AS NATURE WANTS

An opinion persists that representations of nature in art are mostly about art itself rather than nature. Picasso incited: “Through art, we express our conception of what nature is not”. Does this apply to film, too?  

In an inextricable link – host and invader, antibody and pathogen – we struggle to comprehend it but, whatever we pretend to the contrary, nature is beyond our control. Philosopher Georg Hegel thought that competing with nature is “like a worm trying to crawl after an elephant”. If we try to ‘desacralise’ it too much (as John Ruskin saw it), it bites back.  

The painterly masters like Jean-Jacques Rousseau knew best: “Nature has made everything in the best way possible, but we want to do better still, and we spoil everything.” We cannot improve on nature. But its beauty, conflicts, and imperfections may enrich our narratives. We can observe, transform, and express to rediscover in the living matter of nature the essence of our story and inform the characters. Intuition, inspiration and imagination, life’s fundamental gifts, allow us to project further.  

Pieter De Hooch rendered The Bedroom perfectly in just a soft sidelight and a little stronger one from the back, both sources contained in the frame. Highlights on the floor tiles in the background and on the doorframe add to the spatial depth. The observed natural light is stunningly powerful.  

To build an image of real light, a figurative painter studies its sources – daylight and moonlight, candles, oil lamps, torches – their nuances, direction, incidence and reflection, intensity, acuity, tint. The appreciation of light’s workings is sketched, memorised, and recreated in a studio. A news photographer needs to know how, where, and when a particular light effect occurs, but – since they don’t need to recreate it – not all the minute detail of its mechanics.  

In an uncontrived “minimum intervention” documentary, a cinematographer learns to observe the existing conditions and embrace the flow of natural light’s organic unpredictability, rather than intervene in haste. Lighting the studio for fashion photography needs a more thorough understanding of the mechanics of light. Lighting fiction’s “time machine”, demands deeper still study of the “available light’s” constant change, duration and fluctuation, angle, and intensity to evoke the complex simplicity observed in nature. Fluid, pulsating with the flow of time yet repeatable, quietening, and peaceful or energising, it bounces, filters through, intermits. 

In AD 597, when Augustine as the new archbishop travelled from Rome to Canterbury with the mission to evangelise the unruly Anglo-Saxons, Pope Gregory the Great cautioned moderation: “Do not knock down all the pagan temples, just destroy the pagan idols inside them and replace with Christian symbols.” Translated into film lighting dilemmas, this means: accept the inherent logic of the existing environment and enhance it to release the scene’s power. Keep what’s good there.  

Modulating illumination 

With lighting tools in infancy, early filmmakers used glass-house ateliers equipped with elaborate systems of blinds and canvas curtains to modulate the direction and intensity of illumination, as seen beautifully recreated in Scorsese’s Hugo (2011). Thomas Edison’s studio sat on a great turntable –  orientating the set to the light tracing the route of the sun during the day.  

I witnessed many actors take a cue from a location environment’s reality and feel. While scouting a location, the direction and characteristic of true light may prompt in surprisingly unpredictable ways. On a shooting day, to find the right lighting mood, I often first switch off the work-lights to see how the existing sources might influence the shape of the scene and acting environment. Conrad Hall ASC touchingly describes such a moment in Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers by Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato. 

“The first thing I do is I quake in my boots. (…) I put my eye up against the camera and close the other eye and be totally alone. Or I can blink and see if anybody is watching. And everybody is watching because you have to decide what you are going to do and you have to communicate that to somebody. (…) It really takes me a little while to get rolling, to get my courage and spirit up (…) And the only constant is the fear of not being able to do it well. I worry about that.” 

In Four Books on Human Proportion, Albrecht Dürer counsels to follow nature: “Do not depart from it, thinking that you can do better by yourself. (…) For verily ‘art’ is embedded in nature; he who can extract it, has it.”  

Why then do we so often use artificial light rather than trust the unbeatable pure quality of the natural? The simplest answer is: because we can. True-to-nature humble simplicity proves tricky in lighting a regular fiction film. There is too much of natural daylight or too little, too sharp or too soft. The location-dictated logic of an unstable, real light environment may not attune with the narrative. Balancing naturalism with heightened expression can be challenging.  

Risk only tailoring the available illumination to the film stock’s (or digi processor’s) needs and limitations? Or play safe, ignore what’s existing and build our own to ensure the continuity of lighting flow throughout the day? The set looks naturally perfect, yet, perhaps reluctantly, we add or shape. Even Dogma films cheated here. Chatting at the 2004 Camerimage Festival with Pierre Lhomme AFC (Army of Shadows, Joli Mai, Cyrano), the master cinematographer neatly paraphrased Duke Ellington: “Natural light is my mistress.” Then, added enigmatically: “And the sun is the enemy, a tough sparring partner.” 

