Stanley Kubrick Director: A Visual Analysis

Stanley Kubrick Director: A Visual Analysis

Alexander Walker, Sybil Taylor, Ulrich Ruchti

p.43

“As for Lighting, I should say that eighty-five percent of A Clockwork Orange was lit either by replacing normal light bulbs in existing lighting fixtures with photo floods, or by the use of very lightweight Lowell 1,000 watt quartz lights, bounced off either ceilings or special reflective umbrellas. At other times it was necessary to use brute arcs for which there is no substitute when large expanses have to be lit at night, or when a one source light effect has to be achieved in a large interior.”

A Clockwork Orange p. 196 – 223

p.198

When he holds a shot, Kubrick seems to hold it for measurably longer than one expects him to.

There is a recurrent use of low angles, so that the characters have a friezelike elevation.

p.199

Off for a bit of the old ultra violence, the gang’s shadows leaping before them advertise their intention.

p.201

Kubrick’s quick cutting and the acrobatic movements of the actors during the rape of he writer’s wife edit the assault into a weird ballet whose effect is consolidated by the masks that seem to combine the stock features of both tragedy and comedy. The viewer’s experience is highly disorienting. “There are dreams,” says Kubrick, “in which you do all the terrible things your conscious mind prevents you from doing.”

p.202

Up to the moment of his imprisonment for her murder, Alex is frequently presented in these low angle shots that enhance his menace. Later, the camera tends to dominate him as he is put in the position of victim

p.205

Kubrick’s consistency in lighting a scene with only the illumination one would expect to find in the actual environment.

p.222

A Clockwork Orange is nearer this dream state than any film Kubrick has made. Its lighting, editing, photography, and especially its music – for sound reaches deeper into the unconscious than even sight – are all combined with events in themselves bizarre and frightening.

The Shining p.268 – 314

p.287

The earlier scenes – a brief job interview, a tactful history of a particular place – resemble the professional exchanges between the space technicians in 2001. They are conducted in medium shot, low-key , the voices confidentially lowered. But the suspense they generate has already nudged the story’s center of interest away from Stephen King’s spooky premonitions toward a man’s interior demons.

p.289

It felt like an actual hotel, not a movie set open to overhead lighting racks and ‘breakaway’ walls that collapsed when accommodating camera setups.

p.290

Crucially, the illumination used throughout perfectly duplicated the lighting one would expect in a hotel.

p.291

To exploit fully the spaciousness of The Shining’s set, much of the action would have to be filmed in long continuous takes. Using cuts would have negated the impact of the grand design.

The Overlook’s long corridors and fixed walls made it impossible to lay camera rails on the floor, or overhead. Yet for Kubrick, these difficulties presented less of a problem than an opportunity. The shooting of The Shining exactly coincides with the introduction of the Steadicam into filmmaking.

p.300

Throughout, Nicholson’s features are lit from below, illuminated by the lighting panels in the car counter. This adds drama to Nicholson’s expressions, exaggerating every minor alteration in the actor’s incredibly complex orchestration of emotions in a way both realistic and slightly surreal.

The dialogue suggests depths beyond its superficiality.

p.306

Kubrick has said himself, “When one is looking at a film,  the experience is much closer to a dream than anything else”.

p.309

During such key moments in a character’s inner drama, Kubrick employs extreme formality and symmetry in his camera set up. Such a setup frames Wendy looming above the typewriter as she discovers, horribly, that her husband’s ‘creative’ writing consists of page after page containing the same two words: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Kubrick has positioned Jack’s typewriter in the foreground, shooting it from a low angle.

Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations by Torben Grodel

Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations – Torben Grodal

p.152

Lighting is one of the most powerful means of creating effect in films.

The experience of light is a basic one.

The following does not pretend to be able to put forward a general theory of film lighting but will provide an account of some of the dominant metaphoric descriptions of the effect of film lighting and provide dome reasons for these effects.

To describe the cognitive effects of lighting – for instance, the way in which a given light enhances or impedes object recognition and object salience – in itself poses a series of problems for description. Mostly, however, the description of the effects of lighting is aimed at a lager endeavor, namely, to describe the way in which lighting aspectualizes the emotional experience of a given scene, resulting in sad, scary, or euphoric experiences

When cinematographers want to describe the effects of different types of lighting, they mostly use metaphors. Some of those are tactile (soft versus hard light, warm versus cold colors), other muscular-kinetic: a given type of light provides a punch or a kick to the image.

