Moving Images, Understanding Media

134 Moving Images: Making Movies, Understanding Media

range of styles, like many successful motion picture photographers.

Right from the opening of Sweet Smell of Success, the viewer can

perceive Howe’s ability to light areas of kinetic activity and control

strong contrasts of dark and light with characters moving between

interiors and exteriors.

• In A Little Princess (1995), Alfonso Cuarón appointed his habitual
  collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki to illuminate visual schemes that
  balance the reality of a young girl’s situation at a boarding school
  during World War One with fairy-tale qualities. Th e cinematography
  consistently uses the motivated light of large school windows,
  fi replaces, and glass fi xtures to provide subtle illumination of faces
  and interiors. Lubezki had to meet the challenges of the color
  combinations that help to create the tone of the movie, particularly
  the diffi culty of creating agreeable skin and wood tones alongside
  prominent uses of green in the production design. Th e execution of
  expressive lighting, resourceful framing, and well-designed and well-
  timed camera movement combines to create a world that achieves
  deep resonance through the quality of its images.


• In Los Olvidados (1950), director Luis Buñuel and cinematographer
  Gabriel Figueroa capture the bright sun and dusty streets of Mexico
  City, and the fi lm powerfully uses the contrast of bright and dark in
  both exteriors and interiors to depict the harsh forces of the world
  inhabited by these characters. Th e brightness of a dusty path, the faces
  of children stuck in shadows as they prepare to commit aggression,
  the pathetic beggar being hit shockingly in the face with dark mud,

Figure 4-15 The boys

attacking the blind beggar

in the brightly lit exterior

photographed by Gabriel

Figueroa of Los Olvidados.

(Courtesy Heraut Films/

Photofest)

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