| | | | | | described by Levinas, the meeting between characters and viewers becomes "a world of the me-only, a world that erases otherness from the picture of the other, a world in which the other becomes just another self, an alter ego known congenially through a return to one's own core." 37 Instead of keeping open the space between two entities (the character and the viewer), motion picture lighting fills the gap between them, smoothes over the difference, joins them so to speak through an umbilical cord that remains for the most part unobserved and unexamined. | | | | | | | | | Because the cloaking of the world by conventional lighting tends to make use of known stylistic figures (figures that have worked their way through mass consciousness till they have become nothing more than stereotypes), the others present in the field are siphoned through a sieve that quickly reduces them to a repertory of clich s. Even when they beg, their faces never actually demand anything of viewers. Traditional lighting thus deprives us of a defining moment of existence. Because we are not exposed to something truly outside ourselves, the movie world remains unchallenging and our responsibility toward the other nil. | | | | | | | | | So far we have taken for granted that light is a natural everyday phenomenon. Interestingly, in the Bible, God created the sun and the moon only on the third day, whereas light preceded everything else on the first day. What are we to make of this gap between sources and effect? Even more paradoxically perhaps, when God, to initiate the creation, said " 'Let there be light!' and there was light," even God could not be sure that anything at all had been activated: "Darkness was [still] upon the face of the deep." This of course makes sense since light itself is invisible, its rays bouncing back and making visible only what already exists and stands in their way. In film, for example, light can be "seen" filling space only after smoke, fog, talcum powder, whatever is thrown into the air so that the light rays have a chance to hit the minute particles and join with them in the production of a beam of light. That invisible first light thus functioned as a backdrop against which all other aspects of the divine creation, including the sun and the moon, would later be revealed. In my view, this original light stands very much as an analogon for Martin Heidegger's notion of Lichtung. | | | | | | | | | For Heidegger, the question forgotten by Western philosophy throughout its history is the question of being. Almost immediately, from | | | | |
