sheer mind-bending quality of quantum physics buoy the dialogues again. These range over whether the information gathered by photons is lost when it enters a black hole, how optical clockworks can measure time more precisely, and analogue television static as the carrier of fragments of ancient light that tell us about the early days of the universe. One researcher even clutches a red-lit skull, as he declares the use of light to look inside the human brain the holy grail of neurobiology.
Light’s everyday beauty punctuates the sequences from the number-crunching hubs of science, in the form of imagery that might be generic, but never gets old: illuminated snowfall, moonlight on water, and prismatic reflections of April sun rays from a mirror on a staircase. Multiple artworks using light are also featured. A quick dive is made into London’s Thin Air immersive art exhibition, and inside a laser and phosphorous particle installation by Robert Henke. Riedelsheimer jumps from country to conversation to project, carefully labelling each interaction but never leaving us much space to sit with huge ideas and work built for contemplation. More sustained time is afforded to artist Julie Brook, whose sculptural work within natural landscapes includes breathtaking firestacks constructed between tides that flame bright against the sea in the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. Atmospheric soundscapes by Fred Frith and gabby fluke-mogul support Riedelsheimer’s obvious appreciation of out-there thinking and boundary-pushing experimentation.
By the film’s end, and many reality-bending quantum nuggets from the ARC’s staff to chew, Jarman says that her understanding of light has only become more complicated. It’s a realisation there for us to enjoy along with the director, in a documentary that opens with a quote from Albert Einstein about mystery being the most beautiful thing at the heart of art and science. Light’s duality of particles and waves makes it difficult to measure, and defies attempts to understand it, the scientists all admit, but they don’t seem to mind — just as we are relieved when cinema retains its magic, and our fascination never has to end.
Director, cinematographer, editor: Thomas Riedelsheimer
Producers: Thomas Riedelsheimer, Sonja Henrici
Music: Fred Frith, gabby fluke-mogul
Production companies: Filmpunkt GmbH (Germany), Sonja Henrici Creates (UK)
World sales: New Docs
In English, German
Venue: DOK Leipzig (Opening Film)
99 minutes
