Film Noir Lighting comparison with Ridley Scott's “Blade Runner”.

Menelaos Pampoukidis

3. Choose a film, TV show, music video or advertisement and discuss how the directing OR editing OR lighting style and choices inform its narrative form, genre and theme(s). Consider the film or show in its entirety and demonstrate your understanding and awareness of directing OR editing qualities. How lightning style and choices inform Ridley Scott's “Blade
Runner”(1982) narrative, genre and theme.
In early 1940s, soon after the second World War, a new film genre started to develop. Almost, twenty years later Nino Frank, influenced by the France “Black Book”, gave it the name Film Noir.
“Product of a multifaceted interaction between developments within particular genres – the gangster/crime film and the Gothic melodrama – fluctuating conditions of production and reception within the American industry, and more diffuse cultural movements.”1 The early Film Noir was profoundly influenced by the depression of the war. Hard boiled, dark, devious and cynical, it was originally based on German expressionism and later on Italian neorealism in order to create it's individual style and unique iconography. “As expressionists motifs supplied Noir's dark undercurrents, the Neo-Realist influence that appeared after war introduced a documentary flavour to American thrillers”2 As Film Noir kept progressing many elements were added to the prime features, expanding the range of the genre. Finally, even though Film Noir undoubtedly changed the visual language of cinema, after few decades it started decaying and merging with other genres.
Film Noir is a genre, however is also consider as a generic field of common elements and features which maybe found in different sorts of films. Many postmodern films were influenced by the Noir elements in such a degree that they are considered as Neo-Noir films. Ridley Scott's “Blade
Runner”(1982) is a Neo-Noir, Si-Fi Thriller. It take part in the future, close to 2019. Were humans have achieve to design labor robots, with artificial intelligence, they are called Replicants. After a rebellion replicants became illegal on earth. So in order to control them there is a special police force called The Blade Runners, which is responsible for tracing, hunting and disposing them. The main Hero is Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) and he is a Blade Runner. When a group of replicants makes it to Los Angeles seeking a way to extend their life span, he will have to find them and stop them with any means. However, while he is on the job, he starts falling in love with a woman, who turns out to be a replicant as well.
“There are two basic tendencies at work in postmodern noir, revivalism, which attempts to retain the mood and atmosphere (stimmung) of classical noir, and hybridisation where elements of noir are reconfigured in a complex generic min”3. Many elements in Blade Runner can be easily linked to
Noir Film. In order to make an effective analysis they must be separated and looked individually.
One of the most important elements of Noir Film is the lighting. In Blade Runner Lighting profoundly tries to resurrect the mood and atmosphere classical noir film.
From the early frames of the movie, the references in Noir lighting are obvious. The small, sharp lights of the huge building are the main source of lighting in the surrounding darkness (image 1-01).
This dim image relates not only with Noir principals, but with it's predecessors, the expressionistic film. And it is a clear reference to the Fritz Lang's “Metropolis” (1927) (image 2-01). The Noir film use in great proportion dark imagery of the night time city,4 as an expression of depression, fear and loathing. 1 Film Noir Andriew Spicer
2 The Dark Side of the Screen 65-66
3 Film Noir Andriew Spicer
4 Film Noir Andriew Spicer

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Film Noir Lighting comparison with Ridley Scott's “Blade Runner”.

Menelaos Pampoukidis

(image 1-01)

(image 2-01)
An other important characteristic of Noir lighting is the use of fog. Fog can be smoke coming from a specific source or mist which surounds the city (image 1-02). The fog creates a claustrophobic atmosphere and refracts the light, making it look alive and fluid, as an unworldly pressers surrounding the characters. In many instances fog, smoke and mist have an important part in Blade
Runner's lighting and iconography, creating the feeling of constant night even in the day time scenes. As in many noir scenery “ A pall of smoke hangs over the street, adding to a sence of claustrophobia already present in the press of pedestrians, cars, carts and store fronts”.5

5 Noir Style 79

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Film Noir Lighting comparison with Ridley Scott's “Blade Runner”.

Menelaos Pampoukidis

(image 1-02)
A key feature of Noir Lighting is the absence of light. The films deliberate visual styling enhances the kind of transformation from reality to nightmare that the narratives dramatise6. Lighting with only one light source in front of the camera and behind the subject, Blade Runner, as many Noir
Films, create silhouette7 of the characters. By hiding their facial features manages to reveal their true nature of doom and their machiavellian intentions. Or other times expresses the cruelty of the world they live in. In Blade Runner (image 1-03) the antagonist is brilliantly “not lit” but his devious intentions are clearly illuminated.

