A man sits in a dark office asking for justice, and the light comes from above, so the face that answers him has no eyes, only two pools of shadow under the brow. Outside there's a wedding going on in bright daylight, and the film keeps cutting back and forth between the two.
Gordon Willis lighting Marlon Brando for The Godfather (1972) is the textbook case of chiaroscuro in film: strong light against deep shadow, used to shape a face and hide part of it. The look has a family tree that runs back through film noir and German silent cinema to a chapel in Rome where, around 1600, Caravaggio painted one beam of light across a dark room and let the rest go black.
Chiaroscuro vs tenebrism: what the words mean
Chiaroscuro is Italian for light-dark. The National Gallery in London defines it as clear tonal contrasts "often used to suggest the volume and modelling of the subjects depicted," and gives the two ends of the idea, Leonardo using it to make figures feel three-dimensional, "while Caravaggio used such contrasts for the sake of drama."
Tenebrism is the far end of it. The word comes from the Italian tenebroso, which the same glossary translates as "darkened and obscuring," a kind of painting where faces and hands are lit by highlights against "a predominantly dark setting."
For a cinematographer the difference comes down to where most of the frame sits on the value scale. Chiaroscuro spends its time in the middle tones, rolling light around a form, while tenebrism parks most of the picture near black and lets a few hard highlights sit up near white, with nothing bridging the two. Film calls the whole family low-key lighting, and tenebrism is low-key with the fill turned off and the background left to die.
Caravaggio and the light that does not come from the window
The whole method is already there in Caravaggio's first public commission. In The Calling of Saint Matthew (about 1599–1600), in the Contarelli Chapel in Rome, a group of men counts money at a table in a dim room, and Christ stands at the right, mostly in shadow, pointing.
Look at the window. It hangs in the upper half of the canvas and lights nothing at all. The light that matters comes in from past the right edge of the picture, high up, above Christ's raised hand, cuts a hard diagonal across the back wall and lands on the faces at the table, which means the real source is off-screen.
Any gaffer would recognize it as a lighting plan, one source and the nerve to let everything else go dark.
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The room
Most of the canvas is left to go black. The light is a slice of wall and a row of faces.
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Key
One hard key, high and out of frame, motivated by something the audience never sees.
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Shadow edge
A shadow edge on the back wall doing the composition's work, leading the eye from the hand to the man being called.
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The window
Painted in, and not the source.
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Where it lands
The faces at the table take the key.
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Fill
No fill on the shadow side. Christ stays mostly in shadow; his face and pointing hand catch the edge of the light.
Caravaggio's paintings, read like films goes through his other canvases one by one. The film line runs through the painters who came after him. Caravaggio to Virgil Abloh follows his paintings off the screen and onto flannel shirts and album covers.
Georges de La Tour moves the source into the frame
Georges de La Tour (1593–1652) took the tenebrist dark and put the light inside the picture. In The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (about 1635–37, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the only source is an oil lamp on the table. Her face, throat and bare shoulder catch it, her shins, further from the flame, fade toward the floor, and the smoke climbs straight up into the black. Nothing in that room is moving, and the longer you look the stiller you get.
The painting is a lesson in falloff. Light from a small source spreads over an area that grows with the square of the distance, so if you double your distance from a flame you get a quarter of the light, which is two stops. La Tour paints that curve by eye, and any scene lit by a practical candle or a bare bulb lives on it. The famous case is the candlelit card games in Barry Lyndon, keyed by the candles on the table.
Rembrandt lighting: where the name comes from
To a portrait photographer, Rembrandt lighting is a recipe: the key high and to one side in front of the subject, so the far cheek falls into shadow except for a small lit triangle under the eye. In the movies, the name comes out of an argument with a sales department.
In 1915 Cecil B. DeMille was shooting The Warrens of Virginia, and in a 1927 Harvard lecture, printed in Close Up in 1928, he told what happened. For a scene of a spy coming through a curtain, "I wanted to light only half of his face. So I borrowed a spotlight from an old theatre in Los Angeles, and gave his face just a smash of light from one side, the other side going dark."
The sales department wired back: "Have you gone mad? Do you expect us to be able to sell a picture for full price when you show only half of the man?" DeMille's answer, in his own telling: "In this instance Allah was good to me and suggested the phrase 'Rembrandt lighting.'" By DeMille's account the sales department then charged exhibitors twice as much, because now the picture had Rembrandt lighting.