To imitate “this Great Book, always open, that we should force ourselves to read” (in the words of the visionary Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi) is hard; transcending and transforming can still prove fruitful. “Art is a harmony parallel to nature – what is one to think of those imbeciles who say that the artist is always inferior to nature?” Paul Cézanne wrote in a 1897 letter to poet and critic Joachim Gasquet. As one of Cézanne’s fools who might get frustrated by following the nature, I recognise his point. For a scene’s mood and edge, we are bending nature – towards dramatised light that feels right rather than for what in the immediate reality appears most logical. 

For millennia, the various flame sources illuminated night hours. Lighting a Roman Empire tale exactly like a modern story would miss the chance of bringing up the tangible time-touch of the era through the use of period lights sources. We shot Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, set in antiquity, on Tudor location (Hampton Court House). In the confluence of vocal pyrotechnics with real ones, 90% of nights and dark interiors we had lit mainly with oil lamps, fire baskets, and multi-wick candles, with a supplementary flame-bar out of a frame and only minimum of regular lighting kit. In the big finale, Dido sets her Cartage palace on fire; our special effects pyromaniacs’ crew operated 78 separate genuine flame sources: bonfires, braziers, torches of all kinds. The singers worried a little about their precious voices in the heat and smoke but, having only to mime singing to a playback, didn’t need to stretch their voices.  

Building the illusion 

After all the worship of natural light, let’s also celebrate the inventive options that artificial light offers. Unknown to the painterly masters, this new tool in performing arts appeared roughly in parallel with the advent of cinema. Its visual sensations may intensify the emotional storytelling and directly cut through to the modern viewers’ psychological connections with the spectacle. With nature not completely denied, let‘s look afresh. A push to simplicity on the screen in practice may require complex solutions. To build the illusion of genuine natural-looking illumination in the film set’s reality may need erecting a scaffolding with big lights outside the windows, more gear inside, added eye-lights and more. “The available light” may mean all the lights available on the sparks’ truck, as long as you fool the eye with re-created natural-ish beauty.  

“Drive Nature out with a pitchfork, she’ll come back, / Victorious over your ignorant confident scorn” (The Epistles of Horace). Nature, complete and streamlined, beats us easily. It looks fresher and richer. It’s fun to glide through a scene just with the available light untouched or with not much added. You watch for the best time of day, if such luxury is possible, and place actors in the existing light rather than placing the light on the actors. You have to buy time, lots of it. But then you need to be so lucky as to work alongside such an inspiringly unorthodox creator as Terrence Malick. In an American Cinematographer magazine article from August 2011 entitled Cosmic Questions, Jack Fisk, production designer of The Tree of Life, elaborates: “If we had a room that faced east, we could shoot early in the morning, and if it faced west, we could shoot later in the afternoon. Terry took that to the extreme by having the same room represented in several houses so that we could shoot at different times of the day.” Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki ASC’s multiple Oscars vouch for this attitude.  

When you put someone in front of a window, you’re getting the reflection from the blue sky and the clouds and the sun bouncing on the grass and in the room. You’re getting all these colours and a different quality of light. It’s very hard to go back to artificial light in the same movie. It’s like you’re setting a tone, and artificial light feels weird and awkward [after that], said Lubezki in the article. 

A muddled message of a superficial look can spoil the spectators’ sense of the basic truth of a scene. They may not analyse the details of lighting logic, yet subconsciously sense something wrong about it. Seeing a scene in places that you can equate to your encoded life experience – unless the action is happening on Mars or in an underground artificial place – your brain subconsciously checks it out to confirm if this truly happens in real life. Is this something I passed through? Do I feel comfortable comprehending that? 

The overriding logic of nature-given illumination brings a purposeful cause-and-effect order that animates life. We instinctively recognise and trust the genuine light of nature we deal with every day. It brings truth and clarity of thought to bear on our narratives. An almost-unnoticeable lighting, true to logical light sources and blended with the nature-provided,  helps craft sensitive, veritable, fiction tales. As long as the plot and sets are not completely implausible, there’s a chance the audiences might start to buy into the underlying veracity of the whole story. You open credit of trust.  

Nature is a gentle, prudent and just guide, said Montaigne (Essays by Michel de Montaigne, chapter 13 “Of Experience.”). Witnessing cinematographer László Kovács ASC’s use of natural light, Easy Rider’s director (and hellraiser par excellence), Dennis Hopper crisply modernised philosopher seigneur’s thought: “God is a great gaffer.”