Light dominates our universe: it functions as its heartbeat, helping us count the days. Daily life responds to its rhythm. We are at home in its tempo. We respond to its changes, its moods. We adapt ourselves to a world punctuated by its presence. Throughout our entire life, we bathe in it.
From this, we would assume that of all motion picture techniques lighting would be the one audiences would be the most familiar with. Far from it. Year after year, a few films are nominated for an Academy Award in cinematography, yet most viewers would be at a loss to explain why. At best, people might reflect upon the beauty of some landscape shots or the splendid warm light that reminds them of sunset, but no more. It may be indeed that the phenomenon of light is too familiar, making it difficult to imagine its use in film as a trope. Whatever shows up on the screen is automatically rationalized as the duplication of some natural phenomenon. Even when the lighting is absolutely bizarre (e.g., the blue and pink motif in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola [1981]), it is either justified as an effect from some unknown source beyond the limits of the frame or discounted as mere "noise," some strange filtering not really essential for the understanding of the narrative.
One does not get more enlightened when turning to the writing of the professionals in the field (books of interviews or articles about filmmaking in American Cinematographer). Vilmos Zsigmond, certainly one of the best and most vocal directors of photography working in Hollywood, is typically hazy when, on the same page, he explains his approach to lighting in the following way: "The first consideration in lighting a set is the nature of the story. . . . The mood of the scene within the story is equally important. . . . The light that establishes the mood of the set is the first lamp I turn on." 7 What are we to make of this, since each consideration may run counter to the other two? Which is the determining factor and why? Is the film's genre a comedy, a gangster film the important factor or is it at times overridden by what happens between the characters in one scene? Or should location be the dominant ingredient in establishing Zsigmond's mood? In his writing (and it is representative of most books on lighting), the mood of the locale conveniently also happens to be that of the individual scene as well as that of the film as a whole. No clue is offered to help us out of the morass when that is not the case. Of course, Zsigmond and his peers in the American Society of Cinematog-
