Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir

Patrick Keating

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780231520201
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Lighting performs essential functions in Hollywood films, enhancing the glamour, clarifying the action, and intensifying the mood. Examining every facet of this understated art form, from the glowing backlights of the silent period to the shaded alleys of film noir, Patrick Keating affirms the role of Hollywood lighting as a distinct, compositional force.

Closely analyzing Girl Shy (1924), Anna Karenina (1935), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and T-Men (1947), along with other brilliant classics, Keating describes the unique problems posed by these films and the innovative ways cinematographers handled the challenge. Once dismissed as crank-turning laborers, these early cinematographers became skillful professional artists by carefully balancing the competing demands of story, studio, and star. Enhanced by more than one hundred illustrations, this volume counters the notion that style took a backseat to storytelling in Hollywood film, proving that the lighting practices of the studio era were anything but neutral, uniform, and invisible. Cinematographers were masters of multifunctionality and negotiation, honing their craft to achieve not only realistic fantasy but also pictorial artistry.

Part I

Lighting in the Silent Period

Mechanics or Artists?

In 1917 The Moving Picture World published a special issue covering all the major fields of filmmaking. In the largest article on cinematography, William Fildew wrote, “As to what constitutes the greatest difficulty in the making of motion pictures, I should reply the insecurity of the tripod in the making of outdoor scenes…. The tripod must be nursed like a contrary child. It must be firmly set.”¹ For Fildew, cinematography posed a mechanical problem, requiring a mechanical solution.

Ten years later, the same magazine ran a story about cinematographer Joseph La Shelle. According to the article: “During the past few years the motion picture cameraman has come into his own to a certain extent. Producers began to realize that a camera was not merely a contraption with a crank and a reel of film but to the expert cameraman represented the brush and easel of the portrait artist.”² The metaphor of the parent nursing a child was replaced with a new conceptual definition: the cinematographer as artist. Soon this metaphor would become a cliché. Cinematography was painting with light.

The point of making this comparison is not to say that cinematography in 1927 was aesthetically superior to cinematography in 1917. There were several ambitious cinematographers working in the late teens, and the cinematographer of 1927 still had to prevent his camera from tumbling down a hillside. Rather, I wish to suggest that the cinematographer had acquired a new public identity. He had come to be perceived as a person with good taste, emotional sensitivity, and a deep understanding of dramatic values. This new understanding was promoted by a particular institution: the American Society of Cinematographers. Through its monthly journal, American Cinematographer, the ASC crafted a compelling narrative about the development of a new kind of art—and a new kind of artist. No longer a laborer turning a crank, the cinematographer was a skilled professional making a valuable contribution to the cinema—a contribution that could best be described as aesthetic.

In 1913 the professional cameramen of Los Angeles and New York City formed two different clubs—the Static Club in California, and the Cinema Camera Club in New York. The clubs sponsored dances and other social events, but their primary purpose was to promote the interests of cameramen. The New York club’s constitution read:

We, the members of the Cinema Camera Club, have resolved to organize an association for the development of an artistic and skillful profession, namely, the operating of cinematographic cameras; it being our purpose to maintain for the members of said profession the dignified standing justly merited, among the rest of the industry of which it forms a most important branch.³

The club’s members aimed to improve the professional standing of the cameraman by emphasizing his identity as a skilled artist.

A few years later the Static Club changed its name to the Cinema Camera Club, as the two clubs grew more closely affiliated. In 1918 Philip Rosen, formerly a member of the New York club, took over the leadership of the Los Angeles club. Soon this club became the American Society of Cinematographers. The ASC was an advocate for cinematographers, but it was not a union. Membership was by invitation only, and ASC members were regarded as elite cameramen. Although Rosen himself became a director, many of the other original members—including Charles Rosher, Joseph August, and Victor Milner—went on to have long, distinguished careers in cinematography.

Perhaps the first example of ASC discourse was its motto: “Loyalty, Progress, Art.” Implicit in these three words is a certain narrative: as more and more aesthetic functions (art) are shared (loyalty), the group style improves (progress). This narrative would be refined in the discourse of the ASC’s most visible publication, American Cinematographer. The first issue of this magazine appeared on November 1, 1920. Its masthead described the journal as “an educational and instructive publication espousing progress and art in Motion Picture Photography, while fostering the industry.”⁴ As the terms “educational and instructive” suggest, one of the journal’s purposes was to help standardize Hollywood style by teaching all cinematographers—both amateur and professional—a set of normative ideals.

The desire to appeal to a wide readership was stated explicitly in the July 1, 1922, issue of the magazine: “While this magazine has already gained recognition throughout the industry as the only publication of its kind, the board of directors has prepared a program of expansion that will make The American Cinematographer of even more general appeal and greater national influence.”⁵ The strategy is clear: by enhancing public awareness of the cinematographer, the ASC hoped to increase his influence.

Because of its explicit concern with public identity, we should not expect American Cinematographer to offer a perfectly accurate picture of the cinematographer. Instead, we should expect its portraits to be as flattering as possible, like the soft-focus glamour shots that the ASC’s members made for Hollywood stars. Just as the glowing highlights of those glamour shots are occasionally lacking in plausibility, the glowing reviews found in American Cinematographer are often lacking in consistency. One page may stress efficiency as the most important virtue; the next page may stress technical skill; and the next page may stress artistry. Indeed, its editorial policy was highly eclectic. Most articles offer practical advice, such as a 1921 article called “Composition—What Is It?” Some articles advocate policy changes advantageous to the cinematographer, as in the sensible article calling to “Eliminate Death from Air Cinematography.” Other articles read more like wish-fulfillment fantasies, such as the optimistic 1926 article “Amateur Cinematography as World Peace Agent.” Finally, a few articles seem to exist solely as filler. One of the magazine’s first editors was a theosophist, and his issues occasionally include mystical articles, such as the 1928 piece “Significance of Jewels: The Influence of Rock Crystals and Other Stones on Mankind Said to Be Anything But a Dream.”⁶ There is nothing surprising about this inconsistency. Institutional discourse is often opportunistic. We should expect the ASC to use any argument that could highlight its guiding theme: why the cinematographer deserves an improved standing in the industry.