The word drifted, too. In 1927, Herbert C. McKay's Handbook of Motion Picture Photography defined back light as "the so-called Rembrandt lighting where strong light is thrown on the actors from the back," a rim around the figure, and today's portrait photographers mean the cheek triangle.
Rembrandt's own face doesn't follow the recipe. In the 1659 Self-Portrait at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the light spreads across most of the face with no neat triangle, and what holds the picture is the brown-black ground that swallows the shoulders. John Alton, the great noir cameraman, wrote in 1949: "Rembrandt knew the secret of leaving the background dark and lighting only what he wished to feature."
On set, contrast like this gets measured as the lighting ratio, how much brighter the lit side of a face is than the shadow side, and every time the ratio doubles you add one more stop between them.
Film noir lighting, from painted shadows to Painting with Light
German silent cinema made shadow graphic. For The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the Decla studio was short on electricity and lighting, so the designers painted light beams and shadows straight onto the sets, as Michael Toole tells it for TCM. Two years later F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, photographed by Fritz Arno Wagner, sent Count Orlok's shadow climbing a staircase, the threat drawn in silhouette on the wall.
Hollywood noir turned those effects into a working method, and John Alton wrote it down. In Painting with Light (1949) he treats lighting as a choice made per genre, and the chapter he calls "Mystery Lighting" opens with his reason darkness works on an audience:
"Where there is no light, one cannot see; and when one cannot see, his imagination starts to run wild. He begins to suspect that something is about to happen. In the dark there is mystery."
That is the engine of film noir lighting: the unlit part of the frame is where you do the work, and whatever your mind puts in there is usually worse than what the film would have shown you. The cinematographer John Bailey, writing for the ASC, calls Alton, who shot The Big Combo (1955), "a singular master of inky black and burning white lighting" and "the original 'Prince of Darkness.'"
Gordon Willis and The Godfather: top light and hidden eyes
The nickname belongs to someone else now. Gordon Willis is the Prince of Darkness, and the Harvard Film Archive credits the name to his fellow cinematographer Conrad Hall and ties it to Willis "daring to use only the minimum of necessary light."
The Godfather lighting started with a face. Dick Smith's makeup pushed Brando's lower cheeks out into jowls, and Willis told Jeff Glickman in 2013 what that meant for the light: "Marlon had this makeup stuff that he was using so a top light seemed to be the most effective way of dealing with him. You don't really want to see his eyes."
Then the rule spread to everybody else, who, he told Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 2002, "selectively had to be subjected to the same kind of lighting to make the movie hold together visually."
A top light puts the brow between the source and the eye sockets, and without an eye light, the trick Hollywood used for decades to put a sparkle in a star's eyes, the sockets go to black. Willis skipped it. He described the opening as a design, "start in this cave-like environment, this blackness, and slowly begin to reveal and then 'pop' there he is," cut against the "bright, hysterical" wedding outside.
The yellow and the newspaper
The color came from instinct. After weeks of thinking, he told Gross, he settled on "this kind of brassy yellow look to it. Don't ask me why, it just felt right," and on location in 1971 he told American Cinematographer it should have "a brown look to it, with occasionally a bit of that 1945 blue-black in it," and should look "like a newspaper photograph in bad color."
Underexposed on purpose
The darkness was locked in at the camera. In that 1971 interview Willis explained that Eastman recommended rating its color negative at ASA 100 for interiors and ASA 64 for exteriors, and he was exposing at ASA 250 and having the lab push the film one stop, "which means that, theoretically, I'm underexposing half a stop."
The real reason was control. A thin negative can't be printed brighter without falling apart, so nobody in a lab could come along later and rescue the shadows he'd chosen. "If they try to print up what I've shot, it will fall apart," he said. He exposed every scene for one specific thing in it, and the film printed "on one light throughout the movie."
He remembered the original release prints, three-strip Technicolor, for their blacks: "So a black on a three strip print was 'black.' It was beautiful."
