Anna Biller

Albion, you are assuming that special lighting on a woman is somehow sexist. Well, many people would agree with you. But then again it's not a fact that treating women and men differently in photography is sexist. There could be all sorts of reasons for wanting to glamorize women, including, as David suggests, the woman's own preferences on how to be lit. But glamour in itself is not a 4-letter-word. It's only the current fashion to try to erase gender. Yet sexist inequality is worse than ever in some ways, especially if you look at the violence of the sex industry. So no, I don't believe it's anyone's moral obligation to do away with glamour. If anything glamour was invented by women for women. Of course you don't "need" stylize or glamorize anything to make it beautiful, but I think that's been a given in artwork and photography for at least 40 or 50 years and so it's not such a revolutionary concept. As for the nervous system, it's not a concept. It's a fact that we respond to darkness and light differently. This probably even happens in the womb. We have circadian rhythms etc. Even if things are totally socially constructed, you can't just arbitrarily change what they mean and expect an audience to "get it." You can't change the meanings of archetypes. They become embedded in people. We read them like we read spoken language, so they are another form of language and can help to tell a story.

I don't know why soft light would be equated with natural light, except maybe indoors if you had a ceiling light with a frosted shade. Sunlight is the most natural light and it is a hard light. The reason I think the soft light has become so popular is that you only have to set one light. Less time for lighting = more profits for the studio. About actresses being lit from the side softly with window light: I just finished reading John Alton's cinematography book, and he shows what it looks like if you light an orange from the side. You can see all of the texture of the orange peel. Then he moves the light to the front, and the orange looks smooth. It's the same with the pores on the face. He says that until you can light an orange so it looks as smooth as a billiard ball, you shouldn't try to light actresses! Then of course you have to add the other lights to make the orange look round. I looked at some photos we took recently, where first we had the key light soft and to the side, then we moved it to the front and hard - and voila! Suddenly she had no pores, no lines, and perfect skin! No wonder actresses insist on a key light! Alton is sort of insane though. He has a whole chapter on how ladies should arrange to be well-lit in every circumstance, even contriving which side of the street to walk on in relation to the sun, where to sit in a restaurant, and how to arrange the desk at work and the breakfast nook and dining table lights at home. He imagines a future in which every lady's house will be equipped with the perfect lighting in every room to show off that particular lady's best features. Alton may have been obsessive, but he sure knew lighting!

Since everything is constructed, then the "hands-off" approach is also a construction. Today people just use a different set of conventions. Ironically, in most interior lighting conditions, it's more realistic if you use lights than if you don't, because your eye picks up much much more light and detail than the camera. So by declining to light you are making the room artificially dark. That's a SPECIAL EFFECT, produced perhaps by notions of postmodernism, but creating in essence a reality that only exists in cameraland, just as much as the most flamboyant lighting you could ever create.

Most cinematographers are not inventing anything new. Most people in all fields of art are copying the latest trends, This is as true today as it was in classical Hollywood. As I said, "realism" was always the focus of cinematography, starting in the early '20s. But what realism means to people has changed. The human eye has so much for range than the camera that the old lighting used to compensate for this. Contemporary lighting uses just as many gimmicks as classical lighting. There is no superior post-modern reality that is a leap in progress. It's different, but it's not better and it's definitely not more "real." You might point to "post-modern thought" but you can't tell me that movies are made and marketed in any other way they they were before. Shadows affect the nervous system; the way faces are lit affects how we feel about people. If DPs don't do glamour lighting as much, it's because those films and stories are not concerned with glamour. If anything, "effects" photography which tries to scare people through the use of things like shadows is much more rampant than ever before. Using conventions that don't fit the style to produce interesting contrasts is not new either. Classical cinematographers from the '20s to the '60s invented pretty much every lighting technique we have today.The author Patrick Keating spends a lot of time disabusing his readers of the the notion that the cinematography of yesterday was limited or inferior. There are all kinds of great movies with great lighting over the last hundred years. To privilege the last couple of decades as superior is ahistorical and the films themselves, watched side-by-side, are the proof.

