Rembrandt said “everything is light”. If our reference is the visible universe, I think you’re right. In movies, even emotions depend on the way the film is lit. This is why I think the DP (director of photography) is such a crucial part of a film crew, perhaps as important as the director himself.
Two recent movies and one old one drive the point home very strongly: The Illusionist (2006), Marie Antoinette (2006) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001).
The dark, dull, dusty green-brown-sepia light of The Illusionist was a perfect choice for this film. That flickering, out-of-focus light scheme at the edges told you at a glance that this was an “old” movie and that we were watching something that happened “in the distant past.” The entire film was shot in the colors of yellowish paper. I especially loved the beautiful faded dull greens and burnt wheat browns. It was the lighting of a torch from the pre-electric age and a gaslight that matched the story very well. The light itself was a character unto itself in this Edward Norton mystery with a twist ending that resembled The Usual Suspects (1995).
Marie Antoinette, for her part, has used lighting with light and vibrant colors that rejected the categorization of “history that takes place in the past”. Nothing faded in this movie. Nothing was dark or dull. The brilliance of the reds, blacks, yellows, blues, violets and especially the billowing pinks had the magical effect of transporting us, the viewers, to Versailles at the end of the 18th century. Thanks to that lighting, we were no longer further away from the stage (as in The Illusionist), but we were part of it. Why? Because enlightenment screamed “now and now,” not “a long, long time ago.” This movie made a time machine out of light.
Black-and-white lighting has long been the touchstone of most film noir pieces, even (oddly enough) when shot in full color, like most classic French film noirs.
However, I do have one film in mind that is sort of the “gold standard” in my mind for black-and-white lighting: the Coen Brothers’ incredible and unforgettable The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001).
In some scenes, the lighting is so crisp, so luscious, so staggeringly uncompromising that you forget the story and want to savor each frame for its aesthetic value, just to celebrate the beautiful new language that only two main colors, no grays in between. , carving out of space and time.
The Man Who Wasn’t There represents the absolute minimum in illumination beyond which the visible universe ends. But perhaps that is also where it all begins. Perhaps pure black and white, with no grays, acts as the binary gatekeeper for that part of the visible universe that lies within our frequency spectrum. Is that why B&W creates such a life-or-death urgency and emotional response from all film noir fans?
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