(darkness). A hard-edged crime story about U.S.
Treasury Department agents’ successful busting of
a counterfeit ring, T- M e nincorporates many shots
made in near-total darkness—a black so deep that
sometimes you can barely see the action. Bright
lighting occasionally punctuates this gloom, but the
overall tendency is to place everyone—cops and
counterfeiters alike—in a dark and murky atmos-
phere. Alton lit his sets for mood rather than for
making them completely visible to the viewer, and
with this approach he rewrote the textbook on film-
noir lighting. In doing this, he also changed the
expectations traditionally raised by film-noir light-
ing in order to direct and complicate our interpre-
tation of the film’s narrative.
The various aspects of lighting—its source, qual-
ity, direction, and color—work together with other
elements to determine the overall mood and mean-
ing of a scene. Lars von Trier’s Dogville(2003; cine-
matographer: Anthony Dod Mantle), a misanthropicvision of the United States in the Depression-era
1930s, is set in a town of the same name that is
located high on a plateau and populated by selfish,
bored losers and miscreants. Grace (Nicole Kid-
man) arrives out of nowhere as a “gift” to the town’s
residents, whose primary reactions to her presence
involve humiliating and torturing her, even as she
does their chores to seek their acceptance. What is
this place? Who is Grace? Why is she treated as an
outsider? Lighting helps us answer these ques-
tions. The town’s setting is a schematic design con-
structed on a vast, dark studio floor and often
photographed from a very high angle that permits
us to see its entire layout and total isolation from the
surrounding countryside (which we never see). How-
ever, in contrast to the high-key lighting that floods
the overall set with an even light, the scene we are
considering (which takes place in one of the “houses”
outlined on the floor) uses expressively lit close-ups
to record a turning point in the action.1 23 4
Aspects of lighting in Dogville[1] Grace (Nicole
Kidman) provokes Jack. [2] Grace faces the sunlight.
[3] Grace, in profile, is transfixed by the sunlight.[4] Grace turns toward Jack, astonished at how easy it was
to bring light into darkness.CINEMATOGRAPHIC PROPERTIES OF THE SHOT 243