(image 1-03)
Film Noir not only uses the light to lit subject, but also create haloes in the murk. A lamp, a projector or a car passing by creating flares in the camera. That increase the emotional contrast between light and the absence of it. It's an other way to diffuse light in to the atmosphere with out brightening the image. Blade Runner uses this technique as a way to inform the narrative and to stylise the iconography (image 1-04).

6 The Film Noir Ian Cameron
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Film Noir Lighting comparison with Ridley Scott's “Blade Runner”.

Menelaos Pampoukidis

(image 1-04)
Rain is a artistic element which effects the movie style in general. Particularly in lighting rain can reflect and refract light. Producing a result similar but not identical with fog. More over rain, as halo effect, fills the atmosphere. This weather intensifies the claustrophobic atmosphere and functions as a second baptism for the sinister characters (image 10-5).

(image 1-05)
However, in Noir genre exists an other deeper element of the same nature. The impression of rain.
Wet road and slippery pavements consist a standard element in Noir style. The remaining water in the street reflects the light, multiplying its sources and indicates an unfriendly environment (image
1-06).

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Film Noir Lighting comparison with Ridley Scott's “Blade Runner”.

Menelaos Pampoukidis

(image 1-06)
Jordan Cronenweth ( cinematographer of Blade Runner), uses this technic in order to create complicated and unique compositions, in which light appears as a live object.
“Noir operates in a world of virtuoso contrasts between light and shadow” 8 “The visual style habitually employs hight contrast (chiaroscuro) lighting, where deep, enveloping shadows are fractured by shafts of light form a single source, and dark, claustrophobic interiors have shadowy shapes on the walls”.9 In order to achieve there are time that it uses a very genre specific technic.
“The use of venetian blinds which cast barred shadows onto characters”10 (image 1-07). Which adds a tone of mystery and ambiguation to the overall tone of the film.

(image 1-07)
In Blade Runner characters faces are often lit with strange hight lights or left particularly shadowed to create hidden and threatening spaces (image 1-08). The light in film noir has the power to make the character fill unwelcome and generates an unpleasant, however aesthetically appealing oppression. This is designed in order to depict the unhealthy relation between the characters and their surroundings. In contrary, sometimes the character are merging in the darkness of their world
8 The Dark Side of The Screen 106
9 Film Noir Andriew Spicer 4
10 The Dark Side of The Screen 107

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Film Noir Lighting comparison with Ridley Scott's “Blade Runner”.

Menelaos Pampoukidis

slowly devoured by it and merging in to the shadows as a premise of their doom11.

(image 1-08)
Lighting is mainly defined by the settings of a scene. Film Noir usually unfolds around the a common scenery. “Downtown bars, classy nightclubs, seedy hotel rooms, precinct stations and the city by night”12 More often than not, Noir sceneries are lightened by flashing neon lights which reflect into the wet streets and store vitrine. (image 1-09). 13 14

(image 1-09)

11 The Noir Style 62
12 The Film Noir Ian Cameron 30
13 The Noir Style 56
14 Film Noir Andriew Spicer 4

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Film Noir Lighting comparison with Ridley Scott's “Blade Runner”.

Menelaos Pampoukidis

(image 1-10)
One of the most, if not the most, important element of Noir genre is the infamous femme fatale. A dark presents who appears in angelic form. “The figure of the deadly female - femme fatale/spider woman/vamp – emerged as a central figure in nineteenth century and became on of the most persistent incarnation of modern femininity, the woman who 'never really is what it seems to be' and therefore, in a patriarchal culture, ungovernable and threatening”.15 The way a femme fatale is lightened is conflicts the general style of the movies. Usually, the light smoothens her skin, accents her lips, eyes and brows. Making her look like the object of desire, a dangerous temptation (image
1-10).
Blade Runner was an innovative movie, not only because it transported the stylisation and iconography of Film Noir in a futuristic science fiction film. But also because, it became the proof of how well different genres can co-exist and compliment each other, in the same film. Moreover, it reviled the recognizability of noir elements even outside of noir conventions.
This consistency of the the Noir features, it's an evidence of how profound the Noir style is, not only as a whole, but also in each particular consisting element.
The lighting in Noir Film was not a coincidence or merely a aesthetic choice. Conversely, the core theme of noir stories was greatly connected with the feeling of oneiric confusion, social decay and dark inner conflict of the characters in a hopeless and dim world. This type of lighting exposes clearly the inner world of the characters and the atmosphere of the city, thus the importance of light and shadow is a defining feature of a Noir Film. Even thought, many other convention of the genre maybe altered or blended with other genres. It becomes obvious how stylisation of iconography can influence the whole movie in such a level that it can still be considered as postmodern Neo-Noir.

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