The Hardwired Expressiveness of Underlighting

p.153

Kris Mankiewitz states, “As the saying goes, good people are lit from heaven and the bad people are lit from hell” (1986, p. 133). These cliché’s are not as obvious in today’s more natural and often softer lighting, yet the angle of light and the composition of light in the frame remain some of the most powerful tools for the creation of mood and for the shaping of an actor’s face.

p.154

Many critics assume that underlighting has an uncanny effect, mostly linked to villains, and there might also be a reason for this, namely that it is easier to provide a negative than a positive contextualization for the effects of underlighting. All other things being equal, familiarity is linked to positive, upbeat feelings, unfamiliarity with negative feelings. That does not prevent filmmakers from contextualizing underlighting in such a way that it provides positive feelings, fulled by the emotional salience of the deviating light, say, using a cozy source of light such as candlelight or fireplace. But the situation is marked as ‘extraordinary’ and is expressing a ‘mood’.

Many of the lighting clichés in cinema (and real life) are used in order to create or enhance moods – from romantic sunset scenes to horror-inspiring fog-clad cityscapes. A preliminary reason for this can be found by considering the difference among feelings, moods, and emotions.

Darkness reduces object control and enhances passive experiences whether such experiences are positive (for instance, in the context of a romantic encounter linked to a voluntary reduction of control) or negative (as in a horror environment and its forces reduction of control. The conscious or unconscious evaluation of a given type of lighting will thus be felt as mood.

p.155

Variations in the lightness (and colour) of the different objects and surfaces will influence the attention of the human onlooker. Thus, all other things being equal, a selectively highlighted object will stand out from the less lightened objects or surfaces and thereby draw attention to the highlighted phenomena.

Ambient and Directed Light

p.157

Directed light reaches the object directly from the light source and is then reflected, whereas ambient light is refracted by passing through some transparent material (the atmosphere for instance) or reflected from other surfaces and objects. Whereas directed light radiates from one point, ambient light arrives at a given object from multiple points, from all the surfaces of the environment of the object.

p.158

The main cinematic way of producing those two lighting elements, directed and ambient light, is by having a key light producing directed light and a fill light to produce ambient light.

One set of variations is linked to the source of the directed light in relation to the observer. 

(example..)

The perception of a human face, facing the observer and illuminated by directed light only. If the light is coming from behind the observer (the camera), there will be a minimum of shading, and the face will look “flat”. If the face is illuminated with side light, that is, light coming from either the left or right side of the object, the face will get strong shadings that will enhance the curves on the chin and make the nose ridge very prominent, but the opposite side of the head will be placed in deep shadow. The shading will enhance a three-dimensional physical appearance but distort the overall perception of the face, which is now very asymmetrical. If the source of light is directly behind the face, the face will be in deep shadow and will only exist as a dark two-dimensional surface, defined by the contour line. Thus, except for front lighting, the main effect of strong directed light is to enhance the continuous, dramatic aspect of the face, either by enhancing its physical and sculptural three dimensionality (in combination with asymmetry) or by enhancing its nonphysical appearance as a two dimensional silhouette. Furthermore, directed sidelight enhances the dramatic three-dimensionality, but it suppresses the ability of the observer to see the face as a continuous (and soft) surface by giving prominence to those aspects of the face where there is a radical change of curvature, such as the cheekbones or nose ridge.

The reflected, ambient light will in several ways result in the opposite effects from those caused by directed light. Because the light waves hit the object from many different points, the ambient light will not create strong shading, and if a given scene is illuminated solely with ambient light, shadows and shading will disappear. Surfaces will not be seen as defined by radical changes but as continuous surfaces. This may provide an eerie feeling. If, for instance, the weather is strongly overcast, the lack of shadows may provide the objects with a two-dimensional immateriality whereas other cues (such as overlapping) point to three-dimensionality.

p.160

When seeing a film noir, the viewer perceives the actual distorted scenes and figures, but their deviation from some omplicit norm only get access to consciousness by the feelings of expressiveness.

Darkness diminishes the intake of visual information and thus diminishes visual control and therefore the ability to act and control. So, at least on a general level, darkness should be concomitant with feelings of deactivation. Deactivation by darkness can be a forced and stressful block of action tendencies, as in horror films, and also a block of moral control, as in Martin Scorses’s Taxi driver.

So the specific expressive qualities of darkness can only be determined by its diegetic context, by an analysis of whether the depression of activity cued by darkness is concomitant with a voluntary relaxation or is opposing a wish for control.

Similarly, strong backlighting is generally expressive because it reduces three-dimensional objects to an immaterial two dimensionality, but whether this will be experienced positively as a sublime transfiguration or negatively depends on the diegetic context.

p.161

Softness is mostly linked to tactile experience of surfaces, often produced by organic surfaces, whereas hardness is linked to solid three-dimensional objects, often of a mineral kind.

