Blank Film & Light
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-3-89581-394-8
Verlag: Alexander
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The History of Filmlighting is the History of Film
E-Book, Englisch, 212 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-89581-394-8
Verlag: Alexander
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Richard Blank studierte Philosophie in Köln, Wien, München und promovierte bei Ernesto Grassi. Er schrieb Hörspiele, veröffentlichte mehrere Bücher, u.a. Sprache und Dramaturgie, Schah Reza, der letzte deutsche Kaiser (Rogner & Bernhard, München 1977), Jenseits der Brücke - Bernhard Wicki, ein Leben für den Film (Econ, München 1999) und machte Dokumentarfilme für das Femsehen. Seit 1978 inszeniert er nach eigenen Drehbuchvorlagen Spielfilme für Fernsehen und Kino. Sein Kinofilm Prinzenbad, in dem Bernhard Wicki seine letzte große Rolle spielte, war der einzige deutsche Spielfilmbeitrag bei den Filmfestspielen in Venedig 1994. richardblank.de
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Anyone visiting a film studio to watch filming will be amazed by the sheer number of spotlights, lamps, lighting fixtures which are standing around among the scenery and which are arranged, moved, positioned “somehow” without one, as a layman, being able to recognise any kind of system.
When someone has come to see the actors working, he will soon become impatient. The setting up of the light takes time, a long time, far longer than the work with the actors. At the same time the lighting technicians work according to rules which have evolved in the course of film history and are all but universally valid, today.
Every scene has a main light, the “guiding light”, “a light source, which influences and determines the directed lighting of the lighting as a whole”.1 The Americans call this the “key light”. This “key light” is determined by a contextual criterion: The set with scenery and actors should look “natural”. This will be achieved if one “allows oneself to be led by the underlying natural source of light which one wants to imitate”2 when lighting the set. What does that mean in a specific case? Contemporary cameramen, senior lighting technicians and other specialists provide us with information:
“For day interiors windows are the most logical light source … When it is very early in the morning or very late in the afternoon, light coming into the room will be at a very low angle, almost parallel.”3
The light in the day interiors thus has a real “natural” source, sunlight. This is imitated or intensified by the spotlights. We are talking about “afternoon” or “morning” here. What happens if the scene is set at midday?
Vilmos Zsigmond (the cameraman from The Long Goodbye, 1973 and The River, 1984) admits that he feels compelled to “cheat”: “I cheat a lot in daylight because I never think of the sun as being as high overhead as it is in California in the summer.” At the same time he takes pains to keep his concept within a realistic context and continues: “I assume the location is in Sweden or Ireland, where the sun travels low around the sky even in the summer months.” In the same breath he admits “cheating”, to assure himself that he is ultimately not filming in either Sweden or Ireland, but rather in California: “So for me day is 10 a.m. or 3 p.m, but it is never noon.”4
Questions about light go beyond the scope of technical matters. The efforts to find a naturalistic “truth” at all costs are astounding. Zsigmond could simply say: I place the spotlights in such a way that the light falls diagonally, almost parallel to the floor of the interior/room – the “cheating” happens first by means of a geographical change – Sweden or Ireland – is then taken back and is then repositioned in a time – 10 o’clock in the morning or 3 o’clock in the afternoon – in order to be corrected truthfully at the end: although the scene takes place at midday, the sun has to come through the window diagonally. Somersaults of this kind show the concern for truth and naturalness which goes beyond all technical questions and which emphasises the basic principle: film light imagines a “natural” source, which appears in such a form that the viewer can perceive it to be true.
