Lighting: Black Narcissus

Across five Monday afternoons, cinematographer, film colourist and educator Devan Scott will illuminate the distinctive ways in which filmmakers have created mood and meaning through the manipulation of colour. Each 40-minute talk will examine a different colour process – including lighting, tinting, production design – within its historical context, and exploring its aesthetic, artistic and storytelling attributes.

Each talk will be followed by a complementary screening, this week, Black Narcissus (1947).

The use of gels to control the hue of film lights has been a key tool in every cinematographer’s toolkit since the advent of color film stocks. We’ll use Jack Cardiff’s work in the Technicolor masterpiece Black Narcissus as the jumping-off point for a discussion about the ways in which he paints with light to create moods, emotional cues and color rhythms. Additionally, we’ll cover how innovations in color film stock impacted these creative decisions as well as more recent developments in lighting technology.

About the film: From the team behind A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes, Powell and Pressburger, this is a hot-house erotic melodrama set in an Anglican nunnery in the Himalayas, the nuns’ mission to build an orphanage competing with nature itself, it seems. For many, this is the greatest movie shot on the three-strip Technicolor process, cinematographer Jack Cardiff evoking atmosphere on the backlot through his use of light and colour, influenced by painters like Vermeer and Van Gogh. He won the Academy Award for his work here.

Technicolor had begun in America in 1935, but it’s fair to say that the deeply romantic, theatrical, and painterly nature of the process was never more fully embraced than in Britain in those post-war years when austerity ruled in most things. It was a process that involved three separate film strips, a camera the size of a wardrobe, and elaborate printing schemes that required exceptional craftsmanship at the printing baths from men whose arms were tattooed in fantastic colors… Black Narcissus is one of the most ravishing films ever made.

David Thomson, The New Republic

Talk: 1:00 pm
Black Narcissus: 1:40 pm

This film will also play as part of the Total Cinema series.