Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition

by Stephen Prince

  productions. Unlike Woody Allen, who works suc-

  Club (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Gardens

  cessfully and well on limited resources, Coppola

  of Stone (1987), and Tucker (1988), generally failed

  often required huge budgets for his visions and had

  to connect with critics or the public and often

  difficulty accommodating the inevitable compro-

  seemed more conventional than visionary. Part of

  mises such budgets entail. Presently, he has semi-

  Coppola’s problem was a faltering economic base.

  retired from filmmaking in order to concentrate on

  He attempted to establish his own studio by creating

  his vineyard and wine-making business. ■

  THE GODFATHER: PART 2 (PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 1974)

  Coppola brilliantly integrated masterful storytelling with an ambi-

  tious visual design in The Godfather , an enduring modern classic.

  And then he surpassed that film with its sequel focusing on Michael

  Corleone (Al Pacino) and the disintegration of his empire. Gordon

  Willis’ cinematography used light and color to create a consistent

  through-line that helped to unify the two films. Frame enlargement.

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  Cinematography

  of everyday perceptual information, and filmmakers use this information in light to create a convincing impression of three-dimensional space on a flat screen.

  In contrast with hard light, soft light is highly diffused or scattered. It is produced by using a filter in front of the light source or by bouncing light off a reflective surface (cinematographers use “bounce cards” to accomplish the latter goal). Once light is scattered in this fashion, it will move in all directions to wrap around and envelop the actors and set. For this reason, soft light is much less directional than hard light, which can be precisely controlled to spotlight small details or areas of a set or an actor’s face.

  During the Last Supper scene in The Passion of the Christ (2004), Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography creates a strong, single-source effect, with the light seeming to come from the candles on the table. The soft light creates a gradual transition between light and shadow, and the design is realistic. It looks as if the candle is casting all the visible light within the frame. By contrast, the lighting in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) simulates a hard-light look by using soft light. The soft light is precisely controlled to create sharp fall-off. The light does not wrap around the actor.

  Hard and soft lighting can establish time of day very effectively in a scene by mimicking the way sunlight changes during the course of a day. At noon, sunlight tends to be very hard, and shadows tend to be short. During the morning and dusk, sunlight is more highly diffused and produces longer shadows. Bright exterior lights visible through windows of an indoor set and diffused light on the interior of the set will establish daytime, whereas night is indicated by using dark or dim exteriors and hard, contrasting illumination on the interior. In Peter Weir’s Fearless (1993), cinematographer Back Light

  Key Light

  Fill Light

  FIGURE 5

  Three-point lighting.

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  Cinematography

  SCHLINDER’S LIST

  (UNIVERSAL PICTURES,

  1993)

  A strong key light on the face

  of actor Liam Neeson (as Oskar

  Schlinder) makes his gaze seem

  especially intense. Lighting

  defines space and character

  and can convey mood, psy-

  chology, and emotion. The

  intensity of this image is due

  as much to cinematographer

  Janusz Kaminski’s striking

  use of the key light as it is to

  Neeson’s performance. Frame

  enlargement.

  Allen Daviau used hard light to establish the late-morning hour during which a critical airline flight occurs. He positioned lights at a high angle to cast short shadows through the windows of the airplane set. The lighting arrangement realistically replicated qualities of light at this time of day.

  Hard and soft light also can convey emotional qualities. In Batman Begins , the filmmakers used soft light to film the flashback scenes to Bruce Wayne’s childhood, before the trauma of losing his parents and being attacked by bats. The soft light helped to establish this as a happier time—thereafter, he is depicted with harder light.

  HIGH- AND LOW-KEY SETUPS Hard and soft lighting designs can be achieved by using high-key and low-key lighting setups. The key light , in the traditional three-point lighting employed in Hollywood films, is the main source of illumination usually directed on the face of the performer. The other two light sources are the fill light and the back light . The back light illuminates the rear portion of the set and/or the performer to establish a degree of separation between the actor and the rear of the set.

  The fill light fills in undesirable areas of shadow that are created by the positioning of the key light and the back light.

  Low-key lighting features a relatively bright key light in comparison with a small use of fill light. This produces abundant shadows. In low-key lighting, most of the frame is underlit, whereas other, usually small, portions are adequately exposed.

  Typically, low-key lighting employs hard light in a high-contrast, fast fall-off image.

  This style was very popular in crime films throughout the 1940s and early 1950s.

  Many of these were called film noir , meaning “black film,” a term designating the low-key lighting setups they employed as well as the moral darkness of their stories and characters. The shot from Out of the Past (few pages back) is low-key.

  High-key lighting is the opposite of low-key. High-key employs similar, bright intensities of key and fill, producing an even level of illumination throughout the scene with low contrast and few shadow areas. While low-key setups are suited to the gloomy, sinister films noir, high-key styles brightened the tone of Hollywood’s popular musicals. High-key styles assertively displayed the cheerful sets, colors, costumes, and dancing in such films as Singin’ in the Rain, An American in Paris , and The Band Wagon . The MGM studio in particular favored high-key styles to showcase the sumptuous sets and costumes in their productions, musical and nonmusical alike.

