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Ghostlight

2003, Movie, NR, 80 mins

Ghostlight: Review

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Documentary filmmaker Christopher Herrmann's gossamer-light tribute to monstre sacre Martha Graham, doyenne of American modern dance, is a fragile artifice that ultimately rests on the broad shoulders of performance artist Richard Move. Structured around the efforts of one-time Graham student-turned-filmmaker Barbara Rosen (Ann Magnusen) to document the creation of a new Graham work and explore the legendary choreographer's tempestuous life and ideas about art, the film unfolds as Graham (Move) choreographs a new dance-drama based on the Greek myth of Pheadra, whose tormented liaison with her stepson Hippolytus (Reid Hutchins) shatters her family. Although Graham has spent her life cultivating an aura of fierce mystery, she agrees to cooperate with Rosen's project because her perpetually struggling company needs money. Surrounded by Graham's famous friends and collaborators, including Halston (Kevin Keane Murphy), Liza Minnelli (Donna Coney Island) and Blondie's Deborah Harry (as herself), Rosen records the process of creation while drawing out Graham's thoughts about dance, marriage, sex, love, art and mortality. Herrmann, who worked with the real Martha Graham for several years, clearly didn't intend to create a thinly dramatized biography — Graham created her Pheadra in 1962 and died in 1991; the film appears to unfold in the present day — or an introduction to the dance world. His subject is no less than the Graham mystique, and the dreamy B&W sequences that suggest Graham's inner life are genuinely poetic, a perfectly pitched combination of iconic images and eloquently controlled movement. But Move's remarkable evocation of Graham's towering, intensely theatrical persona is key — Move's Martha was developed and refined onstage over the course of several years, and even knowing he's nearly a foot taller and considerably more robust than the real Graham, his performance is so completely realized that it radiates its own synthetic truth. It's hard to imagine anyone who isn't familiar with Graham and her place in 20th-century dance history getting drawn into Move and Herrmann's hall of Martha mirrors, but for the right viewer it's a fascinating exercise in self-reflexive mythmaking. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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