Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography 3030659348, 9783030659349

Table of contents :
Preface
About the Book
Contents
About the Author
Introduction
The Digital Rupture
References
Theorising Creative Lighting
Experiencing Light
Moving Image Materiality
Optical Metaphor and Epistemology
References
Understanding Cinematography Technology
Determinism
Apparatus
Social Constructivism
Non-anthropological Vitalism
Actor-Network Theory
References
Exploring Exposure Processes
Defining Cinematography
Wet Exposure
Exposure as Data
Virtual Production
Aesthetic Leadership
References
Index

Citation preview

Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography

Alexander Nevill

Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography

Alexander Nevill

Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography

Alexander Nevill London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-65934-9    ISBN 978-3-030-65935-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65935-6 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design: eStudioCalamar Cover pattern © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book was written to address a disparity between the existing literature on cinematography and my personal experiences working in the field. Emerging from a film school background into the world of independent filmmaking, I eagerly explored different perspectives on lighting, from both industry and academic standpoints. Finding that many of the key texts in this area were either significantly outdated, predominantly anecdotal or too reliant on conventional three-point lighting, I set out on my own research path. The writing process that followed became one of self-­ discovery in which my perspective moved from the notion of light as vision to light as material, from technology as a tool, to technology as a network and from cinematography as an industry, to cinematography as a collaborative art. As such, this book presents my reflections on, and critical interrogation of, the discipline of cinematography with a specific focus on lighting processes. My hope is that this book will spark a similar journey for you, the reader, and perhaps inspire further contemplation towards your creative work. In a time of insightful podcasts, instructional video tutorials and instantaneous social media posts, exploring cinematography in this form was a fantastic opportunity to engage in deeper enquiry and consideration. In conjunction with this, my writing process was guided by an underlying recognition that theory and practice are deeply intertwined. For those interested in a critical understanding of cinematography, practice alone cannot explain the context or cultural implications of the discipline, just as writing, taken in isolation, cannot capture the full v

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richness of experience necessary to advance creative skills or technical proficiencies. As such, this book is designed to exist in dialogue with practical engagement and I aimed to strike a balance between an accessible, concise form while offering a rigorous theoretical exploration of cinematography that will hopefully speak to practitioners and academics as well as those somewhere in-between. This writing began during my doctoral research at the University of the West of England where I received tremendous support and guidance from a superstar supervisory team and coworkers in the Digital Cultures Research Centre. I was also fortunate enough to receive a scholarship through the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s 3d3 Centre for Doctoral Research which made the enquiry possible and connected me with an inspiring group of researchers. Over the past several years, this writing took shape alongside my teaching at San Francisco State University where talented colleagues and students in the School of Cinema supported further research and emboldened me to seek publication. This writing would also not have been possible without the fantastic directors and artists that have trusted in my abilities and ultimately allowed me to explore cinematography during our collaborative projects. London, UK

Alexander Nevill

About the Book

This book presents three interrelated essays about cinematography which offer a theoretical understanding of the ways that film practitioners orchestrate light in today’s post-digital context. Cinematography is a practice at the heart of film production which traditionally involves the control of light and camera technologies to creatively capture moving imagery. During recent years, the widespread adoption of digital processes in cinematography has received a good deal of critical attention from practitioners and scholars alike; however, little specific consideration about evolving lighting practices can be found amongst this discourse. Drawing on newmaterialist discourse, actor-network theory and the concept of co-creativity, these essays examine the impact of changing production processes for the role and responsibilities of a cinematographer with a specific focus on lighting. Each essay advances a new perspective on the discipline, moving from the notion of light as vision to light as material, from technology as a tool, to technology as a network and from cinematography as an industry, to cinematography as a collaborative art.

