Film Reading

This weeks blog must be about film and photography and I couldn't find anything to read, but then my mother emerged from the basement with a book called Understanding Film. It seemed to easy, but it worked perfectly. The college text book, by Louis D. Giannetti, is split up into many different sections, I read one on lighting. The book talks about how much harder lighting movies is compared to photos. When lighting a movie the designer must make it so that everywhere a character goes there is good lighting. Unlike a photo, where the subject doesn't move. Also, it talks about the different feelings light gives us. Giannetti describes light as a, "...security, and any blockage of light is therefore a threat to this sense of safety..." (25). The most interesting part of the reading is when it talked about how Hitchcock would tease the audience with his use of light. He would, "...deliberately reverse light-dark expectations to puncture our smug sense of security" (22) This was a very interesting read. It gave me a lot of information about the different types of lighting and how we instinctively react to it. Giannetti, D. Louis. Understanding Films. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1976.