James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

In the darkened scenes of the film, the actors are often lit with a single hard light from the side, so that part or all of their faces are in deep shadow. Whenever the audience needs to read the expressions on silhouetted or partly obscure faces, Musuraca uses a soft fill lightas in figure 41, which shows Jeff and Kathie looking out of a bright room and into the night. In cases where the foreground and the background have roughly the same degree of illumination, he uses a rim light or a "liner," usually positioned to the side and slightly to the rear of the actors and either above or below the cameraas in figures 4243. This sort of lighting had been commonplace in Hollywood since the 1920s, not only because it created a separation between figure and ground, but also because it gave faces a three-dimensional quality. Wide shots of dark city streets usually involved similar techniques, because architecture needed to be picked out of the gloom and given a certain dimensionality or sculptural effect. Figure 44 shows an RKO set representing San Francisco at night, with its darkness strategically broken by a neon sign, several glowing windows, a streetlamp, and a pair of automobile headlights reflecting off wet pavement: a key element is a single floodlamp hidden in an alley, which creates a sense of depth and separation between two of the buildings. Figure 45 shows a studio mock-up of a courtyard behind an apartment house on Telegraph Hill: Robert Mitchum is silhouetted against a bright patch of "sky," and the surrounding darkness is broken chiefly by rays of "moonlight" striking a low wall and a clothesline.

Musuraca's chief method of giving depth and atmosphere to interior scenes was to use a modified form of what Alton called "Jimmy Valentine lighting." With the assistance of art director Jack Okey and set decorator Darrell Silvera, he gave the below-eye-level key light an ostensible source, such as a fireplace or a table lamp, which threw slightly high shadows on the walls and lent a gothic quality to faces. Meanwhile, he situated one or two indirect lights close against the walls, so that the edges of picture frames and other furnishings cast their own dramatic shadows. This technique often created a sinister or perversely violent mood, as in the early scenes in which Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) hires Jeff to find Kathie (figures 4647). Notice, however, that the same lighting arrangement is used when Jeff and Kathie first spend the night together. The setting is Kathie's bungalow on a rainy evening in Acapulco: "It was a nice little joint with bamboo furniture and Mexican gimcracks," Jeff recalls. "One little lamp burned." We see Jeff and Kathie dash into the room from a thunderstorm, and a solitary lamp, situated low in the foreground, motivates high shadows on the walls. After drying Kathie's hair with a towel, Jeff passionately embraces her and tosses the towel across the lamp, which pitches over in a gust of wind from the open doorway. The camera then drifts outdoors, gliding along the veranda in the backlit rain. A few moments pass, and we return to the darkened room. The lighting now seems to come from the moon, which shines through a pair of French windows (impossibly, since the rain still falls), silhouetting, Jeff's figure against the wall as he rises to shut the door.

Fill lighting and "liners" in Out of the Past.

Here and elsewhere, the codes of erotic lighting have an affinity with the codes of mystery lightingand appropriately so, because Out of the Past is a film about fatal attraction or the fear of a woman's sexuality. Nowhere is the intertwining of eroticism and danger more apparent than in a sequence near the end of the picture, when Jeff secretly investigates Kathie's San Francisco apartment. Once again high shadows are cast by a single lamp, and the luxurious furnishings are sculpted by hidden background lights. When a telephone rings, Kathie enters from a party next door, and Jeff steps into a darkened bedroom, observing her conversation from the shadows (figure 48). After Kathie hangs up, she crosses to a liquor cabinet. Jeff steps out of the bedroom doorway, his face lit by a sinister, low-level light (figure 49). Kathie turns and starts to run, but jeff grabs her arm and pushes her down into a chair (figure 50). The reverse angle shows her landing roughly, her mink coat falling off and lamplight spilling across her bare shoulders; her black dress is outlined against the gray upholstery of the chair, and her seductive body functions almost like a return blow, countering Jeff's violence (figure 51).

Eroticism and ''mystery light" in Out of the Past.

More could be said about Musuraca's contributions to Out of the Past, but these examples suffice to outline a basic repertory of techniques that were central to a great many Hollywood films of 1947, when the so-called noir style was at its height. During that year, it was estimated that only 12 percent of U.S. films were photographed in color. The increasingly sophisticated technology of lenses and film stocks made black and white seem an extremely flexible medium that was suited to both locations and studio sets and adaptable to every genre in the industry. The situation for photographers, however, was about to change. In the early 1950s, Eastman Kodak introduced a single-strip color film and a dye-coupling process that eliminated the need for expensive Technicolor equipment. The new Eastmancolor stock (derived from the German Agfacolor and renamed Warnercolor, Metrocolor, or anything else the studios liked) required no special cameras, no monopolistic laboratory, and no "color consultants"; it appeared when the movies were attempting to differentiate themselves from television, and it resulted in a sudden, massive reduction in the amount of black-and-white photography. By 1954, at least half the films produced in Hollywood were shot with Eastmancolor. This figure dropped slightly when the movie industry became more interested in selling its product to television, but soon afterward, television itself became a color medium. Over the next decade, broadcasters used color videotape to document the ghastly combat in Vietnam, astronauts took color pictures of the earth, families assembled photo albums out of color snapshots, and a tourist with a home-movie camera photographed the assassination of John F. Kennedy on color film. By the early 1970s, most people regarded color as the normal or "realistic" way of seeing, and black and white as an abstract or stylized medium, redolent of the past. 21