The hardness or softness of a given face or object may be enhanced by context, say, using soft light for a romantic scene or hard light for a thriller. But hard light on a romantic scene would still add experience of hardness to the scene and characters.

Innate Factors in the Experience of Light and Lighting

Light is the most important medium for gaining information about the world and guiding our interaction with our environment. Our experience of lighting is not a neutral intake of information but is welded together with feelings and moods that in shorthand tell us something about the affordances of a given scene or a given object.

p.162

Different kinds of tacit knowledge will, therefore, be attached to the conscious visual surface information and gain conscious salience by means of different kinds of feelings, as when we experience some types of ambient light as soft or feel that strong light (within limits) creates upbeat feelings.

These feelings may indicate an expressive deviation from some norms as when underlighting provides a feeling of uncanniness.

The experience of light and lighting is a source of knowledge about an objective, exterior world. But the experience is not disinterested. It is deeply intertwined with our concerns and subjective interests. For that reason, lighting is a powerful tool for inducing and changing feelings and moods.

American cinematographer - Western destinies DEAKINS

American Cinematographer – Western Destinies

By Stephen Pizzello, Jean Oppenheimer

October 2007

Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC explores the existential perils of the American West in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men.

p.30 – p.47

p.31-32

You shot both pictures in super 35mm. why did you choose that over anamorphic?

Deakins: I prefer Super 35 because it allows you to use short focal-length lenses. I also like the scale of that format – the intimace – and the texture of the film grain. In some cases I find anamorphic to be almost too clean, too grain-free and pristine.

The opening scenes of No Country provide an interesting contrast, because you were dealing with a large desert basin that was lit partially by the lights of modern pickup trucks.

Deakins: That was kind of frustrating, because that whole sequence -- when Moss [Josh Brolin] goes back to a crime scene at night and is pursued by drug dealers -- had to go from night through dawn and then into full daylight. I wracked my brain about how to do that, because the area we were filming in was a half-mile square in this big, dusty basin. I couldn't see any way around it other than to use a big wash of light on top of the escarpment above the location, so I put three Musco lights up there to create a moonlight effect. I didn't want to do it, but I didn't see any other possibility. After we set up the Muscos, I knew we needed more of them, but I was lucky to get the three.

To try to make the transition to dawn, we picked out a rise where Moss parks his truck; when the drug dealers come back, they park their truck in the same spot with their headlights on. We tried to make the transition to dawn by lighting behind the trucks, as though the sun was starting to come up beyond the rise. We got about eight 18Ks and literally just shot them up into the air to light the sky while flagging them off everything else. Those basically lit the dust in the air and created a very faint glow behind the trucks.

p.44

Through much of No Country, Moss is help up in motel rooms, but you managed to create a lot of suspense through your lighting

Deakins: The lobby of the big hotel was a location in Las Vages, New Mexico, and we shot those scenes at magic hour to get the feeling of dusk outside. The hotel room itself was a set because we had so many specific shots to do there. Inside that room, I wanted the feeling of the street lights coming through the windows so that when Moss turns off his bedside lamp, we’d get this reddish sodium light coming through the windows. Then we had white light under the door so we could shoot Chigurh’s shadow creeping down the hallway toward the door. The shot of Moss diving out the window was done on a set, but the shot of him landing in the street was done on location.

During the big shootout that follows, Chigurh seems like an invisible force, because you never really get a clear look at him

Deakins: In the book, Chigurh is the personification of evil, and it’s implied that he’s almost like a ghost.  So throughout the film, we wanted to make him feel very shadowy or indistinct figure.

The big shootout was pretty complicated, we had small rigs of four or five 1Ks bunched up on rooftops and we had little gag lights on street lights to create more defined pools of light. I stuck with the orange sodium look for that chase because I wanted it to feel pretty grim.

There’s also some interesting lighting in the subsequent scene, where Moss crosses the border into Mexico and dumps the money off a bridge.

Deakins: That was one of the trickiest setups in the movie because it was staged at a freeway crossing. The art department put in the border posts. I wanted the American side to have blue light, so we changed out all the streetlights. We lit the border post with cool white fluorescents. For the main action on the Mexican side, I wanted more garish colors. When Moss stops to talk to those three kids, you can see colorful lighting coming up from below the bridge, as if theres a street down below. I enjoyed playing with the colors because the lighting for the preceding shootout consisted entirely of orange sodium light.

p.46

What kind of enhancements did you make in post?

Deakins: The most involved scene in No Country was the whole night-into dawn exterior we discussed earlier. The DI was invaluable for that, especially for a bit involving a dog paddling down the river after Moss. One shot would be cloudy and the next would be in clean morning light, with reflections on the water. In the DI, I could use a power window to add a little highlight in the sky to create the impression that the sky was brighter and was reflecting in the water.