: Richard Blank
: Film& Light The History of Filmlighting is the History of Film
: Alexander Verlag Berlin
: 9783895813948
: 1
: CHF 23.90
:
: Fotografie, Film, Video, TV
: English
: 212
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
A comprehensive history of film lighting, from its earliest origins to the heyday of Hollywood dominance - and beyond. This is a book about the art of lighting, 'the relevance of pictures, and the responsibility of all those who take pictures of the world and show them'. In an age of constant digital snapshots, with their mercilessly artless recording of everything around us, the award-winning director and scriptwriter Richard Blank makes a compelling case for this increasingly neglected art, and for sustaining 'the awareness of its responsibility'. In Film& Light, Richard Blank draws on examples from a century of pioneering filmmakers - from Griffith to Buñuel, Ophüls to Altman, Rossellini to Scorsese, Eisenstein to Wong Kar-Wai - to trace the historical development of lighting technology, analyse the changing 'rules' and techniques of film lighting, and define the key terms surrounding the technical innovations of its art. The close attention he brings to bear on these modern masters - from DeMille to De Sica to Lars von Trier, Niblo to Murnau to Siodmark, via Maurice Tourneur and Fritz Lang, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles - brilliantly illuminates the hidden art of these past masters, as well as the troubled social context by which they each variously came to shine.

Richard Blank studierte Philosophie in Köln, Wien, München und promovierte bei Ernesto Grassi. Er schrieb Hörspiele, veröffentlichte mehrere Bücher, u.a. Sprache und Dramaturgie, Schah Reza, der letzte deutsche Kaiser (Rogner& Bernhard, München 1977), Jenseits der Brücke - Bernhard Wicki, ein Leben für den Film (Econ, München 1999) und machte Dokumentarfilme für das Femsehen. Seit 1978 inszeniert er nach eigenen Drehbuchvorlagen Spielfilme für Fernsehen und Kino. Sein Kinofilm Prinzenbad, in dem Bernhard Wicki seine letzte große Rolle spielte, war der einzige deutsche Spielfilmbeitrag bei den Filmfestspielen in Venedig 1994. richardblank.de

THE RULES

Anyone visiting a film studio to watch filming will be amazed by the sheer number of spotlights, lamps, lighting fixtures which are standing around among the scenery and which are arranged, moved, positioned “somehow” without one, as a layman, being able to recognise any kind of system.

When someone has come to see the actors working, he will soon become impatient. The setting up of the light takes time, a long time, far longer than the work with the actors. At the same time the lighting technicians work according to rules which have evolved in the course of film history and are all but universally valid, today.

Every scene has a main light, the “guiding light”, “a light source, which influences and determines the directed lighting of the lighting as a whole”.1 The Americans call this the “key light”. This “key light” is determined by a contextual criterion: The set with scenery and actors should look “natural”. This will be achieved if one “allows oneself to be led by the underlying natural source of light which one wants to imitate”2 when lighting the set. What does that mean in a specific case? Contemporary cameramen, senior lighting technicians and other specialists provide us with information:

“For day interiors windows are the most logical light source … When it is very early in the morning or very late in the afternoon, light coming into the room will be at a very low angle, almost parallel.”3

The light in the day interiors thus has a real “natural” source, sunlight. This is imitated or intensified by the spotlights. We are talking about “afternoon” or “morning” here. What happens if the scene is set at midday?

Vilmos Zsigmond (the cameraman fromThe Long Goodbye, 1973 andThe River, 1984) admits that he feels compelled to “cheat”: “I cheat a lot in daylight because I never think of the sun as being as high overhead as it is in California in the summer.” At the same time he takes pains to keep his concept within a realistic context and continues: “I assume the location is in Sweden or Ireland, where the sun travels low around the sky even in the summer months.” In the same breath he admits “cheating”, to assure himself that he is ultimately not filming in either Sweden or Ireland, but rather in California: “So for me day is 10 a.m. or 3 p.m, but it is never noon.”4

Questions about light go beyond the scope of technical matters. The efforts to find a naturalistic “truth” at all costs are astounding. Zsigmond could simply say: I place the spotlights in such a way that the light falls diagonally, almost parallel to the floor of the interior/room – the “cheating” happens first by means of a geographical change – Sweden or Ireland – is then taken back