30/10/2024 - Light as you’ve never seen it before becomes the protagonist of Thomas Riedelsheimer’s latest documentary

Thomas Riedelsheimer’s Tracing Light [+see also:
interview: Thomas Riedelsheimer
film profile], the opening film of this year’s DOK Leipzig, engages with perhaps the most abstract and concrete entity of all: light. It’s a fact that life on Earth would not exist if not for the Sun, much like photography (“painting with light”, from the Ancient Greek) or cinema. As a conditio sine qua non, light is the perfect focus for a meta-study of cinema through cinema and science. In Tracing Light, we see a super-sensitive camera capturing light in motion, a trillion frames per second, and we marvel at the captured image even if we struggle to understand how light is both a beam and a wave, why it travels backwards, and what a picosecond is.

Exactly 20 years ago, Riedelsheimer opened DOK Leipzig with his 2004 film, Touch the Sound, and his affinity with easily digestible documentary cinema of the senses makes Tracing Light the perfect opening film for a docu-festival. Over the space of 99 minutes, the audience meets quantum scientists and artists (as they meet one another), complicating their understanding of this life-giving phenomenon even further. That said, the accompanying experiments and conversations are enjoyable to watch and offer much in the way of learning. Who knew, for example, that TV static is, in fact, ancient light? The wonder which possessed Albert Einstein and enabled him to translate his own admiration of light into scientific terms is felt clearly throughout the film. Of course, Einstein himself only appears as a close-up print on a couple of coffee mugs.

In the film, physicists and artists from Scotland, England, and Germany make use of laboratories and research centres to test out contraptions we might never have heard of, like the single-photon avalanche diode cameras (SPAD) used to film the propagation of light in space. Space is time and time is light, and the documentary's most profound voice recordings are cannily interspersed throughout the film's runtime, so that every time it gets a little bit too technical, we find ourselves soothed by the mysteries of our world and its bare necessity: light.

To no one’s surprise, Riedelsheimer's film doesn’t reveal the great secret, origin, or mystique of its subject. Instead, it lingers on the (frankly entertaining) potential for collaboration between science and art, and the encounters this engenders. Even when the score feels a little overbearing, Tracing Light doesn’t demand too much of the viewer’s attention or require a level of deciphering which might ruin the experience. Like the patterns of light captured by the filmmaker on his own wall, and those which are an artist’s direct medium, the film is both elusive and concrete, and this duality certainly arouses curiosity.

Tracing Light is produced by Germany’s Filmpunkt and UK firm Sonja Henrici Creates Ltd.