More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

extreme wide-angle lens that makes them look grotesquely elongated. From the evidence of his book, however, Alton seems to have regarded studio lighting, not framing or perspective, as his transcendent concern. Perhaps he was always more of a Sternbergian aesthete than a tough guy. Even in a criminal melodrama like Raw Deal, he is especially interested in the 'color' or lighting palette of black and white. Consider the opening scenes of that film, in which we see Claire Trevor visiting Dennis O'Keefe in prison: the photographic drama is largely a matter of the subtly graded spectrum of light and dark, ranging from the steely gray exteriors and the purgatorial diffusion of the interior establishing shots to the beautiful close-ups of Trevor, who wears the hint of a black veil, and whose eyes sparkle like diamonds because of a cleverly placed reflector.

A similar preoccupation with the tonal qualities of black-and-white imagery can be found in other celebrated films noirs of the 1940s, most of which are neither starkly realistic nor purely expressionistic. These films usually try to achieve a balance between documentary and art, mixing locations with studio sets and creating an eroticized treatment of underworld settings. Their charm has something to do with the purely graphic qualities of the film stock, but it also depends on subtle variations of light, enhanced by arc lamps and a wide array of new lenses that provide sharpness and resolution. In general, they are films that brilliantly exploit the darkness of cinema, replicating the effect of a projector beam splitting through the gloom of an auditorium; again and again, they remind us that the medium itself originated in shadow play, or in the primitive fascination of hot fire gleaming in cold blackness.

A particularly good example of these effects is RKO's Out of the Past (1947), which derives some of its most captivating moments from the fact that it was produced at a studio where nearly everything was composed of rich, India-ink blacks and silvery highlights. Photographer Nicholas Musuraca and director Jacques Tourneur, who had collaborated on the Val Lewton pictures at that same studio, were especially good at creating a lyrical or sensuous play of shadow, and their considerable talents are evident throughout. Interestingly, Musuraca's work involves no night-for-night scenes, no distorting lenses, no extreme deep-focus compositions, no 'choker' close-ups, and very few radical anglesin other words, it manifests almost none of the traits that Place and Peterson claim are essential to the visual atmosphere of film noir. ¹⁹ The photography of Out of the Past nevertheless seems definitively noirlike, chiefly by virtue of its low-key, deeply romantic 'painting with light.'

Let me pause here to offer a few illustrations of lighting technique in Out of the Past, because this particular film represents such an impressive use of what had become standard Hollywood procedures. The best place to begin is with the major technical problem that affected Musuraca or any studio photographer who worked in low-key black and white: the need to keep the various objects on the screen from blending into one another. Because of the limited 'color spectrum' available to the camera, an actor in a beige trenchcoat standing against a gray wall could almost disappear, and sets looked flat if they contained no contrasting points of illumination. One solution to the problem was to make sure that the foreground and the background were lit differently. Consider the moment when Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) exits the manager's office of the Sterling nightclub, where he has just stolen some papers: first he stands against a dark area outside the door, his body illuminated by an overhead lamp; then he walks down the hallway, silhouetted against a bright background; then he descends the stair, moving past an overhead light just as the wall ahead grows dark (figures 3335). An even more striking example of the same effect can be seen early in the film, when Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) enters the story. Wearing a pale dress and a matching straw hat, she walks out of the Acapulco sun, moving through a dark archway and into the cool shadows of a cantina. Her light clothing makes her almost invisible on the brilliant plaza, but when she steps into the room she seems to materialize out of brightness, becoming first a silhouette and then a visible figure against a shaded wall (figures 3638).

^{Contrast lighting in Out of the Past (1947).}

The same rules apply whether we are speaking of low-key or high-key scenes, although it should be emphasized that clothing itself can be as important as lamps or reflectors. Notice the 'framing' episodes of Out of the Past, which were filmed in the crystal-clear daylight of Lake Tahoe, Nevadaan atmosphere that seems more appropriate to a western than to a thriller. When gangster Joe Stephano (Paul Valentine) enters this world, he wears a black hat and a black trenchcoat. Late in the movie, when he drives into the mountains and attempts to kill Jeff Bailey, he is silhouetted against the sunny landscape or against the sparkling waters of a mountain stream. To borrow a line from Raymond Chandler, he looks as conspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

In the darkened scenes of the film, the actors are often lit with a single hard light from the side, so that part or all of their faces are in deep shadow. Whenever the audience needs to read the expressions on silhouetted or partly obscure faces, Musuraca uses a soft fill lightas in figure 41, which shows Jeff and Kathie looking out of a bright room and into the night. In cases where the foreground and the background have roughly the same degree of illumination, he uses a rim light or a 'liner,' usually positioned to the side and slightly to the rear of the actors and either above or below the cameraas in figures 4243. This sort of lighting had been commonplace in Hollywood since the 1920s, not only because it created a separation between figure and ground, but also because it gave faces a three-dimensional quality. Wide shots of dark city streets usually involved similar techniques, because architecture needed to be picked out of the gloom and given a certain dimensionality or sculptural effect. Figure 44 shows an RKO set representing San Francisco at night, with its darkness strategically broken by a neon sign, several glowing windows, a streetlamp, and a pair of automobile headlights reflecting off wet pavement: a key element is a single floodlamp hidden in an alley, which creates a sense of depth and separation between two of the buildings. Figure 45 shows a studio mock-up of a courtyard behind an apartment house on Telegraph Hill: Robert Mitchum is silhouetted against a bright patch of 'sky,' and the surrounding darkness is broken chiefly by rays of 'moonlight' striking a low wall and a clothesline.

Musuraca's chief method of giving depth and atmosphere to interior scenes was to use a modified form of what Alton called 'Jimmy Valentine lighting.' With the assistance of art director Jack Okey and set decorator Darrell Silvera, he gave the below-eye-level key light an ostensible source, such as a fireplace or a table lamp, which threw slightly high shadows on the walls and lent a gothic quality to faces. Meanwhile, he situated one or two indirect lights close against the walls, so that the edges of picture frames and other furnishings cast their own dramatic shadows. This technique often created a sinister or perversely violent mood, as in the early scenes in which Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) hires Jeff to find Kathie (figures 4647). Notice, however, that the same lighting arrangement is used when Jeff and Kathie first spend the night together. The setting is Kathie's bungalow on a rainy evening in Acapulco: 'It was a nice little joint with bamboo furniture and Mexican gimcracks,' Jeff recalls. 'One little lamp burned.' We see Jeff and Kathie dash into the room from a thunderstorm, and a solitary lamp, situated low in the foreground, motivates high shadows on the walls. After drying Kathie's hair with a towel, Jeff passionately embraces her and tosses the towel across the lamp, which pitches over in a gust of wind from the open doorway. The camera then drifts outdoors, gliding along the veranda in the backlit rain. A few moments pass, and we return to the darkened room. The lighting now seems to come from the moon, which shines through a pair of French windows (impossibly, since the rain still falls), silhouetting, Jeff's figure against the wall as he rises to shut the door.

^{Fill lighting and 'liners' in Out of the Past.}

Here and elsewhere, the codes of erotic lighting have an affinity with the codes of mystery lightingand appropriately so, because Out of the Past is a film about fatal attraction or the fear of a woman's sexuality. Nowhere is the intertwining of eroticism and danger more apparent than in a sequence near the end of the picture, when Jeff secretly investigates Kathie's San Francisco apartment. Once again high shadows are cast by a single lamp, and the luxurious furnishings are sculpted by hidden background lights. When a telephone