The light makes the masters detached from each other

Gordon Willis may really be the prince of darkness. His obsession with classical oil painting and cinematography and his use of Caravaggio-style dark lighting have made him the one of the most influential directors of photograph in Hollywood in nearly half a century. Therefore, analyzing The Godfather (1972) shot by Gordon Willis has become an important process for understanding the dark tone and lighting.

However, what I want to explore here is not how Gordon Willis covered a large area of shadow on the character’s face to strengthen the narrative of the opposition between good and evil and the symbolic meaning of darkness in the character’s human nature, countless predecessors have discussed this. The Godfather is an indisputable exemplary work in this field, and even the other movie All the President’s Men (1976) made by Willis himself is slightly inferior to The Godfather, perhaps only Francis Coppola’s another film Apocalypse Now (1979), which is as famous as The Godfather, can go further. After so many film directors and directors of photography are deeply influenced by Gordon Willis, the audience can even see his shadow in superhero movies like Batman v Superman (2016), what should the director of today be? And how they get out of his classicism prison? How creators can apply this series of visual techniques? These are what I want to discuss.

David Fincher, a director who has a strong admiration for digital technology, provided a way to answer these questions. Throughout all the films filmed by David Fincher, from the film age to the digital age, David Fincher’s visual style is often regarded as rough and cold, which may be due to his low-key lighting love. At the beginning of Seven (1995), the audience can see a scene very similar to The Godfather, immersing a large area of human face in darkness. And because of the penetration of cool tones, the highlights of the skin tone are more obvious, which intensifies the contrast of light and shadow in a non-hash light environment.

The two protagonists in Fight Club (1999) have been exposed to severely under-lit environments for a long time, with a lot of pathological colors and shadows surrounding them. Although its low-light lighting method is similar to Gordon Willis’s picture style in terms of visual results, the lack of sunlight shows the strong style of David Fincher himself

In the movie The Social Network (2010) and Netflix’s Mindhunter (2017), David Fincher pays more attention to making the whole picture in a low-contrast bleak, the audience can no longer see the clear screen composed of “bright” highlights and black shadows, on the contrary, everything in the picture is low-key, the highlights and shadows seem to merge into one. The evaluation of “rough” or “cold” no longer applies to David Fincher’s films at this stage (the picture of Mindhunter is often filled with a warm green hue), instead it is a kind of chaotic gloomy sense, the lighting logic brought by The Godfather will still appear, but David Fincher completely transformed it into another expression of mood with his own visual style.

I don’t think that this change originated from David Fincher’s switch from film cinematic camera to digital cinematic camera. The advancement of his visual style was not changed by the transformation of equipment characteristics. This was confirmed in his movie Zodiac (2007). In this film, David Fincher did not make the picture full of highlights and shadows because of the high light characteristics of the film. On the contrary, the audience saw more pictures like the common pictures in his later digital films. The dim highlights and the shadows that faintly contain details, everything maintains a sense of silence and gloom, even in the sun’s picture, this feeling is lingering.

The advancement of David Fincher’s visual expression showed the audience that the same lighting method can achieve a mood that is different from the original creator’s style through different creative logic. So, what kind of creative logic gave David Fincher the potential to get rid of the influence of Gordon Willis-style light and shadow from the beginning? And what can new creators learn from it? The answer may be attributed to the “realism” in David Fincher’s films. Although the composition of light and shadow in David Fincher’s early films looks similar to Gordon Willis’s series of films, if audiences look closely at the screens of David Fincher’s movies, it almost always reminds audiences about the light source in scene of the light and shadow distribution on the character. This is different from The Godfather, it’s almost impossible for the audiences to determine which lamp in the movie scene constitutes the light and shadow of the character. The movie screens of The Godfather always maintain an oil painting-like classicism beauty, while the movie screens of David Fincher are true and alienated realism. David Fincher’s realism tendency determines that more practical lights than stage lights are used as light sources in movie scenes, and he deliberately displays these light sources in the movie screens to enhance the realism of the movie. In a nutshell, use more practical light to emphasize the authenticity of the picture, and at the same time control the contrast of the picture as much as possible in the later stage, so that it can get a sense of gloom and alienation. This is the technique used by David Fincher, and the technique that new creators can learn from. Creators can also use this to experience how a master can detach from the influence of another master. It also shows how one master can escape from the influence of another master.

