Day 21: Film with Great Lighting
My choice is in fact a film mostly plunged in shadows - Alfred
Werker/Anthony Mann’s “He Walked By Night” (1948) is a testament to how much
you can do with just a little illumination. Known in his field as the ‘Prince
of Darkness,’ I always felt cinematographer John Alton ‘painted with light,’ a
term I was pleasantly surprised to find he used himself, and he does it so
brilliantly in this picture, where noir meets early Dragnet (with no femme
fatale but instead an overwhelming post-war anxiety and unease as police hunt a
faceless, nameless killer). Alton’s scenes keep the criminal slinking and the
detectives stumbling in the literal and narrative dark, with guiding light only
coming from seemingly natural sources like table lamps, streetlights or
moonlight, flashlights, reflections from water or windows, all rich, crisp
shades of gelatinous silver, lunar platinum, and blinding white against inky
black and rainy charcoal. I once read something by Daniel Dayan on
Hitchcock-style films that suggests the camera hides things from us, but it
feels like Alton uses it to reveal just enough and a little more, using secret,
movie-magic lighting to show us people’s tense faces as we navigate the
urgently unfolding mystery Xo
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