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Sometimes a particular technique (or technology) pervades an industry so entirely that subsequent generations don’t realize that the techne was once new. Today, ‘bounce lighting,’ the use of a reflective surface to redirect light towards a subject or scene, is a standard cinematographic (and still photography) technique. However, it was an innovation as recently as the mid-1900s.
Bounce lighting is deceptively simple— the manipulation of light can create emotional dimension in a film that is separate from those aspects of the film that more easily identified with emotion, such as dialogue or facial expression. If a filmmaker is shooting outside, she can use the sun as a backlight, then take a reflector-- a cloth structure called a ‘bounce’-- to deflect the sunlight on an actor’s face. (A wall or ceiling can also be used as a bounce.) Depending on the angle, the result can be glow behind the actor and a reduction of shadow on their face.
While these details of light intensity might seem to be a small part of a movie, if you think of great cinema, like Satyajit Ray’s films or Ingmar Bergman’s films, the impact of the stories they tell depends in large part on the mood created by the cinematographer. While the human eye has a huge dynamic range, the ratio between the largest and smallest possible values of a changeable quantity like light, the camera captures much less. Accordingly, actual light on a set has to be manipulated to adjust to what the camera is capable of capturing. Just as light can positively or negatively affect our mood in real life—think of light boxes used for depression-- it plays a significant role in creating a mood in a film’s viewer.
Subrata Mitra (1930-2001), the cinematographer of Satyajit Ray’s critically-acclaimed Apu trilogy, was the first cinematographer known to use bounce lighting. While shooting Aparajito, the second film in the trilogy, the threat of monsoon rain made shooting courtyard scenes outside (as originally planned) difficult. Instead, the courtyard set was built inside a Calcutta studio with studio lights.
Mitra, who was originally a still photographer, attempted to simulate shadow-less diffused light by placing a framed white cloth over the set. The cloth represented a patch of sky and studio lights below it were arranged so that light would bounce off the cloth and create the illusion that the courtyard was actually outdoors. Prior to Mitra’s use of bounce lighting, the Hollywood aesthetic favored strong back-lighting and heavy diffusion (in an interview, Mitra compared the ubiquitous use of strong back-lighting to “putting chili powder in whatever you cook.”)
Mitra operated the camera for Ray’s films, until Charulata (The Lonely Wife), a film based on a story by Nobel prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. After Charulata, Ray operated the camera himself. Ray emphasized the importance of making the right photographic decisions in film, writing, "[t]he style of photography should grow out of the story, and the director should be aware of what he wants and be able to convey it in precise terms to the cameraman." Coming up on December 16-17th, 2010, Stanford Theater in Palo Alto, will show Charulata, as well as Mahanagar (The Big City). Both movies are about women (played by Madhabi Mukherjee) that stand apart from their time and circumstance in mid-1900s India.
They are lyrical and realistic at once, a combination due in part to their technical brilliance. David Packard, who restored Stanford Theater and turned it into the most popular revival theater in America, is known to be a passionate admirer of Ray, holding Satyajit Ray retrospectives at the Stanford Theater and once arranging a special showing of Ray’s films in Southern California as an antidote to the pessimism of Slumdog Millionaire.