Low-key lighting after film: Deakins and the digital sensor
Digital cameras moved the fight. For the Shanghai office in Skyfall (2012), Roger Deakins lit the set from giant LED screens outside the glass. The screen footage was jellyfish, kept because, in Deakins's words, "it was a really deep blue, and we wanted this whole Shanghai section to feel quite cold." The fight plays out as black shapes against moving color, which is tenebrism lit from the background.
In 1917 (2019) the light source moves. For the night in the ruined town, flares hung on wires, and the set was modeled so that "when the flares went over we'd have these big tall structures that would cast these really good shadows and that shadow would move across the shot," Deakins told No Film School. The shadow edge that sat still on Caravaggio's wall now crosses the frame in real time.
Sensors keep pushing further into the dark (ARRI rates the ALEXA 35 at 17 stops of dynamic range), and that changes who owns the black. Willis made his darkness permanent at the camera, while a modern file holds detail so far down into the shadows that the black gets decided later, by whoever runs the grade.
Lord Knows is built the tenebrist way. Fire fills one half of the frame and black space full of sparks the other, and a figure stands on the seam with his head bowed, the glow catching his brow, cheekbone and shoulder while the eye sockets fall into shadow. As with Brando under Willis's top light, the eyes are the part the picture keeps from you.
Frequently asked questions
What is chiaroscuro in film?
The use of strong contrast between light and shadow to shape faces and space and to set mood. On set it usually means low-key lighting: a dominant key, little or no fill, and backgrounds allowed to fall toward black. Classic examples run from Nosferatu through 1940s film noir to Gordon Willis's The Godfather.
What is the difference between chiaroscuro and tenebrism?
Tenebrism is the extreme form of chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro covers any modelling with light and shade, including Leonardo's soft transitions; tenebrism, associated with Caravaggio and his followers, leaves most of the picture near black and lights only faces, hands and a few surfaces. All tenebrism is chiaroscuro, but most chiaroscuro never goes that dark.
How many stops is a 4:1 lighting ratio?
Two. The ratio compares the lit side of a face to the shadow side, and each doubling is one stop: 2:1 is one stop, 4:1 two, 8:1 three, 16:1 four. The higher the ratio, the closer the shadow side comes to black.
Who invented Rembrandt lighting?
Nobody owns the look; painters were using hard side light centuries before film. The name in cinema traces to Cecil B. DeMille, who said in a 1927 Harvard lecture that he used the phrase to sell the half-lit faces of The Warrens of Virginia (1915) to a skeptical sales department. The modern definition, a key high and to the side with a lit triangle on the shadow cheek, came later, from portrait photographers.
Read next
- Caravaggio's paintings, light and emotion canvas by canvas.
- Kubrick's light, the director's lighting and color in the same series.
- Color in film, the hub of the Screening Room.
- Martin Scorsese's red, from the bar in Mean Streets to the fight against fading film.
References
- "On Location with The Godfather: A Discussion with Gordon Willis," American Cinematographer, June 1971: theasc.com
- Jeff Glickman, "Interview: Gordon Willis, the 'Walk and Talk' Guy," Definition, April 2013: definitionmagazine.com
- Terry Gross, interview with Gordon Willis (2002), rebroadcast in "Fresh Air Remembers Cinematographer Gordon Willis," NPR, 2014: npr.org
- Harvard Film Archive, "Gordon Willis, the Man Who Shot The Godfather": harvardfilmarchive.org
- ASC, "Gordon Willis, ASC, 1931–2014": theasc.com
- Michael Toole, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)," TCM: tcm.com
- John Alton, Painting with Light (New York: Macmillan, 1949): archive.org
- John Bailey, "John Alton: Cinematography's Outlier, Part One," ASC, 2013: theasc.com
- Cecil B. DeMille, Harvard lecture as printed in Close Up, vol. 3 (1928): p. 190 and p. 191, Media History Digital Library
- Herbert C. McKay, The Handbook of Motion Picture Photography (1927): lantern.mediahist.org
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Georges de La Tour, The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, about 1635–37: collections.lacma.org
- National Gallery, London, glossary: chiaroscuro and tenebrism
- Mark Hope-Jones, "Skyfall: MI6 Under Siege," American Cinematographer, December 2012: theasc.com
- George Edelman, "How Roger Deakins Filmed '1917' in One Shot," No Film School, December 18, 2019: nofilmschool.com
- ARRI, ALEXA 35: arri.com