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less glamorous. It may also express the gloss of Hollywood or a requirement of the star system. Certainly its presence is paramount in the professional cinema. To sum up, although the backlight is often dismissed by the professional as a supplement not vital to the business at hand, it reveals itself under scrutiny to be essential to the work after all.
Finally, as an extra added at the last minute to the lighting scheme, there is the kicker which from time to time lights a character's fill side from the back. The kicker is often justified by the existence of other lights on the set. It is thus a recoil from the scene itself, a light that jumps at the viewers from the depth of the lighted space. It functions therefore as a baroque light, one that, Gilles Deleuze tells us, is "pur-dedans," 16 a light that owes apparently nothing to external sources. In other words, its presence verifies the self-sufficiency of the lighting scheme in toto.
There we have it, a three-point lighting system which is often a foursome: a visible key often hypostatized as a natural source, an invisible fill under erasure, a backlight-parergon that no one is supposed to notice but whose job is nevertheless beneficial for the lighting scheme as a whole, and finally a kicker, an extra, that pretends that the scene is independently capable of lighting itself.
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In other day-to-day practices, lighting is full of paradoxes as well. Unlike the theater where audiences always remain in the same location vis- -vis the characters, the motion picture camera keeps moving to new positions on the set. In fact the 30-degree continuity rule even mandates that camera changes be made radical enough so as not to provoke a visual discomfort for the viewers. The problem this causes for the lighting scheme, however, is acute. Let us think: when Griffith and others ruptured the integrity of the single scene by allowing for partial views at first (the closeup), radically distinct angles later on, lighting was not yet an issue. At that time, still, the light essentially came from the sky above glass rooftops and all providing an unified effect regardless of where the shot was taken from. It is only later, say, with The Cheat (Cecil B. De Mille, 1915), that Alvin Wyckoff, the first great lighting director, had to face head-on the massive problems occasioned by this expansion of film language. When light indeed is no longer falling on the set unidimensionally, lighting all in the same manner, when there is instead an uneven distribution

 



Film Production Theory2000
Film Production Theory2000
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 126

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