Capturing unseen presence: Christian Suhr’s Light Upon Light

In Light Upon Light (2022), Danish visual anthropologist and filmmaker Christian Suhr embarks on a journey through Egypt to explore the diverse and multilayered meanings Egyptian Muslims attribute to nūr (light). Presenting light in its plentitude of meanings, Suhr's interest is not limited to ordinary light as we might know it. Rather, he wants to engage with a spiritual or transcendental type of light that some Muslims associate with divine presence. The film takes its name from the Quran's Light Verse, which describes God as "the light of the heavens and the earth" (Q 24:35). Suhr shows the viewer light in its plentitude and wants to find out whether he can capture something of this divine light with his camera. His pursuit is an interesting one for scholarly reflection, as Suhr wants to capture a "presence that cannot be seen" through the lens of his camera, as he and others acknowledge in the film. The film revolves around the pursuit of this light and shows the process of Suhr and his team engaging with this spiritual light, in home gatherings, at religious festivals or Sufi shrines, or in deeply intimate conversation. The viewer encounters a rich tradition of Islam among a post-revolutionary generation of Egyptian Muslims seeking purification of the soul, the presence of the Prophet Muhammad, and the different qualities attributed to spiritual light, from "feeling lightweight," to "seeing through," or being embraced by light. Given the challenges of visually capturing an unseen presence, Suhr's film is in dialogue with prevalent debates and themes in anthropological filmmaking and religious studies over how notions of the transcendent are grounded in the material world (Meyer, 2012). Having written considerably on multiculturalism and Islam in Europe early in his career, Suhr later turned to ethnography and anthropological film, directing, among others, the award-winning Descending with Angels (2013) on Islamic exorcism in Danish psychiatry. In addition to the films he has made, Suhr is at the forefront of an enticing debate on the use of film and montage for conveying invisible or extraordinary presences (Suhr, 2019). He has argued that film, through moments of disruption in montage, has the capacity to denaturalize social life, and hence convey invisible and irreducible otherness. Drawing on an idea of cinema of disruption, of causing ruptures in montage through which the invisible might peer through, Suhr criticizes and actively works against a humanized camera eye, for being unable to disturb commonsense viewpoints of human perception (Suhr Russell, 1999). Suhr's film is thus in dialogue with multiple scholarly debates in which he himself is a prominent voice. Set in Egypt, the film presents a wide variety of Islamic perspectives on light, while depicting a rich and heterogenous tradition of Islam in post-revolutionary Egypt. However diverse, all of Suhr's interlocutors share a spiritual association with light and could be broadly grouped together as practitioners of Sufism. In the opening shot of the film, we see Suhr with his colleague and friend Muhammad in an unmistakably Cairene coffeehouse, smoking on shishas (pipes for burning tobacco). Inhaling, Suhr asks Muhammad about his take on the topic of light: "Tell me, what do you want to explore through this theatrical setup with lights and mirrors?" From this and the very first scenes of the film, all of which show conversations between Suhr and his interlocutors, the viewer is familiarized with Suhr's approach. The film clearly is the result of a collaborative effort of Suhr, Muhammad Mustapha, and Amira Mortada—all members of his core crew and with whom Suhr surrounds himself throughout the film. As the film evolves around this group, the viewer is invited to experience their worlds through proximity, sitting with them instead of learning about them (Ingold, 2018, 11). Presenting frequent and informal moments of doubt and deliberation; furthermore, there is a transparent and reflexive drive to the research project. We see that Suhr is not working alone and that he is sensitive to his positionality in the Egyptian context. In view of the medium's limitations, Light Upon Light is a film that not only depicts Egyptian Muslims' takes on light, but also one that fundamentally depicts the troublesome process in Suhr's crew's pursuit of light. The film is a reflexive turn inwards by default, in that both the researcher and his medium—film—are questioned as knowledge-producing instruments. In "thinking out loud" (Corrigan, 2011, 15) about the possibilities and impossibilities of the project, Suhr does not offer round or unambiguous conclusions, thus preserving something of "the process of thinking" (Rascaroli, 2008, 26). Resulting from its collaborative and ruminative character, the film leaves much room for speculation and reflection. This leaves the viewer some open ends and questions, for example, concerning "the authorial voice" in the film. The film introduces a dispersed authorial voice, that of Suhr, Amira, and Muhammad. Suhr, as the director of the film, occupies the most prominent position throughout. We are left to wonder however about Suhr himself, for his explicit voice is largely absent in the film. In the film's beginning, we learn a little bit about Suhr's own interests and stakes in this project, when Amira asks him about the project. In Arabic, Suhr replies: "The light is a nice topic for the camera. Seeing this light is difficult for me." There is some sophistication to this particular scene, where we see Suhr pondering his academic interests while in Denmark, thus stressing his outsider's perspective. Despite this novelty, Suhr's voice and thoughts are thinly presented in the film. Predominantly, when he speaks, Suhr asks questions: "What do you think of my project?", he quickly replies to Amira in the same scene set in Denmark. In the montage of the film moreover, Suhr often cuts out his own share in his conversations and prefers to let the others talk. In the end, the questions that Suhr directs to his interlocutors start to surround him. While we continuously "sit together" with many of Suhr's interlocutors, Suhr himself seldomly invites the viewer into his proximity. As a result of the inattention to his own voice, a climactic moment of the film, inappropriately and misbalanced perhaps, goes to a dramatic scene where Suhr does take center stage. During a celebration of a Sufi sheikh in Humaithara, Eastern Egypt, Suhr experiences something like a dream and breaks down and cries when he remembers the terrible memory of his son who was on the verge of death at birth. Though a touching piece of evocative autoethnographic cinema, the scene falls awkwardly in the light of the film as a whole, in that Suhr's authorial voice, by virtue of its continuous absence, now becomes amplified to the extent that it most likely exceeds its intentions. Although Light Upon Light reflects an understanding of the dialectics in knowledge production, Suhr's film's shortcomings point to the need to nevertheless make a move "backwards," toward ownership or accountability over the knowledge produced and authorized. Suhr does not draw or narrate the viewer "back" into his world of thought. Consequently, the film lacks an explicit conceptual or theoretical grounding. Light Upon Light is foremost an aesthetical and sensory film, a "road movie" whose captivating images might exceed theory altogether. Indeed, Suhr's editing gives primacy to movement, sound, and composition, rather than to a narrative thread. The film is therefore not the site of set messages, but rather one of "meaning potential" (MacDougall & Taylor, 1998, 77), a mode that is suggestive rather than declarative. However, in the light of its theoretical promise, the footage yearns for some conceptualization. Instead, the viewer is left to work out alone how all the different appreciations of light throughout the film cohere. This could be a conscious choice, but there is a clear tension between the variety of voices and takes on light we have heard throughout the film on the one hand, and the lack of conceptual direction that Suhr grants us in understanding these on the other. This inconsistency relates, I think, to a deeper problem of Suhr's choices in montage and the theme of spirituality. Suhr's reflexive or inquisitive attitude towards the project as a whole does not reflect back onto a careful treatment of the subject of Islamic spirituality. However, opinionated Suhr is in the theoretical debates surrounding montage, in Light Upon Light there is no critical exploration of how the invisible light can be mediated. Suhr describes such disruptive potential to montage but disappoints in his execution. Moreover, his choices in montage and sequence of scenes do not provide the viewer with a grounded understanding of Islamic spirituality. For instance, in one scene, Muhammad gives a mundane example of spirituality, describing how excusing yourself to another person could be regarded as a spiritual practice. The next scene in the film then depicts this very situation. Although at first sight this illustration seems like a nice, satisfactory touch, it gives rise to an uncritical attitude: the image and the idea converge into each other, giving the theme of spirituality an "anything goes" character and cloaking it in conceptual vagueness. Suhr does not reflect, implicitly or explicitly, about the implications of this kind of understanding of spirituality and extraordinary presence for anthropological research. This is at odds with his prominent voice in debates concerning how montage may contribute to understanding concepts of the extraordinary and invisible. Despite his knowledgeable and exhaustive writing on anthropological film and the disruptive potential of montage, in Light Upon Light Suhr leaves the viewer in want for the moment where the invisible truly peers through.