The fact that the discourse aimed to flatter the cinematographer does not mean that it should be discounted. Quite the contrary—the fact that it offers an idealized presentation of cinematography makes such writing a useful source for an analysis of cinematographers’ ideals. Consider, for example, the series of comic articles signed by a fictional character named “Jimmy the Assistant.”⁷ These essays are invaluable because they explicitly foreground issues of class identity. In so doing, they help us understand how the desire to enter the professional classes helped shape cinematographic practices. Like many cinematographers (particularly the ones who were formerly assistants), the fictional Jimmy comes from the working class, but (unlike the members of the ASC) he seems to be eternally trapped in this status. In one article, he writes:

Even guys that used to be camera punks and drop magazines right along with me has had their spell of being a first and some of them is even setting in a director’s chair with a deep voice and a megaphone to use it through; but as for me—I’m still picking ’em up and laying ’em down—Jimmy the Camera Punk—always was and never will be. I got as much chance of being anything else as Will Hayes [sic] and Welford Beaton has of kissing.⁸

Jimmy’s articles are peppered with jokes, slang, and misspelled words—he even gets Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MP-PDA) head Will Hays’s name wrong. His insights, though, are sharp: Beaton, a noted critic of Hollywood, was surely one of Hays’s least favorite people. Some of the articles include a picture of Jimmy, represented as an anonymous laborer struggling under the weight of the assistant’s regular load. Although Jimmy’s persona is calculated to appeal to cinematographers who worked their way up from being assistants, his real function is not to remind them of their humble roots, but to flatter them about how far they have come. The cinematographer may have been a hard-working assistant once, but he is now something more valuable.

How did the discourse of cinematography define that value? Jimmy offers one answer in an article entitled “Wages and Salaries”:

Here I am, an assistant; I lug the camera junk around and hold a slate and do all the hard work there is around a camera. It’s a hard graft and I get wages.

The cameraman I work for drifts into the studio two minutes before the hour on the call, gives orders all day, takes orders from nobody, does pretty much as he pleases, and he gets a salary. I do about 10 times as much labor as he does and he gets about 15 times as much dough as I do.

Now, let’s figure it out. I do the most work, but he’s worth a lot more than fifty times as much as me to the company. Fifty of me couldn’ts [sic] get the results that one of him gets. He gets a big salary but he earns many times that in not having retakes, doing good work under bum conditions, and in time saved by fast, efficient work.⁹

Here Jimmy measures value in purely practical terms, as a matter of speed. It is his highly trained efficiency that elevates the cinematographer above Jimmy’s working-class status and into the professional class.

Jimmy, the champion of efficiency, sometimes argues that art is a pretentious waste of time. In one article he writes:

There was a first cameraman come to the lot, a forrener from Checkovia or somewhere, and he talked English like a excited Chinaman trying to recite a Bjornsjern-Bjornsjern poem backwards with the original language. He didn’t make sense….

We got out and started, and you should have seen this guy do his art. He was slower than the next raise. I had to laugh when I see him figuring exposure. He had a actinometer with more different gadgets on it than a flute has toots, and everytime he’d work it he’d forget something and have to start all over. All this got over big with the boss. He was getting art at last. Then this guy sets his stops as careful and delicate as a blind man peeling a cactus. Finally we gets the scene, and a few more before dark.¹⁰

This is vicious satire, with a strong and unpleasant dose of xenophobia, as Jimmy appeals to the ugly anti-immigrant sentiment that was disturbingly commonplace in the twenties. Jimmy’s American slang is supposed to capture the voice of common sense, while lofty artistry is associated with a Slavic-Chinese-Scandinavian jumble of foreignness.

Many articles in the journal sound the same theme (albeit without Jimmy’s stinging wit): the cinematographer is not just a laborer—he is a professional with a special gift for efficiency. Still, this emphasis on quick, competent work was probably not enough to convince producers of the cinematographer’s worth. During the silent period, the cinematographer physically turned the crank on the camera, and, to some producers, an efficient cinematographer was still just an efficient crank-turner. In the words of one cinematographer: “There are a great many producers who affirm that cinematography is not an art, and the photographer therefore not an artist, but a mechanic just like the electrician and carpenter, and therefore not entitled to the salary he receives.”¹¹ To counter this prejudice, American Cinematographer had to turn to a different kind of discourse: the discourse of Art.

Even Jimmy supports the aestheticization of the cinema. In one article he suggests that directors take inspiration from classics in the other arts, such as the music of “this Frenchman, Debuzzy,” and Dante’s story of “Poolo and Francesca.”¹² In another article, entitled “Art and Business,” Jimmy explicitly argues that the values of art and efficiency can be combined. According to Jimmy, there are three kinds of cinematographers:

There’s some cameramen which gets along great because although mebbe there work aint up to the highest artistick standard or aint A number 1 in a lotta ways, yet they’re quick as lightnin’ and dont never hardly ever get into greef in spite of there speed. They can cut from three to five days off a perduction filming time. That boosts him way up in the money saving class….

Then there’s the oth...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledments
• Introduction: The Rhetoric of Light
• Part I. Lighting in the Silent Period
• Part II. Classical Hollywood Lighting
• Part III. Shifting Patterns of Shadow
• Conclusion: Epilogue
• Notes
• Index