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Contents

Introduction 1 The Digital Rupture  4 References  7 Theorising Creative Lighting 9 Experiencing Light 11 Moving Image Materiality 16 Optical Metaphor and Epistemology 23 References 30 Understanding Cinematography Technology33 Determinism 34 Apparatus 37 Social Constructivism 40 Non-anthropological Vitalism 43 Actor-Network Theory 50 References 54 Exploring Exposure Processes57 Defining Cinematography 59 Wet Exposure 64 Exposure as Data 68

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Virtual Production 73 Aesthetic Leadership 77 References 82 Index87

About the Author

Alexander Nevill  is a cinematographer, filmmaker and lecturer. He has taught at San Francisco State University, Ravensbourne University London, University for the Creative Arts and most recently Nottingham Trent University.

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Introduction

Abstract  This introduction briefly outlines existing writing in about lighting in moving imagery and suggests this sub-field of film studies can broadly be divided into three conventional categories which approach cinematography and light from phenomenological, historical and ethnographic perspectives. It also establishes a viewpoint on the transition to digital technologies in film and photographic practice, drawing on the work of David Rodowick and Thomas Elsaesser who argue that digital cinema is a new epistemic object, distinct from earlier photochemical forms. Building on this argument, the introduction suggests that with capture and display technologies now changing at an increasingly rapid pace, a standardisation of cinematography practice that emerged as part of industrialisation has been surpassed by more complex and fluid ways of orchestrating light, which are best understood through a new-materialist perspective. Keywords  Cinematography • Post-digital • Ethnography • Phenomenology • Filmmaking Cinematography literally means recording movement. Across 100 years of industrialised practice, this term has become synonymous with the discipline of camera and lighting practices in the context of collaborative filmmaking. This book offers a theoretical investigation of cinematography © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Nevill, Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65935-6_1

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which builds on conventional and commercial uses of the term towards a more creatively charged meaning that addresses specifically processes of mediated light. Robert Bresson’s reflective collection of aphorisms, titled Notes on the Cinematographer, inspired this writing. Drawing on the original Lumiére brothers’ term ‘cinematograph’, his inquisitive notes express a personal journey to understand the intertwined nature of artistic and technical pursuits in filmmaking. Whereas Bresson extended cinematography across a range of disciplines, encompassing elements of performance and mise-en-scène alongside camera and lighting considerations, this writing instead offers renewed focus for the term through a deep dive into the ways that filmmaking practitioners sculpt illumination during production. In so doing, this book builds on previous work about lighting in moving imagery which is typically situated in the field of film studies and can be broadly divided into three conventional categories, which approach the subject from phenomenological, historical and ethnographic perspectives. A phenomenological understanding of light has been prevalent since the late nineteenth century and is perhaps best encapsulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (2002, 310) writing about perception. He argues that “we perceive in conformity with the light as we think in conformity with other people” and asserts the essential nature of experience as sensual. In so doing, Merleau-Ponty refuses a Cartesian divide that separates mind and body to propose an embodied ontology in which physicality “actualises” or brings experience into being. As an example of this with regard to the study of lighting, Henry Plummer’s (1987) Poetics of Light attempts to capture the dramatic qualities of illumination through his eloquent, empathetic and phenomenological descriptions of the various “lightscapes” brought forth by particular architectural sites. Extending this approach further to engage specifically with moving imagery, Martha Blassnigg’s (2013) edited anthology Light Image Imagination deftly navigates concepts of mediation to explore interactions between qualities of light and imagination, thereby focusing on human-centric and often phenomenological implications across the composition, projection and perception of light. Many chapters in this collection draw upon Henri Bergson’s process philosophy which influenced Merleau-Ponty’s thinking—a line of thought that is explored further in the second chapter of this book. Through a variety of disciplinary approaches, Blassnigg’s collection highlights how visual media can reflect our changing existential relationships to the world. However, as with many phenomenological approaches, it does not deal

