Look under the rule

In this short piece, I will propose that ‘rules’ in cinematography can be thought of as a vertical ‘stacking’, in which every rule represents an easy way to follow the rule under it, and in which we move from the theoretical to the practical as we move up, but also forget about possible alternative ways of fulfilling the rules below. If this is a valid way of thinking about the topic, then it is important that we keep this ‘stack’ in mind instead of just following whatever rule tops it off. In a phrase, always look behind the rule – or rather, look UNDER the rule!

To demonstrate this idea, I’ll take one of the most common ‘rules’ you are taught when you start out as a DP: Avoid full frontal lighting – that is, don’t put the light right behind the camera.

Why do we normally avoid full frontal lighting? It gives no shape to the face. We want some contrast in there, some variation in brightness. But who’s to say the variation in brightness has to be across the face and not within the wider frame? Given that the audience sees the whole frame, what else can we do to give it some variation in brightness? We can introduce contrast - a brightness difference - between the face and the background as opposed to between the two sides of a face. How do we do that? By bringing the source close to the subject so it falls off rapidly. If we’re on a longer lens, by bringing the light down at a slight angle so it doesn’t hit the portion of background in shot. That can look beautiful. And what use is your ‘no frontal lighting’ rule now?

The ‘Avoid full frontal lighting’ rule arose because it introduces variation in brightness across the face, which is one of the easiest ways to introduce contrast into the frame. So we’ve taken a rule – ‘There must be some contrast in the frame’ – and created a rule above it that gives us an easy way to fulfil it. But in the following the rule above rather than the one below, we forget about other ways of fulfilling the rule below – for example, using full frontal lighting with fall-off to introduce an illuminance variation between the background and the subject. After all, in moving ‘up’ the stack, we’re going from the theoretical to the practical. It is easy to see why any practical solution is only one of a number of possible approaches to a theoretical problem.

Let’s dig deeper. If the rule behind ‘no frontal lighting’ is ‘There must be some contrast in the frame’, then what’s the rule behind that? Why must we have some contrast in the frame? At the basic level, no contrast difference, that is, the same foot-lambert level coming from every bit of the frame, would yield an image with no information. A real subject under completely even illumination will introduce foot-lambert level variation through the different reflectances provided by its texture, so although the same level of incident light strikes every part of the subject, every bit of the subject will reflect a slightly different amount towards the camera. So we have to have (and will inevitably have) some contrast variation. Why do we want a substantial amount of it? Because it guides the eye. It separates elements within the frame. 

So we’ve looked a level deeper, and we have: ‘We must separate elements within the frame’. But again, in going from that to ‘There must be some contrast in the frame’, we’ve forgotten about alternative ways to separate elements within the frame: depth, focus, colour contrast. You can compose wonderful frames lit flat but with colour contrast provided by the elements within the frame, or light them flat but compose them in depth, using geometry and/or focus, or have a colour contrast provided by the light rather than by the elements within the frame.

I’m going to stop here, but I invite you to look deeper. What’s the rule behind ‘We must separate elements within the frame’? Do we always want to separate elements, or is that rule just the easiest way to fulfil a deeper rule? Maybe we want the subject not to stand out. Maybe we don’t want to guide the eye. Maybe we should all aim to get to the point where we only use the full contrast range of the medium when it serves our purposes to do so (see Darius Khondji’s incredible night work in Amour).

I’m going to wager that most cinematographers are going to find this at the bottom of every rule stack: ‘Tell the story’. In a way, the ideal cinematographer holds the ‘rule stack’ in his semi-conscious mind at all times, so he is aware of the rules at the top but is always capable of starting from the bottom in order to produce imagery that serves the story rather than the rulebook.

L.

London, 1 April 2013