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  Cinematography

  AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

  (MGM, 1951)

  High-key lighting balances key,

  fill, and backlights to create

  an even level of illumination

  throughout the frame. Notice

  how minimal is the shadow

  information in this shot of Gene

  Kelly. The brightness of high-

  key lighting was suited to the

  optimism of the Hollywood

  musicals. Frame enlargement.

  LIGHTING CONTINUITY

  Continuity of Lighting across Shots Viewers watching a narrative motion picture generally want to believe in the plausibility and integrity of the world represented on screen. In other words, it should behave much as the viewer’s own world does and obey the same kinds of physical laws of time and space, unless, as in adventure, fantasy, or science fiction, there is a clearly established reason for not doing so.

  Filmmakers manipulate cinematic style to represent and transform the viewer’s sense of reality. Viewers, in turn, expect films to reference, and correspond in key ways with, their experience of the world while granting filmmakers a great deal of freedom in the ways they do this. Stylistic manipulations operate within limits. These are partly dictated by the logical demands of the style itself. Sylvester Stallone’s character Rambo can have superhuman abilities, but if these are too excessive, his adventures will lose all sense of danger and peril, and the films will lack suspense.

  Stylistic manipulations are also limited by the viewer’s deman
ds for reference and correspondence in the represented screen world. In this respect, continuity principles impose fundamental limitations on style in the interest of achieving reference and correspondence. In the areas of image editing and sound editing, principles of continuity are fundamental to narrative filmmaking. The same is true for lighting, irrespective of whether a filmmaker employs a realistic or pictorial design.

  Cinematographers follow principles of continuity in their lighting designs. They are not free to drastically change light values from shot to shot. Changes of camera perspective from shot to shot should not produce major changes in the light values that have been established for the scene. A cinematographer, therefore, must take adequate measurements of the amount of light available within a scene and understand how to make small adjustments in that light depending on the camera’s position.

  Close-ups, for example, are generally lit a bit brighter than long or medium shots, but viewers do not notice these small variations.

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  Cinematography

  Filming on location can introduce complications into the way cinematographers plan for lighting continuity. When shooting out-of-doors, filmmakers often must supplement naturally available sunlight with artificial lights. The position of the sun in the sky overhead changes during the course of the day, and so does the apparent hardness of the light. Light is hardest at noon. While filming The Last of the Mohicans (1993), cinematographer Dante Spinotti found that artificial electrical lights offered several advantages during location shooting in the forest where much of the film’s action is set.

  In designing a visual look for the film, Spinotti wanted to be faithful to the story’s eighteenth-century period. At that time, there were no electric lights, so illumination in the forests would have been produced by sunlight during the day and by moonlight and firelight at night. To simulate the effect of powerful shafts of sunlight pouring into the forest, Spinotti used a few very large, very powerful electric lights. These cast narrow beams of light to effectively simulate rays of sunshine penetrating the dark forest.

  This use of artificial light accomplished two things. It established lighting continuity across shots regardless of the different times of day or dusk when filming occurred.

  Using electrical lights that could be positioned at appropriate angles enabled filmmakers to compensate for changes in the sun’s position. Using these lights also extended principal hours of cinematography beyond the noon hour when light was at its hardest and least diffused. Supplementing sunlight with the electrical lights permitted shooting to occur well past the noon hour, even at dusk.

  Continuity of Lighting within Shots A cinematographer must plan for lighting continuity within shots as well as across shots. Many shots involve camera movement, and most involve actors who change positions in the frame. Lights that provide adequate exposure and atmosphere for a camera in one position will not do so if the camera moves to another portion of the set. The cinematographer must plan for a lighting design that can accommodate the entire range of the camera’s movement. This may require adjusting the light level and the exposure level in the camera during the shot itself. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro ( Bulworth , 1998) regularly uses an elaborate dimmer board that enables him to raise and lower light levels during filming and while the camera and actors are in motion.

  Filming Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), cinematographer Walt Lloyd confronted a scene in which a chauffeur drives a limousine in bright, hard sunlight, parks it by a trailer, and goes into the trailer’s dim interior. In one shot, the camera follows the chauffeur as he gets out of the car in the hard sunlight and walks over to the trailer, opens the screen door, and goes inside. To accommodate this drastic change in light levels from exterior to interior within the moving camera shot, Lloyd executed a wide range of “stop pulls,” changes in the lens aperture setting that determines how much light the lens is letting into the camera. The stop pulls helped maintain light continuity as the action of the shot moved from the bright exterior to the dim interior.

  These examples indicate one of the key requirements of a cinematographer’s

  job: the ability to quickly and creatively solve artistic and practical challenges.