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explicitly with the techniques of cinematography and how lighting is orchestrated during a creative, practical process. Many of the studies which engage directly with cinematography techniques use historical analysis as their overarching approach. The most recent and detailed of these is Lara Thompson’s (2017) Film Light: Meaning and Emotion, a close reading of the emotional and aesthetic uses of light in cinema which revisits classic films to conduct an analytical overview of the varied illumination practices across film history. In a similar vein, Patrick Keating’s (2014) edited collection Cinematography: A Modern History of Filmmaking explores questions of authorship and style across a century of cinematography from the silent era through to contemporary production. Taking a more technologically focused approach in Film Style and Technology, Barry Salt (2009) offers an account of the development of filmmaking equipment to suggest the impact these changes had on the visual qualities of films. However, such studies concentrate on mainstream films, often ones produced in the Hollywood system, and hence omit the broader areas of independent, international and artists’ moving image production that offer uses of light in a more creative or experimental fashion. Further to this, as discussed in the chapter titled “Understanding Cinematography Technology”, the approaches to lighting offered through these historical perspectives tend towards technological determinism and are limited by their position as textual analyses so cannot discuss the implementation of cinematography techniques and choices made during production processes. By contrast, ethnographic fieldwork and interviews present another dominant strand of enquiry in the study of cinematography which is able to offer insight into practical processes. This approach informs In the Light of Experience a detailed account by Anand Pandian (2013) of the work of a contemporary Indian cinematographer Nirav Shah which discusses his role amidst the bustling filmmaking process. Cathy Greenhalgh’s (2010) Cinematography and Camera Crew is another significant contribution, which investigates the procedures and structure of production roles during filmmaking processes, again using ethnographic approaches that draw upon interviews as well as her practical insights. It is worth noting, however, that as an anthropologist Pandian writes from a removed, observational perspective on the filmmaking process and although Greenhalgh (2010, 322) is herself a practising cinematographer, she purposely evades the subject of lighting which is a “much larger and complicated issue” to instead focus on creative work oriented around the camera crew.

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Building on these studies, this book focuses on defining and understanding lighting—a creative process that is intrinsic to filmmaking but one which has received little detailed theoretical consideration beyond a small number of cinematographers retrospectively describing their work.

The Digital Rupture The history of cinematography involves a broad range of cultural techniques which have continuously changed since the advent of moving imagery. Perhaps most profoundly, the transition to digital technologies in the film industry ushered in new production techniques and viewing contexts that compliment conventional cinematography in artistic and technical terms, subsequently becoming a focal point of theoretical discussion of the discipline.1 For the practitioner, however, the urgency of analogue versus digital debates has dwindled in recent years. Any dust that was kicked up by the sudden arrival of digital tools at the turn of the millennium has since settled, resulting in a production landscape where both formats exist with equal, although debatable, economic and technical merits so can be employed based on the practitioner’s creative goals. As I will outline, this co-existence between analogue and digital formats requires a different form of examination that instead looks at technology relationally to identify creative implications of these various production processes. Moreover, digitality has led to numerous emerging forms of moving imagery resulting in an expanded pallet that cinematographers are actively embracing alongside conventional filmmaking methods. With capture and display technologies changing at an increasingly rapid pace, a standardisation of cinematography practice that emerged as part of industrialisation has been surpassed by more complex and fluid ways of orchestrating light which, as I will argue, are best understood through a new-materialist perspective. It is important to recognise, however, that the film industry’s transition from analogue to digital occurred as a gradual process which cannot be understood as a simple trajectory of ‘progress’. As Holly Willis (2019, 22) confirms in her introduction to contemporary digital cinema “what may 1  For instance, John Mateer’s (2014) article Digital Cinematography, Brian McKernan’s (2005) Digital Cinema, Harry Mathias’ (2010) Electronic Cinematography and David Stump’s (2014) Digital Cinematography all offer examinations of digital production techniques.

