| | | | | | pleats of the gowns and garments, ending the visit with a toboggan slide down the rest of the body. All effective lighting, but especially the Chiaroscuro technique made famous by Caravaggio, provides such a trap for the eyes. In this case depth is no longer geometric, it is made fully sensuous. Entities are no longer just recognized, they are apprehended as they appear at that moment, in that light. Directional lighting, the use of shadows, and a clear contrast between light and dark in a scene thus greatly activate the rods and cones in our visual apparatus, provoking activity and beguiling the witness. As the eyes move along the surfaces, explore the layers, brush against the display, they fornicate with the objects in the field, taking them in, essentially internalizing something which is fully external. Light in short thoroughly glamorizes perspective, ravishing the field through its uneven radiations, bewitching viewers' eyes, engaging them in a lustful embrace. As usual Andr Bazin was not far from the mark when he called light "the original sin of Western Civilization." 11 | | | | | | | | | Caravaggio's intuitive but forceful use of light was in time systematized, modulated, and softened by academic painters and it is their teaching that cinematographers have emulated in film. To become a member of the nineteenth century elite, to produce an "official art" agreeable to the regime, Thomas Couture reminded his pupils, "you must establish what I call [a] 'dominant' for light and shade effects. . . . Having made this your dominant, you will of course make sure that all other lights are subordinate to it."12 In these two brief sentences we find the fundamental mystification at the core of motion picture lighting: the semblance of a single light, the reality of several. Yes, when we take a look at a scene, we believe that a single light is being used because all the shadows on the set fall in the same direction. In actuality though, other, less discernible lights are employed for all sorts of reasons. To illustrate what I am talking about, let us take a look at the famous three-point lighting system which is inevitably proposed as the model to follow in all the how-to books on the subject. | | | | | | | | | The key light, the one light that is perceivable, is generally explained as the nub of the entire lighting in a given scene. The term "key" itself is quite hazy. Is this the key that unshuts a lock, an open sesame! of sorts, implying that, after it is inserted, the natural world magically will make | | | | |