Well that's all true. Photographically it's true. But perceptually it's different. For instance, when you are looking at someone you know, they could be in shadow or half in shadow, but your brain registers them as if they are lit, without the distortions shadows make on their faces. You never think of people or remember them the way they truly look, but how your brain idealizes them in good lighting. That's why art students have such a hard time at first drawing light and shade - their mind simplifies objects into their outlines, into idealized simple forms. Classical movie lighting tried to light people the way the brain perceives people; when we're in love for instance we further idealize the features of the beloved, and this is what classical lighting attempted to do with glamour portraits. When we are afraid, we emphasize the shadowy aspects of the scene that frightened us, etc. What I love about classical lighting is that it was psychological rather than objective lighting. It was telling you how to feel, what to focus on, and the lighting cues were as strong as the script cues in this regard. Because the style was so consistent, we would know that a close-up was never going to be random, but signified an important moment in the story, etc. Or, if you had villain lighting you knew to fear the person and think of them as a villain. Lighting used to work like music did in a film, to signal to us how to perceive the vents going on. Take away the soundtrack to any thriller, and the actions onscreen will often lose most or all of their suspense. It's been fashionable for many years or decades now to try to do objective, realistic lighting. In fact, that seems to have been he goal of cinematographers from nearly the beginning, as this book proves, starting in the early '20s. But the lighting you do is going to affect the audience emotionally whether you light it intentionally to produce emotion or not. If you let actors blend into a shadowy background, that is a statement that favors cinematographic reality more than perceptual reality, and this is something that the classical cinematographers meticulously tried to avoid - thus the emphasis on illusionism. In John Alton's book, he talks about how to light interiors: two cross key lights through the window at 45 degree angles, the side walls each lit from the opposite corner, the back wall also lit at an angle and brighter than the side walls, the furniture backlit to give dimension, shadows artificially created on walls, one fill light on either side of the camera, then the people lit with key lights, backlights, kickers. Would you think that this lighting would be appropriate for classical color photography, or would it be an example of cluttered lighting for color?

David, I just finished this book too. I found it so incredibly inspiring on so many levels, not least of which is its attitude towards classical cinema which does not look down on it from a superior perspective as so many books do when talking about the past. I love for example how he mentions that the lighting in Citizen Kane was striking not because it is more "realistic," as many claim, but because it is more mannered. This is such an important distinction! Reading that book inspired me to read John Alton's book on lighting, which is quoted a lot in the book. One area where I agree with Alton is in the concept of what realism means, which was very different in 1949 than it is today. For example, if someone lights a room without key lights on the actors, that seems like a mannered approach because it doesn't imitate human perception. When you are speaking to someone, even in a dimly lit room, you always perceive them as being bright and clear and sharp because your eyes adjust and pick them out of the background, so having them lit by an extra light is more realistic than letting them recede into the rest of the room light. They used to compensate for the fact that the lens picks up less than the eye by enhancing lights on people.

Thanks again everyone for your suggestions. I did think about keying the background in, but what i love about rear projection is the ability to direct actors in front of the background image so I know exactly what I'm getting. I also love the look of rear projection. I did find a reasonably priced DLP projector in Florida (5 times cheaper for the same projector in Los Angeles), but I have to find out if they will ship it here for the rental. So is the consensus that a 24P DLP projector is the way to go?

Hi Ali, well, the rest of the film is going to be shot on 35mm so it has to be shot on 35mm. The thing about 35mm projectors is that 1, usually the lamps are not bright enough for rear projection, and 2, I can't even find one in all of Los Angeles for rent! (Not even an ordinary one). The great thing about the digital projectors is that the lamps are so bright. I remember reading somewhere that the projectors used for rear projection back in the day were special projectors with fantastically bright bulbs that were only used for that purpose. (Although I've read elsewhere on this forum about someone using a regular 35mm projector for rear projection). I'd also have to find one of those old motors to synch camera and projector together. It would be so much fun to shoot it that way, but where can I get the equipment?? I did call about a DLP projector, and they are outrageously expensive.

Hmmm...lots of things to consider. Thank you Phil, David, and Albion for your invaluable suggestions. The color does worry me, now that you guys mention it. Isn't there a way of putting a filter of some sort on the projector lens without cutting too much of the light? Or is there a way of testing the color temperature of the projector with a meter, so that the footage can be timed to compensate?

Thanks for your suggestions! If you were shooting the scene, how bright a projector would you go with? I read somewhere that 25,000 lumens was an idea to be aimed for, but that's not in our budget. I was wondering if 10,000 lumens would be bright enough. What would be a large screen size? 10' x 14', or larger? Some of the background scene will have to be in focus, because there is a car tailing the car in front that must be seen through the rear window. I don't think I have the budget to do tests really...that would involve the renting the studio, lights, the car, the screen, the crew, etc. and it's just not feasible for us to do that without at least trying to get the "real" footage out of it. Is there a way to adjust the frame rate of the projector to be in synch with the camera, or to synch them together somehow so there would not be an flicker?

I'm shooting some car scenes where I want studio lighting on the actors, so I'm thinking rear projection might be the best way to go. A model for the look I want is the driving sequence near the beginning of Bunuel's BELLE DE JOUR (starting at about 11 minutes into the film). One DP I spoke to said he thinks those shots were done on a process trailer, but to me they look like rear projection. Any thoughts on how those scenes were shot would be greatly appreciated. We're shooting on 35mm, and I was wondering if anyone has had experience shooting on 35mm and projecting the background plates on LCD or DLP? Are there issues with flicker when shooting in this way? And does anyone have advice on which type and size of screen to use?