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seem like a relatively recent phenomenon, occurring mainly in the 1990s, has much deeper, often elided roots”. A lineage of digital filmmaking technologies has been more thoroughly examined by Willis as well as other scholars exploring technological media histories.2 For the purpose of this book however, the notion of pre-digital loosely refers to a timespan of cinematography from the introduction of analogue moving imagery in the late 1800s through to the early 1990s when the use of portable digital video cameras and computer-generated effects became widespread in feature filmmaking. In contrast the term post-digital, which will be discussed more thoroughly in the chapter titled “Exploring Exposure Processes”, refers to a timespan from the introduction of digital sensors for imaging purposes in the early 1970s through to the present day, recognising a significant overlap between these technologies.3 The idea of distinguishing cinematography practices before and after this point is reinforced by film studies scholars such as David Rodowick (2007) and Thomas Elsaesser (2016) who approach digital cinema as a new epistemic object, distinct from earlier photochemical forms. For instance, Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film, one of the most notable contributions on this topic, offers a comprehensive account of the digitisation of time-based media. He argues that the interpolation of light into discrete binary information, as conducted by digital capture and display processes in cinematography, entails a sensory engagement with moving imagery that is fundamentally distinct to analogue ‘filmic’ media. In Rodowick’s (2007, 94) view “what appears on electronic and digital screens does not fully conform to the criteria by which in the past we have come to recognize something as a created, aesthetic image”. Explaining these changing criteria, he outlines an epistemological rupture, or gap, between the study of analogue and digital forms as the “powers of mutability and velocity of transmission” in digital processes serve to break what had been perceived in analogue production as the temporal and physical connections of imagery to its originating moment of exposure.

2  For a more detailed history of digital moving image technology see Leo Enticknap’s (2005) Moving Image Technology: From Zoetrope to Digital and, more specifically, Patrick Keating’s (2014) edited collection Cinematography explores visual style throughout the history of Hollywood motion pictures. 3  Notably, some scholars have argued for a significantly longer entwining of analogue and digital technological histories across centuries such as Sean Cubitt’s (2014) Practice of Light or Siegfried Zielinski’s (2006) Deep Time of the Media.

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Similarly, in Elsaesser’s (2016, 234) view, the rupture between analogue and digital moving imagery is most apparent in changing delivery and production systems afforded by ease of transmission and distribution. He suggests “the difference that digitization has brought to this division of labor is to shift the balance between pre-production and post-­production towards the latter”. Drawing on Lev Manovich’s influential writing about digital imagery, Elsaesser highlights how these changes could reframe cinema as part of a larger “graphic” cultural form whereby moving images created through photographic practices, such as those commonly featured in mainstream Hollywood films today, would be the minority and animation (including forms of computer-generated imagery) the majority. With this, Elsaesser (2016, 236) suggests the “digital image should be regarded as an expressive rather than reproductive medium” recognising the manual application of craft and skill implicit in creating animated images. Moreover, he outlines how the shift impacts time-space relations for a viewer through the opportunities it provides for interactivity as well as the new cognitive, visual and sensory coordination skills that are entailed by ubiquitous digital imagery. Outside the field of film studies, the implications of digital technologies for wider photographic processes are also well documented. For instance, Diarmuid Costello’s (2017) philosophical interrogation of photography reveals a divide amongst perspectives that he terms “new theory” and “orthodoxy”. In Costello’s overview, the introduction of digital technology poses little concern for scholars upholding the new theory perspective. He suggests this perspective approaches photography as a fundamentally diverse family of technologies for marking surfaces with light and therefore digital technology can easily be subsumed into an understanding of the medium. On the other hand, the orthodoxy perspectives centre around mechanical, or non-human, aspects of photography in contrast to humanly mediated depictions such as painting. As such, Costello (2017, 298) suggests these writers must reconcile their perspective with digital technology to decide whether it “is merely different in degree to analogue photography … or it constitutes a definitive break with the analogue”. This argument indicates the wide extent of debates around medium specificity, which clearly extend to photographic studies as well as film studies, and establishes an important dimension in discussion of the role of the cinematographer that will be examined in more detail throughout this book. As Costello (2017, 304) summarises “it may be a digital image,

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but it is not a digital photograph, since light played no role in the formation of the image itself”. Extending this to a consideration of filmmaking roles and processes we could similarly ask: is it still cinematography if there is no light involved in the formation of the image?

