| | | | | | Stimmung can thus express someone's alienation when visiting, say, a solicitor's waiting room and finding oneself out of place because the people there look, speak, and behave in totally unexpected ways, a situation well described by Christine Edzard in her Little Dorrit (1988). Worse, as in Bergman's The Silence, a traveler can find herself in a country whose foreignness is impenetrable: not only is the language unintelligible but the street manners are baffling and the men are all somewhat threatening. On the contrary, in most films, there is no discontinuity between what characters are experiencing and the external Stimmung. Not only does naturalized light manifest the Stimmung of the locale, the arrangement, somewhat miraculously, also fits the tone of the scene and the concerns of the characters. An entire bundle of separate functions are thus made to coincide within a single package. As the lighting seemingly duplicates the mood of one and all, nature is made to synchronize itself with the ups and downs of mere humans. It is domesticated, made to service individuals (the diegetic characters as well as the technicians who orchestrate it all). The combination thus provides a powerful Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk effect: everything moves at once in complete synchronicity. Nature as a result manifests the same uncanny behavior as a Disney animal. By hiding the discontinuities between the personal feelings of fictional characters, the Stimmungen belonging to a group, a place, or a historical situation, and the real world of everyday life, film lighting invests the fiction with hallucinatory powers. | | | | | | | | | Other filters may also be at work in film lighting. To uncover them, I would like to bring in the phenomenological questioning attempted by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the century. In Logical Investigations, Husserl strove to bracket the thorny philosophical issue of the actual existence of the world beyond our sense awareness of it by focusing exclusively on the intentionality of consciousness. In his view, "there are . . . not two things present in experience, we do not experience the object and beside it the intentional experience directed upon it, there are not even two things present in the sense of a part and a whole which contains it: only one thing is present, the intentional experience, whose essential descriptive character is the intention in question." 26 Husserl's insight therefore involves the absolute intertwining of the mind's commandeer- | | | | |
