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History of Hard and Soft Lighting


Kennan Conner

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I am a student writing a research essay about the correlation between method acting and the trend towards soft lighting in American cinema. My take on the topic is going to analyze how the popularity of method acting increased cinematographers' use of soft lighting as a means of lighting a space for the actors to improvise. I am going to qualify the method actor argument with other factors (i.e. technological "advancements" away from sunlight or carbon arcs towards helium balloons or kino flos, and greater dynamic range/faster film emulsions) which may have also affected the trend towards soft lighting. My research so far (including on this site) has turned out very little; if you can give me any advice, suggestions, directions, or opinions, I would be very appreciative. I am planning to support my analyses of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Godfather Part II, Raging Bull, and There Will Be Blood by outside evidence. Thank you in advance.

 

"Soft light has been a trend for the last fifteen years. Largely because of what happened in acting techniques through method acting, namely that actors don't hit the marks like they used to. They want more dynamic range. Hard lighting is very specific, and if you want it to look good, you have to hit that mark all the time. The new style of acting makes it impossible to do. We went into bigger soft sources so people can move around"

-John Buckley

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Earliest silent movies were shot in studios under glass roofs with muslin cloth stretched across, so were under soft light. One of the most popular lights in the silent era were Cooper-Hewitts, which were gas-discharge fixtures in tubes, a cross between a mercury vapor streetlamp and a fluorescent tube, and produced a soft light. Cinematographers like Charles Rosher did lovely lighting effects by mixing hard carbon arc lamps with soft Cooper-Hewitt lamps. So soft lighting is not a modern phenomenon.

 

Sound killed the use of the noisy Cooper-Hewitts (as did color). But many 1930's movies still created soft lighting using tungsten lamps through spun glass or silks. By like all styles, people became tired of it and the sharper, crisper look using harder lights become the norm by the 1940's.

 

Soft lighting started reappearing in the work of the French New Wave and also in England from DP's like Ozzie Morris, late-1950's through the 1960's.

 

It's sort of a side benefit that soft lighting is more generalized in a space allowing actors to move more freely, or for the blocking to be changed in the last minute. The main reason it re-emerged is that soft light is one aspect of natural light and in the light depicted in paintings (based on natural light) and thus filmmakers were interested in recreating it or capturing it for real. It's too limiting to only use hard lighting or only soft lighting.

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On 12/19/2012 at 12:02 AM, David Mullen ASC said:

Earliest silent movies were shot in studios under glass roofs with muslin cloth stretched across...

David, I am wondering if you have any knowledge of the history behind the frames themselves. Who first created a 4x4 and stretched diff across it? Were the larger frames first? The 12 bys and such? Any info would be appreciated!

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You see old photos from the late 1920's and 1930's of small wooden frames with spun glass on them to diffuse smaller lights. And you see the same spun glass on round gel frames in front of large lighting units like carbon arc lamps, 10K's, etc.

I've read about Lee Garmes using large silks but I haven't seen a photo of that.

I don't know the dimensions but I think the standardization to sizes like 4'x4' came later when you started to have third-party companies like Matthews and Century making grip equipment.

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There are not many books on the history of lighting in motion pictures, but one that touches upon trends from the Silent Era to the late 1940's is "One Reel A Week" by Fred J. Balshofer and Arthur C. Miller (ASC), University of California Press, 1967.

Balshofer started as a lab rat with "Pops" Lubin in NYC around 1905, making illegal dupes of Melies films, foregoing a career as a stereoscope photographer.  Soon enough he broke away from Lubin and formed the New York Motion Picture Company.  Miller started with Balshofer as a teenage lab rat and their careers crossed paths back and forth up until the late 1960's.

The sections Miller writes touches somewhat on the types of lighting he used from the silent era to the sound era, mentioning early Technicolor productions and the impact that panchromatic stocks had on traditional ortho film lighting.

Miller won 3 Oscars for his cinematography;  most notably for "How Green Was My Valley" with John Ford.

It's mostly a sentimental journey of the two, retracing their careers, but there is enough of a sprinkling of technical information in the chapters to be of value to read.
 

Edit:  Of course, there is also "Painting With Light" by John Alton (1949), which you can currently purchase as a reprint with a forward by John Bailey.  If you want to learn about Film Noir lighting, this is a great resource.

Edited by Frank Wylie
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Also “Hollywood Lighting” by Patrick Keating.

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/hollywood-lighting-from-the-silent-era-to-film-noir/9780231149020

But I don’t actually buy the premise that soft lighting developed from a desire to give actors more flexibility to move around a set and miss marks. Maybe on occasion that was the motivation, but in general that was more of a side benefit. Soft lighting came out of desire to make lighting look more natural and less theatrical.

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1 hour ago, David Mullen ASC said:

But I don’t actually buy the premise that soft lighting developed from a desire to give actors more flexibility to move around a set and miss marks.

Quite.

Would Spencer Tracy or Katharine Hepburn miss a mark? Probably not.

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