| | | | | | world, its guarantor so to speak, naturalized light in film safely hides the presence and exercise of language. It seduces us, making us believe that the characters and their actions belong to the natural order of things. The cover-up hence provides the entire narrative operation with an apparent legitimacy: the scene is for real since it takes place in the real world. | | | | | | | | | Although an ideological dividend is already realized from such an operation, other benefits can be gleaned as well. Let us explicate. Say the scene is lighted with a beautiful "sunset" that penetrates the room through Venetian blinds. Certainly, even though the effects may be more beautiful than any we may recall, the light nevertheless reminds us of similar views we have personally experienced. Thus, as Henri Alekan, the grand old man of French cinematography, puts it, such light becomes a | | | |  | | | | | mood that gives its tone to a film. It calls upon our memory to react to physical phenomena such as cold, rain, fog, sun, heat, or dryness, and come up with psychological equivalents such as annoyance, sadness, mystery, fear, anguish, comfort, joy, gaiety, etc. As these effects produce immediate impressions in viewers, the cinematographer is able to obtain psychological reactions out of mere technical means. 23 | | | | | | | | | For Alekan then, a mood originating in the external world cues viewers into a specific state of mind. To explain what is at stake here it may be useful to go back to Martin Heidegger's discussion of mood or Stimmung. The key to the German thinker's entire philosophy is that we are not beings functioning independently from the rest of the world. Rather, we must deal with a specific, historical world from day one. Stimmung as a result reflects more than the momentary internal feeling of an individual.24 Although experienced within the body, it nevertheless springs from the outside, expressing affinity or disjunction toward some aspect or situation encountered there. Far from a personal sentiment, it evidences the reflex action of the body to nonsubjective, extraneous conditions. As Heidegger puts it, moods are "the sort of thing that determines being-with-one-another in advance. It seems as if, so to speak, a mood is in each case already there, like an atmosphere in which we are steeped and by which we are thoroughly determined."25 | | | | |