Although David Fincher’s method is extremely referential, not everyone has the work experience of Industrial Light and Magic to achieve very deep and complex film post work. Some new films created by traditional film production processes may be more helpful to new creators. This turned my research to the black-and-white movies shot in recent years. After removing the interference of color, the role of light and shadow is more obvious in black-and-white movies. This kind of inquiry finally made me focus on the film The Lighthouse (2019) directed by Robert Eggers and shot by Jarin Blaschke. If an ordinary viewer who doesn’t know anything about filmmaking or film history watch The Lighthouse, he might think he is watching an old film that has been carefully restored but let an experienced movie viewer sit in the same position, he should be able to immediately perceive the modernity that is wrapped in the illusion of “retro”, such as lighting. Although the film’s director and director of photography used many methods to make it look like a film from the early days of film exploration, for example, a lot of tribute to the lighthouse genre of the 1920s and 1930s, using Kodak 35mm Double-X 5222 black and white film for shooting, and it hasn’t changed its formula since 1959. However, the lighting of the film screen still reveals the modern flavor of the film from time to time. It is not difficult for the audiences to find the Gordon Willis-style high-contrast low-illumination light, and how the director transformed this lighting into his own visual features. The layout logic of indoor light in The Lighthouse is almost the same as in The Godfather. The faces and other limbs of the characters are often hidden in huge shadows, and the parts exposed to the light are used to express the inner activities of the characters, and the subtle details are particularly noticeable through the few bright spots in the movie screen, and the texture is enlarged. The subtle wrinkles and reflections on the skin create a weather-beaten visual image of the character as a seaman. When the dramatic conflict in the scene continues to advance, the shadow and light on the characters also fluctuate and twist. Emotions and camera narratives show a high degree of consistency in this way.

Compared with the color pictures of The Godfather, this classic aesthetic is transformed into a kind of symbolism in the black and white pictures of The Lighthouse. The shadows of the characters and the buildings give the composition a strong sense of form, and the audience determines the “shadow” are certain meanings in the movie screens, but they cannot be accurately captured. The lighting has already created this fuzzy mood, which makes a nightmare-like dark atmosphere throughout the whole movie. In order to strengthen the horror atmosphere of the movie, Robert Eggers also introduced realist methods to strengthen this point. The audience can almost always see the definite light source that constitutes the light and shadow in the screen, which making them aware of the reality of the movie screen. This combined with the darkness represented by the film’s underlying symbolism, makes the audiences feel real fear.

This is also the difference between Robert Eggers and David Fincher, although they both use a lot of realism in their movies. David Fincher uses highly realistic lights and scenes to present a highly calm and objective picture, which places the audience in the position of a third-party observer and spontaneously produces a sense of rational alienation; while Robert Eggers does highly combine the methods of realism and symbolism, makes the film images have multiple meanings that directly point to the heart, thereby bringing the audience a real sense of fear. Regardless of the high budget in order to complete the details of the film The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’ lighting logic is still worthy of the creator’s reference. Classical light and shadow are transformed into symbols with realistic methods and careful configuration. The film picture is so ideological that the film picture itself has a narrative ability. Such a result can undoubtedly bring inspiration to creators on how to combine imagery with actual film scenes.

Going back to the beginning of everything, Gordon Willis created a paradigm for Hollywood that can be reused film lighting in film photography, but truly excellent directors have the ability to innovate. They can transform some seemingly fixed technologies into their own narrative style, and the process is full of inspiration and originality. Light allows masters to detach themselves from each other, and as new creators, we should learn from it.