apprehension or suspense in such film noirs as
Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). In fact,
lighting often conveys these things by augment-
ing, complicating, or even contradicting other cin-
ematic elements within the shot (e.g., dialogue,
movement, or composition). Lighting also affects
the ways in which we see and think about a movie’s
characters. It can make a character’s face appear
attractive or unattractive, make the viewer like a
character or be afraid of her, and reveal a charac-
ter’s state of mind.
These are just a few of the basic ways that
movies depend on light to achieve their effects.
We’ll continue our discussion of cinema’s use of
light and manipulation of lighting later (Chapter 6
includes information and analysis of lighting’s aes-
thetic role in cinematography; Chapter 11 covers
how motion-picture technologies capture and uti-
lize light). For now, it’s enough to appreciate that
light is essential to both movie meaning and the
filmmaking process itself.Movies Provide an Illusion of Movement
We need light to make, shape, and see movies, but it
takes more than light to make motionpictures. As we
learned in Chapter 1, movement is what separates
cinema from all other two-dimensional pictorial art
forms. We call them “movies” for a reason: the
movies’ expressive power derives in large part
from the medium’s fundamental ability to move. Or,
rather, they seemto move. As we sit in a movie the-
ater, believing ourselves to be watching a continu-
ously lit screen portraying fluid, uninterrupted
movement, we are actually watching a quick suc-
cession of twenty-four individual still photographs
per second. And as the projector moves one of
these images out of the frame to bring the next oneFUNDAMENTALS OF FILM FORM 471Expressive use of light in The Grapes of Wrath
Strong contrasts between light and dark (called chiaroscuro)
make movies visually interesting and focus our attention on
significant details. But that’s not all that they accomplish.
They can also evoke moods and meanings, and even
symbolically complement the other formal elements of a
movie, as in these frames from John Ford’s The Grapes of
Wrath(1940).2
3