Starlight - aesthetics in motion pictures - The Transient and the Timeless

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1990 by Arby Ovanessian

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THE opening sequence of a remarkable Korean film, "Why has Bodhi Dharma gone East?", shows a red light flashing on and off at regular intervals in the corner of the screen. As it punctuates the moving images in a kind of visual counterpoint, it calls to mind the aesthetic canon that governs the cinema, the art of moving light. In the final images of the film, a liberated bird flies up into the early morning sky like a star, while on the earth below a man and his cow walk together in harmony.

"Bodhi Dharma", with its flickering light of water, fire and colour, with its sound and silence, is a film that conjures up the beauty and wisdom of the East, where emotion is a pure, immediate response which is made spontaneously without any prompting from the intellect. In this way beauty blossoms in the universe. In skilful hands the camera can capture and reveal the inner laws of the invisible world. When it does so, there is a moment of liberation at which we witness a pure act. Such a moment occurs in "Bodhi Dharma" in a scene when an orphan child enters a temple and takes over the room of a newly "departed" master.

The great Bengali director Satyajit Ray has described how he and his fellow students at the Visva-Bharata university founded by Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan in India were taught to draw a tree by making strokes from the base upwards, in a movement which is in keeping with the process of organic growth. At the same time they were asked to "Consider Fujiyama... fire within and calm without ... the symbol of the true Oriental artist". This Oriental canon of beauty, which is so essential for the understanding of the roots of creation and art, is also valid for a medium such as Western cinema which uses refined technology.

The soul of stardom

One of the great pioneers and masters of the art of cinema, the American director D.W. Griffith, believed that the sense of beauty is developed by environment. "If I had children," he said, "I should try to develop in them the sense of beauty. To do this, I should provide them with rooms of such simple beauty as that in which my father's orotund voice poured forth the music of Keats and Tennyson and Shakespeare." Griffith continued his evocation of a setting in which beauty could blossom thus: "we see the truth in silence. Silence can be more eloquent than all the tongues of men ...... Describing the qualities he sought in a film star, he wrote: "...Granted that the person has a face for the movie camera, a face that photographs well-the first thing needed is soul "

Lillian Gish, one of Griffith's most famous discoveries, possessed this quality to an outstanding degree. She had already become a legend when she was in her early twenties and received the accolade of stardom-a portrait bust by the fashionable sculptor Boris Loski. In Griffith's film Broken Blossoms (1919) she made an unforgettably radiant appearance, her blonde hair silhouetted against a halo of light. In all her screen appearances she revealed a natural gift for radiating an inner light.

In the prologue to the silent epic Ben-Hur, made in Hollywood in 1926, the Virgin Mary was shown against a halo of backlight using the biochrome process, while the main story was filmed in black and white. This notion of colour emanating from pure white light is a remarkable example of cinematographic language and was used much later in many memorable films to depict beauty in glorious hues. However, despite technological progress in the use of colour, economic pressures forced film-makers to continue using black and white, but many directors used this technique so brilliantly that it was as vibrant as colour.

`The human face... a land one can never tire of exploring'

The play of light and shade on the human face was exploited with great artistry in such films as Carl Theodore Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, made in 1928 towards the end of the silent era. The crystal clarity of Dreyer's stylization made even silence vibrate. Nothing in the world," he said, "can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration, to see it animated from within and turning into poetry."

Hollywood was as sensitive as a celluloid negative to light and its mysteries. One of the great early directors, Josef von Sternberg, wrote that "Light means fire and heat and life.... Every subject has a moment when light can force its beauty into full power, and that brings us to the province of the artist.... Every light has a point where it is brightest."

Marlene Dietrich is the star who was most sensitive to Sternberg's use of light. She could feel on her skin the exact temperature needed to capture the luminosity of her beauty on film, and always used her finger as a meter to test the intensity of the lighting.

Light flickering from a fireplace inspired lighting director and cameraman William Daniels in Rouben Mamoullan's film Queen Christina (1933), which starred Greto Garbo and John Gilbert. A special lens was developed which was used to make a long tracking shot, culminating in an enigmatic close-up of Garbo's face. The beauty and composition of this sequence make it a landmark in the history and mythology of the cinema.