Through a Lens Darkly

Picture a forest at night. What do you see? It's likely you are remembering a scene from a movie you once watched, says History of Art doctoral student Iggy Cortez. “When we think of the night we tend to think about movies, which are artificially illuminated, instead of lived experiences,” he says. “It’s as if the movies are changing our idea of what reality is like, or how we remember reality.”

Cortez’s dissertation project focuses on the aesthetic, political, and ethical implications of nighttime filmmaking across a range of cinematic media. In addition to being an artistic examination, these nocturnal scenes can also be used to examine the film industry’s larger technological evolution. The move from photochemical film to digital cameras, for example, has important implications when it comes to how we perceive certain settings. “These nighttime scenes analogize the new conditions of production, which allow for a different kind of visibility of night,” Cortez says. “With digital cameras directors are pushing the limits of the visible in low light conditions to really interesting thresholds that disturb distinctions between darkness and light, vision and blindness.”

The first chapter of Cortez’s dissertation focuses on the 2012 film Holy Motors by the French director Leos Carax. The movie follows a day in the life of an actor being chauffeured from location to location in Paris. “The character acts out these strange roleplays with different scenarios,” says Cortez. “But it is unclear for what purpose or for what motive. We’re not sure who is looking at these performances or what kind of relationship they have to reality.” The movie highlights what a digital camera can accomplish in very low light conditions, picking up subtle phenomena like different kinds of gradations of light and shadow and achieving an expansive depth-of-field even in the dark. “The later in the day it gets, it seems as if the nocturnal spaces and nonhuman world surrounding him displaces him as the central figure of the movie,” says Cortez. “It speaks to humans and their place on Earth, not as transcendent figures over the planet but in relation to their broader embeddedness in their environment.”

Technology has also drastically challenged conventional ideas about a film having a single auteur, generally thought to be the director. But the director of photography (the more accurate name for a cinematographer) has an amplified role in the current generation of filmmaking. “Film scholars are increasingly recognizing the technical aspects of the visuals in a film,” says Cortez. “Cinematographers are constantly looking at the effects that certain kinds of images have on the audiences, often in an editorial sense. So they’re really attuned to upping their game in figuring out how to create new conditions of reality, or remembered reality.” Directors and cinematographers have even been known to even contact companies directly in order to customize cameras. For a scene in The Social Network, for instance, a miniaturized version of the RED camera was created in order to film a scene in a racing shell.

Cortez is also examining Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. The film portrays periods of reincarnation that the character experiences, which in turn represent the many different kinds of reincarnation of film. “There are homages to older day-for-night technologies, a scene that is filmed in the day but made to give the illusion of nighttime in post-production or using specific kinds of filters,” says Cortez. He cites other popular directors like Michael Mann, specifically his film Collateral, which stars Jamie Foxx as a cabbie ferrying Tom Cruise’s character throughout a city at night, as having used nighttime scenes shot with a digital camera to create what he calls a hyperreal depiction. “What these cameras can do in terms of filming at night heightens our awareness of how we actually experience darkness.”

One of the reasons nighttime filming is so popular, Cortez says, is it presents a challenge many cinematographers see as a bar for innovation. “Cinematographers often talk about films that we might think of as completed films as ongoing experiments,” says Cortez. “They map out what they’re able to do in a single movie to a longer lineage. And they are constantly imagining what else is possible.”

It’s not all about the people on the other side of the camera, though. We, the audience, also play a major role. “Darkness creates intimacies. In order to see things at night you have to move close because the world is veiled from you, and vice versa,” says Cortez. “It allows you to look at things while you yourself might still be in the shadows. And that’s also seen in the experience of watching a movie in the darkness of your room or in a cinema, but reflected in nighttime movies themselves.”