Introduction to Film Studies Mise-en-scène. Lighting In Colour lighting, thin colour film placed in front of a light gives image a universal tint.

Introduction to Film Studies

Mise-en-scène

Lighting

• In Colour lighting, thin colour film placed in front of a light gives image a universal tint.

Lighting

• In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, their cinematographer Jack Cardiff got scenes lit in bold colours. Intense key light comes from the screen right in blue and orange.

Lighting

• The theatrical lighting in blue in the concluding sequence of Nagisa Oshima’s last film, Taboo (1999)

Lighting

• In William Wyler’s Jezebel, Bettie Davis is a central figure and lit by the key light from top right, by the fill light from left and by the back light from slightly high at back. The figures in front remain rather dark as the light do not reach them.

Lighting

• Three point lighting in a colour film

• Strong key light from left, a fill light from off right of the camera, and the office behind the couple is lit more dimly and softly with background light.

• Whenever the camera position moves, the lighting positions must be rearranged.

Lighting

• Three point lighting suited to high-key lighting

• Photography with low contrast between brighter and darker areas

• The most frequently used in classical Hollywood cinema.

Lighting

• Low-key lighting creates stronger contrasts and sharper, darker shadows. The lighting is hard, and fill light is lessened or switched off.

• Light is hard and comes from right in the shot above, The Maltese Falcon. Fill and back light eliminated creating a dark shadow on the wall

Lighting

• The fill light and back light are significantly less intense in Andrzey Wajda’s Kanal making the back of the screen remain opaque.

Lighting

• Low-key lighting has usually been applied to somber or mysterious scenes. Common in horror films of the 30s and film noir in the 40s and 50s. Revived in the 80s in such films as Blade Runner and Rumble Fish

Photography: Tonality

• Film stock, lighting and development determines the tonality of photography

• In general, a slow film stock will produce a high-contrast look – the sharp difference between the darkest and lightest areas of the frame.

• Low-key lighting creates ‘contrast’

• In film developing process, contrast can be heightened or lessened.


• In most black-and-white films, grays, blacks and whites are balanced through high-key lighting, ‘normal’ film stock and standard developing.

• Jean Renoir’s Crime of M. Lange


• In the dream sequence of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries a bleached-out look (little colour gradation) is created through a combination of film stock, over-exposure and laboratory processing.


• News-reel like photography in Jean Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers ‘The positive prints were simply made on a special Kodak high contrast stock … Several shots, intrinsically too gray, were duped again sometimes two or three times, always to their highest contrast.’


• Technicolor [colour film stock] famous for its sharply distinct, heavily saturated hues. Rich colours created by a specially designed camera and a printing process. Vincent Minelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)


• Soviet film stock tended to lower contrast and give the image a murky greenish-blue cast. The monochrome colour design in Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Stalker. Actions seem to be taking place underwater.


• Tinting - Already developed positive film is im-mersed in dye. Lighter areas pick up the colour while darker ones remarin black and gray. In Abel Gance’s J’accuse! (1919) the image was tinted in pink.


• Toning – when dye is added during the developing of the postive print, the darker areas of the frame are coloured and the brighter portions remain white or only faintly coloured.

• Veá Chytilová’s Daisies


• Hand colouring – Portions of black-and-white images are painted in colours, frame by frame. The ship’s flat in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is hand coloured red.


• Manipulations of tonalities

• Stan Brakhage scratches off the emulsion in certain parts of the image for creating a graphic design.


• Tonality is the most crucially determined by exposure. Overexposure (too much light admitted through the lens) make the image too bright and underexposure (little light) make the image too dark. Carl Dryer overexposes the windows to create a religious atmosphere in Ordet.


• The city of Naples in Francesco Rosi’s Hands on the City is a little overexposed so that details are not clearly distinguishable. The city corrupt and hazy.


• Women in the foreground shot in well-exposure, but the sun-lit town in the background is overexposed.

• Inside the house a woman is underexposed, while the countryside in the background well-exposed.


• Filter – a slice of glass or gelatin placed in front of the lens reduces certain frequencies of light reaching the film. Day for Night – A filter can block out part of the light and make footage shot in daylight seem to be shot at night.

Perspective Relations

• Types of camera lenses

determined by their focal

length – distance between

the centre of the lens to the point where light rays converge on the film.

Focal length of the lens can affect perspective relations in the things in a frame.


• Short focal length (wide-angle) lens - A lens of less than 35 mm in focal length

• Distort straight lines lying near the edges of the frame.

• Two towers appear to lean rightward and leftward

• Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now


• Anything nearer the camera appear to bulge and its shape look distorted.

• In Terry Gilliam’s Brazil a wide-angle lens is used extensively


• The wide-angle lens exaggerate depth. In a scene from William Wyler’s Little Foxes the lens makes the characters seem farther away from each other than we would expect.


• Middle focal length (normal) lens – A lens of medium focal length between 35 and 50 mm.

• No noticeable perspectival distortion: horizontal and vertical lines are rendered straight and perpendicular

• Depth does not look stretched apart


• Long focal length (telephoto) lens - A lens of long focal length between 75 and 250 mm or more.

• It flatten the space between what is in the foreground and in the background

• The planes seem squashed together

• Chen Kaige’s Life on a String


• In Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi an airport is shot from a great distance by a telephoto lens. The long lens makes the aeroplane is landing on a crowded motorway.


• Akira Kurosawa frequently used the telephoto lens. In his Red Beard a mad woman walks in a doctor’s room. It is filmed over the shoulder of the doctor and the distance between the two characters appear close. When they are shown sideways, the viewer know that they are far apart.


• As the telephoto lens flatten depth, a figure moving towards the camera appears to take more time to cover what seems to be a small distance.

• Running-in-place

• Mike Nichols’ The Graduate


• Zoom lens – a lens which can change focal length and transform perspective relations within a single shot.

• The zoom lens can substitute for moving the camera forward and backward, as it can magnify and demagnify the subject. The Conversation

Introduction to Film Studies Mise-en-scène. Lighting In Colour lighting, thin colour film placed in front of a light gives image a universal tint.

Documents

lighting lowkey lighting

colour lighting

point lighting

lighting positions

theatrical lighting

highkey lighting photography

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