References Blassnigg, Martha. 2013. Introduction. In Light Image Imagination, ed. Martha Blassnigg, 11–22. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Costello, Diarmuid. 2017. On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry. Abingdon: Routledge. Cubitt, Sean. 2014. The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2016. Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Enticknap, Leo. 2005. Moving Image Technology: From Zoetrope to Digital. London: Wallflower Press. Greenhalgh, Cathy. 2010. Cinematography and Camera Crew: Practice, Process and Procedure. Edited by B. Brauchler and J. Postill. New York: Berghahn Books. Keating, Patrick. 2014. Cinematography: Behind the Silver Screen: A Modern History of Filmmaking. London: I.B. Tauris. Mateer, John. 2014. Digital Cinematography: Evolution of Craft or Revolution in Production? Journal of Film & Video 66: 3–14. Mathias, Harry. 2010. Electronic Cinematography: Achieving Photographic Control Over the Video Image. Scotts Valley: CreateSpace Publishing. McKernan, Brian. 2005. Digital Cinema: The Revolution in Cinematography, Post-­ Production, and Distribution. New York: McGraw Hill Professional. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. 2nd ed. London: Routledge Classics. Pandian, Anand. 2013. In the Light of Experience: An Indian Cameraman. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 4: 81–92. Plummer, Henry. 1987. Poetics of Light. Tokyo: Architecture+Urbanism Publishing. Rodowick, D. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Salt, Barry. 2009. Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. 3rd ed. London: Starword. Stump, David. 2014. Digital Cinematography: Fundamentals, Tools, Techniques, and Workflows. Boca Raton: CRC Press. Thompson, Lara. 2017. Film Light: Meaning and Emotion. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Willis, Holly. 2019. New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image. New York: Columbia University Press. Zielinski, Siegfried. 2006. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Theorising Creative Lighting

Abstract  Light has historically and conventionally been understood as a passive force as evidenced in the common terms ‘lumen’ and ‘lux’, which represent a duality derived from Renaissance-era notions of a subject-­object divide. This heliophilic perspective assumes the individual is epistemologically separated from their environment and that they perceive the environment physically through objective reflected light. As a counterpoint to this, Theorising Creative Lighting uses a framework of performative materiality, which allows consideration of light as an active force that is implicated in the creation of images with a real physical presence in the world. Drawing on the new-materialist writing of Karan Barad and Barbra Bolt, this chapter outlines a conception of the world as a boundless series of relations, which emphasises notions of energy, flow and material interactions as central to lighting processes. Hence, this perspective opens the possibility for light in moving image practices to be discussed in terms of its material relations and potentialities rather than as a neutral medium affording visibility. Keywords  Light • Cinematography • New Materialism • Film philosophy • Filmmaking How can cinematography be considered philosophical? To begin with, conjuring stories, atmospheres or experiences for an audience requires an intricate combination of technical and creative thinking which is often © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Nevill, Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65935-6_2