Allen Daviau (cameraman from E.T., 1983) stresses: “The intensity of the window has to be realistic enough that you miss that there is nothing out there,” and he warns against too large an interior because the viewer will no longer accept the window as the single source of the key light. “I don’t feel that you can do any kind of large-scale interior on a stage and have people believe it.”5
In whatever way the lighting is set up, the viewer has to be able to perceive a “natural” source, take it to be true – in this case for the key light coming through the window. Additional light for objects, people and their movements in the interior depends on the key light: “Any additional light will follow this pattern.”6
At night the “natural” light source in interiors is self-evident. It is the lamp in the set, which in contrast to the daylight-sun has the advantage of being a realistic part of the scenery: “The practical sources visible in the frame.”7
Just as sunlight in the daytime, at night the light of the lamp visible in the picture is supplemented and extended by spotlights. “Say you have a lamp in the corner of a living room; you may light the chair with the light coming from one side of the lamp and you will light the couch from another side and you will light the flowers on the coffee table maybe from above. So you will end up rising several units that one source … Then, when people are moving around it complicates it even further. Of course you have to make many liberties with justifying your sources.”8
These comments by the great lighting expert Richmond Aguilar (Easy Rider, 1969, Paper Moon, 1973, The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1980) are clear and simple for the expert. The functions of the spotlights around the set appear anything other than clear and intelligible to an amateur watching the filming. And not only to the amateurs! I as a director have long given up any hope of fully understanding the complicated arrangement of the spotlights. When one sees the model or the completed film later on, one is amazed: the light of the whole set appears to come from the lamps in the room in a completely natural manner: “Any time you have a source of light in the frame.”9
What effect is intended with the additional light which follows the pattern of the key light?
Having established the position, direction and intensity of the key light, “one reaches all the other rules almost inevitably”.10
“In order to lighten the shadows thrown by the key light, one positions a full light which is generally of weaker strength, it is subordinate to the key light.”11
A further unit of light has a balancing effect on the entire set. It is the “background” or “room” light, which lights parts of the set: “in order to balance out the contrasts present in the scene.”12
A third supplement to the key light is cited here: A “kicker light”, also called a “kick light” or “edge light”, is used to separate a part of the set or a person optically from the background. Thus in a portrait: “the kicker light shines from the back onto the subject’s head”.13
The equipment appears relatively clear and straightforward up to this point. However, when we continue, the rule book quickly develops into that superb chaos which confronts any non-expert when going onto the set.
In Hilmar Mehnert’s standard work one can read about everything else which serves to supplement the key light: “clothes light”, “frontal light”, “front light”, “eyelight”, “cross” and “back light”,14 or more specific lighting such as the lighting of candlelight scenes, fireside scenes and the special light when a cigarette is lit.15 There is also “figure lighting” practised primarily in Hollywood, which allows a person to be clearly visible even in darkness.
As in Hilmar Mehnert’s book, technical questions are treated in the utmost detail in Painting with Light, a text book by the cameraman John Alton, written in 1949 and recently reprinted.16 The rules of “Hollywood photography”17 are explained in meticulous detail. Thus there are examples for “sunrise”,18 “window shots,”19 “moonlight and window”20 or “fire scenes”.21
Whatever lighting is used, the preservation of the “natural” effect of the key light is always of prime concern. Disputes between individual experts are played out while still conforming to these maxims. Consequently Mehnert assumes that in an interior care has to be taken that only one shadow direction is created, something which Achim Dunker criticises. He points out that different “natural” light sources can throw different shadows on a set.22 While Dunker, who is opposed to all too rigid rules, declares succinctly, “there are endless possibilities for illuminating an image”,23 he remains within the context of the “natural” light source when things get more specific. In the line of argument against Mehnert he establishes a second light source in a room, other than the light which is coming through the window: light which shines into the room from a terrace and throws a shadow onto the curtain. With all the unconventionality which he demands from lighting – “freedom”, “creativity”24 – he stays with the “natural” light source, even if there are two of them.25
Hilmar Mehnert bases his teaching on a kind of law of nature: “The main light source in nature is the sun; it follows that there is a defined shadow. This fact explains that even in interiors, one unconsciously takes the preponderance of one light source for granted. It follows, for this reason and for aesthetic reasons that one single shadow that is welldefined in its direction is perceived to be particularly...
