Radioactive

"More productive and illustrative of Satrapi’s strengths is a quick montage sequence that juxtaposes images of male colleagues shaking their heads at Marie (men, they do not like her) with visuals of Loïe Fuller (Drew Jacoby) twirling onstage (she, they like). A fascinating figure, Fuller created a popular dance called the Serpentine that she performed on a darkened stage while wearing a flowing white costume illuminated by deeply colored changing lights. In real life, Fuller socialized with the Curies and apparently asked for some radium for a costume (they said non). One contemporary observer likened Fuller to “a ray of life,” a metaphor that finds an echo in one of Marie Curie’s descriptions of her and her husband’s night visits to their lab. “We could see their slightly luminous silhouettes,” she wrote of their discoveries, “and these gleamings, which seemed suspended in the darkness, stirred us with ever new emotion and enchantment.” Together, Fuller (with her rotations and hues) and Marie (with her seductive and dangerous luminescences) create a complicated, contradictory emblem of women in the new age." -New York Times