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facilitated through significant logistical preparation and collaboration with numerous crew members. These responsibilities involve considerable conceptual forethought and expressive methodologies that may be enhanced through rigorous questioning and analysis. Moreover, cinematography is “painting with light” (Alton 1995 see also: Keating 2017). By controlling the process of mediation, cinematographers construct material aesthetic artefacts from a seemingly intangible continuum of illumination which involves the orchestration and utilisation of different qualities of light to evoke a mood or convey narrative. While many practitioners recognise the ‘intuitive’ nature of lighting and may have formed personal theories towards their aesthetic decision-making, critically analysing these processes can help to appreciate the nuance and artistic sensibilities that are present in the discipline. Advancing this theoretical understanding of cinematography is deeply connected to ideas surrounding perception and light. For instance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical writing is a key touch stone in this area. Within a wider argument about the primacy of perception, Merleau-­ Ponty (2002, 360) briefly outlines his experience as a film viewer and specifically details how he considers light to behave differently when it is seen on screen as opposed to normal apprehension of the world. Employing the term “localisation”, he suggests the immaterial force of light becomes materialised on a projection surface whereby it creates a tactile impression for the viewer. Cinematographers are typically responsible for a film’s visual qualities and share authorship with other creative individuals throughout each stage of the filmmaking process (discussed in greater detail in the chapter titled “Exploring Exposure Processes”). They commonly oversee the overall imaging process from capture to display and hence this notion of a “localisation” of light seems to be at the heart of the discipline. For the cinematographer then, Merleau-Ponty’s writing is significant in its recognition of light as a tactile, potentially malleable factor. To develop these concepts, this chapter explores discourse surrounding illumination and materiality in cinema as well as other art forms, establishing a theoretical conception of lighting which underpins the investigation of cinematography practices throughout this book. It begins by outlining some of the ways in which artists work with illumination in their creative endeavours, going on to discuss the problem of materiality specifically for moving imagery and outlining the tradition of representation and a Cartesian divide, which many studies of materiality react to or oppose. The chapter indicates how stepping away from Enlightenment notions

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that equate light to knowledge enables a relation-based, performative consideration of materiality. In so doing, this perspective frees light to be part of a complex ever-changing and generative entanglement of materials, rather than being considered a neutral illumination. The chapter concludes by applying these ideas to lighting in moving image production to situate this discipline as an Ingoldian “correspondence” with materials and aims to show the cinematographer as someone who works with and through light, following its flow akin to practices that are perhaps more widely recognised for their material implementation such as pottery, basket weaving or glass blowing.

Experiencing Light Architectural photographer and historian Henry Plummer (1987) argues that light has an ability to enliven surfaces in a dialogue or vibrant exchange between the material and immaterial. He contends that such occurrences are not dependent on the quantity of light falling upon a surface but rather a particular quality of light encountering a particularly responsive configuration of matter, which results in a stimulating effect on our senses. For Plummer, this animate sensation, or bringing to life of material, is linked to an inherent understanding of light as a force that dictates the circadian rhythms regulating our bodies and the world we inhabit. We associate light with the tangible life-giving processes of energy transferred from the sun through inorganic and organic matter as well as numerous instances emitted from natural phenomena such as lightning or explosions in which incandescent illumination indicates volatile energy. Plummer goes on to suggest that the visual vitality of these particular exchanges between light and material are rooted in an ability to confirm our sense of being. By placing us in an environment that appears alive and imbued with energy, attention is called to our physicality within the environment, and so the light-material exchange bestows us with the feeling of being involved or engaged with the world—resulting in a spiritual, transcendental or wondrous feeling. This potent emotional and physiological capacity has interested numerous artists over the centuries whose work has foregrounded qualities of illumination while making use of the medium of light as a principal agent in their work. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s (1922) Light Modulator, a tabletop device comprised of numerous rotating and intersecting planes of metal or glass, casts continually morphing shadows across its surroundings

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revealing the intricate endless variations of light. The Light Modulator manufactures these instances of the vibrant exchange between light and material Plummer so eloquently describes; surfaces gleam, sparkle and refract as direct illumination strikes the modulator while the animated shadows projected around the room engulf the viewer eliciting a sense of mysterious awe. More recent technologies have enabled artists to create increasingly grandiose statements with light, such as Olafur Eliasson’s (2003) renowned Weather Project for which he employed hundreds of mono-frequency lamps to create a large hanging sun-like orb in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Light emitted from these lamps was restricted to specific wavelengths causing the room to be burnished in an orange-yellow glow that eradicated all other colour sensations around the installation; at the same time, a thin veil of artificial mist pumped into the environment caused occasional water vapour formations akin to clouds. Drawn to the light like moths, visitors would often lie directly below the sizeable incandescent source, bathing in its uniform rays and enjoying the enriching sensation of a constantly setting sun, driven by and performing the physiological connection between light and energy that Plummer situates at the heart of luminous matter. Rather than mimicking or eliciting its effects, other artists have sculpted naturally occurring light directly as a feature of their work. Perhaps the most eminent of these so-called light artists is James Turrell (2006) whose ‘Skyspace’ series consists of well-orchestrated chambers that feature ceiling apertures. Deer Shelter is one such chamber that, situated in Yorkshire Sculpture Park, is designed to elicit meditative contemplation and reverie through its selectively framed portion of the sky. Firm diagonal benches encompass the small room, directing a visitor’s gaze upwards towards the exposed view, while a strip of soft illumination emanates from just above the benches to produce a smooth gradient across the whitewashed walls and ceiling that surrounds the overhead aperture. Natural rhythms and moments of light become a focus of this work as worldly illumination is juxtaposed by a surreal and heavily framed setting. Turrell’s work is often said to elicit psychedelic effects due to these unusual contrasts that at once heighten natural instances of light but also isolate the viewer placing her or him in a contemplative space that shows how occurrences of light can be seen to evidence Plummer’s arguments about the feelings of awe that luminous matter evokes.

