Film&Light by Richard Blank

Author:Richard Blank
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783895813948
Publisher: Alexander Verlag
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

TELEVISION

Aristotle, Hollywood, Appia, television and other incompatibilities

The rule book generally accepted today for light in film, the essential features of which had been composed in Hollywood by the mid 1920s and codified by the studios, apply neither to Ophüls’ films nor to a whole series of the films by Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and Robert Siodmak which have already been discussed, nor to others which have not been mentioned yet. However, at film schools and in contemporary text books, this rule book is regarded as the foundation of lighting technique, as if nothing else has ever existed. The selection of cinematographers cited at the beginning of this book, who confirm this set of rules, is representative. The maxim says: the suspenseful story needs a “realistic” space with “natural” light, i.e. with a key light which originates from a natural source.

Light, scenery and the narrative method form a unity which reaches beyond the film. In his book Empire of Light, Sidney Perkowitz defines our world as “an empire of light, which determines space, time and meaning”. 1

The perception of time is reflected in the narrative style. Hollywood’s exegetes see film as being in the tradition of classical drama. At the same time a continuous historical connecting line is seen from Aristotle 2 via Elizabethan theatre 3 to Gustav Freytag. 4 The impression is given that Hollywood film is placed in the continuation of European and Western cultural history.

This historical line is wrong.

We can rule out Aristotle and Greek drama. The religious aspect, the cult character of Greek theatre, excludes the possibility of a direct connection to classic drama. Whether or not Elizabethan theatre is directly related to classical drama is contentious. The Shakespearean stage with its open space and the symbolic character of its scenery is more suited to a broken, unresolved dramatic composition.

This fabricated lineage suppresses the whole of the Middle Ages, which presents a spatial and temporal reality in the mystery plays with their simultaneous staging and the tension-less image of the Christian story, which has nothing to do with classical drama.

Gustav Freytag remains. This rather insignificant nineteenth-century German author summed up the basic principles of classical drama in an essay. 5 The quintessence of this is the same as Bordwell sees in his own words for the story of the Hollywood film: “Here in brief is the premise of Hollywood story construction: causality, consequence, psychological motivation, the drive toward overcoming obstacles and achieving goals. Character-centred – i.e. personal or psychological causality is the armature of the classical story.” 6

The decisive factor is the suspense which grips the audience and captivates them: “Appointments and deadlines stress the forward flow of the story action: the arrows of the spectator’s expectations are turned towards the encounter to come, the race of goal.” 7

The development of this narrative method in Hollywood film is closely associated with the development of the three-dimensional pictorial space, the depth of which was found as a result of the advances in lighting technique.

The combination of a dramatic narrative method full of suspense with the depth of the space has a historical role model.

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