Lighting
Light as language: key, fill, shadow, and who the film chooses to illuminate.
- lighting
- reference
- technical-code
Quality, direction, source and colour of light: high-key evenness, low-key shadow, hard versus soft, motivated versus expressive. Lighting decides what can be seen and, more importantly, what the seeing feels like.
What to look for
Where is the key light and is its source plausible? Who gets soft light, who gets hard? What lives in the shadows the film maintains?
Canonical cases
Psycho — the parlour scene splits one room into two lighting schemes — Marion soft and lamplit, Norman carved up by hard shadow and the taxidermy's silhouettes (Norman among the birds). Alice — the prologue runs the opposite program: the flat, saturated, sourceless glow of a Technicolor soundstage sunset — light that admits it comes from lamps and history rather than a sun (The $85,000 backdrop).
Sources
Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art on lighting design; Durgnat on the parlour's chiaroscuro.