  Cinematographers must strategically fit the demands of a location shoot or a director’s preferred visual design with available camera resources and the imperative for lighting continuity. This may entail supplementing natural light with artificial light, executing elaborate on-set lighting adjustments during the course of a shot, or readjusting exposure levels in the camera to compensate for changes in light level.

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  Cinematography

  LIGHTING FOR COLOR Black-and-white film registers only brightness levels, not colors.

  Brightness values range from white through gray to black. When shooting black-and-white, the cinematographer must be careful to avoid using colors in a scene, such as red and green, that have the same degree of brightness and will be indistinguishable on film.

  By contrast, the cinematographer who works in color can use it to add to the tone and atmosphere of the scene. By appropriately choosing film stocks with an understanding of their sensitivity to color, by employing color gelatins over the lights to intensify a dominant color motif within a scene, and by working closely with the production designer to establish the range of colors to be employed in sets and costumes, the cinematographer helps organize the color design of a given film.

  Functions of Color Cinematography Color design performs three basic functions in film. It establishes symbolic meaning, narrative organization, and psychological mood and tone.

  Conveying Symbolic Meaning Filmmakers often use color to establish a symbolic association or idea in the mind of the viewer. In Thirteen (2003), to express the downward arc of a young girl’s life as she gets involved with drugs, the filmmakers slowly, gradually drained most of the color out of the film. In Pleasantville , a teenage brother and sister find themselves trapped within a 1950s-era television sitcom whose characters lead humdrum and predictable lives. The siblings disrupt the scripted equi-librium of the show, causing some of its characters to reflect on and examine their personalities and identity. Color emblemizes this dawning self-awareness. The sitcom world is initially a black-and-white world, corresponding to the simplified morality of the show. But as the characters awaken into complex selves, color begins to appear, at first in selective parts of the black-and-white image and eventually into the entire image. The shift from black-and-white to color suggests the transition by the sitcom characters to a fuller, more emotionally rounded life.

  Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro ( Apocalypse Now , Bulworth ) believes that colors have an inherent symbolism, based in their wavelength, to which viewers respond physiologically. Of all contemporary cinematographers, Storaro has the most elaborate theory of color expression in cinema, and he typically uses colors for highly specific purposes. In Bulworth , he used an elaborate color palette to suggest the spiritual crisis and regeneration of the title character, played by Warren Beatty. To suggest Bulworth’s initial despair, the film opens in darkness, with no color, and then its scenes move through the hues of red, orange, yellow-cyan-magenta, blue, indigo, and white. Storaro’s color design bookends the film with the absence of color (black) and, at the end, the unity of all colors (white). For Storaro, the aesthetic structure of Bulworth is determined by this color plot and the symbolic ideas associated with its progression of hues.

  Establishing Narrative Organization Many contemporary films use color design in an overt way to establish narrative organization, and this function often overlaps with providing symbolic meaning. Ray (2004), about the life of singer Ray Charles, marks the flashbacks to his youth with bright, vibrant color. Scenes showing his adult life—after he had lost his eyesight—have a more limited range of desaturated color. The complex narrative of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic takes place in three locations, two of which are color-coded. The Washington, DC, sequences were shot unfi
ltered to achieve a cold, blue look.

  Scenes in Mexico were overexposed and shot with a tobacco filter to give them a hot, brown look. As the story switches between the locations, the color change is quite striking. In Blow , the story spans the 1950s–1990s, and each decade gets a distinctive color 83

  Cinematography

  THE WIZARD OF OZ (MGM,

  1939)

  One of the most famous symbolic

  uses of color in movie history occurs

  in The Wizard of Oz . When Dorothy

  (Judy Garland) leaves her dreary

  Kansas home—shown in sepia (a

  brown-gray color) —she steps into

  the fairyland of Oz, shown in glorious

  Technicolor. The brightly saturated

  colors of Oz make it a fantasy-land

  come true for Dorothy, a child of

  Depression-era America. Frame

  enlargement.

  characterization. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan bracket their narratives with a prologue and epilogue and use color to differentiate these sections from the narrative body of the films. In both films, the prologue and epilogue are shot in naturalistic color, whereas the narrative body of Schindler’s List is filmed in black-and-white and that of Saving Private Ryan is filmed in desaturated color. These color differences create a counterpoint within the structure of each film that invites the viewer to reflect on what each section of the films is expressing.

  The narrative of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1993), about the life of the charismatic black leader, is divided into three sections. The first section of the film, dealing with Malcolm’s life as a young man, is the most colorful, the most visually romantic, and the section that features the warmest colors. The sections dealing with Malcolm’s time in prison contrast with the warmth of the earlier episodes by using a color scheme that stresses grays, blacks, and bluish grays. The lighting scheme is very cool and hard, eliminating all diffusion.

  The third section of the narrative, dealing with Malcolm’s career as a civil rights leader and relationship with the Nation of Islam, features browns, greens, and very natural tones. Dickerson wanted each of these schemes to work on the viewer subliminally and to provide a way of visually characterizing the content of Malcolm’s life during these periods.