This is the beginning of a discussion regarding low-light cinematography.
You need light to capture action. You need light to make girls beautiful. You need light to see anything.
But then I go and write a scene in which the babes hide in the crowd to avoid a colorful cast of bad guys such as a hipster samurai and a little ghetto princess wielding a butcher’s knife (conceptual art coming soon), when the lights are low. And that means before the shoot, we’ll have to run some low-light tests to see what the scene will look like. So in lieu of a low-light test, lets look at some pretty cool low-light scenes in cinema.
My favorite is from Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, directed by Michael Winterbottom, starring Steve Coogan, and shot by Marcel Zynskind, who is pretty young as far as D.P.s are concerned.
Here’s a clip of that scene:
I love the lovely layers of silhouettes within the same frame, and how the characters are identifiable even when they’re just shadows. I reckon the set up they did was no joke and was probably painstaking. One can only hope we’ll have the resources and the ingenuity to pull it off.
I also like some not-so-elegant solutions - such as the case in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:
The spotlight is illogical, but since it takes place in a dream, no one questions its existence. The harsh light does make everything feel nice and threatening. Then it’s used beautifully in the end, to create a very melancholy effect.
There’s also a Japanese movie called All About Lily Chou Chou. It is one of the darkest coming-of-age films I’d ever seen. All these cruel acts that teenagers do to each other are depicted somewhat beautifully and whimsically, making the acts even more disturbing and perverse. The night scenes are illuminated by single source gelled in green, creating an eerie “nightvision” effect.
We experimented with low-light cinematography with my last short film This Close or This Far. During the location scout, the cinematographer and gaffer (Drew Daniels and Sean Fee - both forces of nature) and I discussed the possibility of shooting with just a read neon sign. Then we did it:
wait for the neon kiss.
Not sure what the budget will allow or which approach will finally make our scene pop and exciting, but I’ve long admired these three films for their achievement in low-light.
What are some of your favorite night scenes or low-light scenes?
