I

		keep much of the rooms in total darkness. Even the grains of the film stock contribute to the overall effect by blocking our attempt to penetrate the space. More than in most films, light, camera, and sound are not enrolled to dramatize the action. Static long takes make us confront the dread experienced by the character following the death of his father in a cabin somewhere in the Russian steppe. The man's face too is unremittingly naked, keeping our identification at bay. As a result, we are literally forced back onto ourselves, onto our own pain of being.

		In a Lichtung, the usual world breaks down, characters are no longer coopted by the demands of a driving narrative, actors briefly forget what they otherwise know so well, and a film escapes the cultural pattern that normally keeps the world a safe and familiar place. Instead, another realm of experience is exposed, one in which the naked face of the other strips the mask that usually protects us. In the Lichtung, the face of the deep makes itself known.

		X

		There are good reasons then why the language of light has remained highly unstable, why the technical explanations by the experts do not really elucidate film practice. For them, certain things are better left unsaid. To question the foundations of their life's work would be to open a can of worms. Better to go on as before. To counter the professional attitude, take a chance, expose yourself. Escape the safe pose, the deadness of a shoot when the illumination proceeds in an orderly, methodical, unimaginative fashion. Open yourself up instead to the magical vitality of light. Sense the kind of wonderment the Greeks experienced when looking at the world around them. How do you engage the process? It is night. Obscurity surrounds you. Take a lamp in your hands. Switch it on. Now slowly move the beam of luminous rays across the surrounding space. Notice how shapes and forms appear and disappear, how they reveal themselves, then change as you move the lamp around. Feel your power as you do so: the entities respond to your call, they manifest themselves. Switch off the light. Sense the loss as everything falls back into darkness, into the unknown, into nothingness once again.

		When you strike a light you partake in something momentous. Remember that light is one of the four elements. Light rays consist of air.