Film Noir

Low-key noir style light is definitely something I notice in older films but did not necessarily know what it was. The dark shadows on a characters face convey mystery and that something unexpected will occur in the following scenes. The second to last scene of “North by Northwest” on Mount Rushmore exploited this form of lighting. The camera would pan to the men chasing Thornhill and Eve, have of their faces covered by shadows. While shadows logically made sense since they were hiding among statues, it also purposely created a suspenseful mood. Another aspect of nior directorial style is claustrophobic framing, and almost immediately “The Royal Tenenbaums” comes to mind. In many scenes during the film, the director utilizes doors, window, bed frames, and stairways to create an unstable world. The examples at the end of the passage really emphasized the effects of noir lighting. While I previously believed that an actor could solely convey a certain mood, in contrast the mood heavily relies on the lighting. In the screenshot from In a Lonely Place when one looks at the actor’ s eyes, they are covered by a shadow and thus cannot even convey a look of mystery; it is the shadow itself that dictates the mood.