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Within architectural discourse, numerous other writers support a transcendental consideration of such encounters between light and material. Mark Major, Jonathan Speirs and Anthony Tischhauser recognise that our visual sense revolves around the interplay between light and surface, highlighting this as a crucial element in the design of structures. Although less poetically inclined than Plummer, they uphold that the potential to impact mood or evoke emotions within built environments is fundamentally dependent on the interaction between light and space through this illuminative power to reveal surface shape, texture or colour and hence define form: If the shape of our three-dimensional world is determined through form, we experience its nature through surface. It is the very edge of matter, the interface with space. Surface ‘clothes form’ and in so doing provides essential visual information about the very nature of materiality. (Major et al. 2005, 83)

Emphasising the experiential nature of such occurrences, the authors argue that it is through an interplay of light and surface that we understand materiality. Although not explicitly, their argument follows Plummer in suggesting that such exchanges between light and material can serve to root us in the world and confirm a sense of being. Giving a more scientific perspective than the authors already discussed, Peter Boyce seeks to understand the relationship between environmental lighting and human perception. Boyce (2003, 220) writes: “the luminous environment is the starting point of perception and lighting can be used to change the luminous environment. … There is clear evidence that by changing the lighting, the perception of objects can be changed from drab and boring to eye-catching and dramatic.” Boyce is concerned more about the functionality of light rather than its expressive qualities. However, he reaches a conclusion that paves the way for further interpretations to address its potentially emotive impact and to take these insights further. Boyce stresses the role that the prior experience and knowledge of an observer plays in what is known as the high-order perception of objects when internal cognitive faculties screen external sensory input to filter stimuli that would be unimportant to the observer. He suggests that although properties such as form, texture, colour and reflection play a significant role in the perception of an object, changes to lighting have significant power over this perception precisely because of light’s interaction with and effect on these other factors.

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Due to the functioning of our visual system and instinctual associations between illumination, energy and life, it is clear that interactions of light and material can stir emotional, affirming responses in a viewer, as discussed in Plummer’s evocatively thick-textured descriptive writing. The aforementioned artworks show that light art conjures such responses in a relatively simple fashion through live encounters between audiences and the orchestration of light and materials. However, there are of course mediated practices that exploit creative orchestrations of light in a similarly evocative manner but with recording mechanisms or materials employed to enable the capture and subsequent display of such occurrences. Henri Alekan (1991, 14) pertinently outlines in relation to cinematography, perhaps the foremost practice of mediated light, that interactions of luminous matter and the subjective mystery surrounding them have become the bedrock for an intuitive language of visual communication. He posits: “Light allows us to ‘see’ and even more, it allows us to ‘think’, however, how are light and its opposite, that is to say darkness which is its starting point, experienced by man?”. This experiential conundrum of mediated light relates to Merleau-Ponty’s (2002, 361) aforementioned phenomenological account of perception. He observes that lighting and reflections become ‘solidified’, undergoing a transformation from immaterial to material when presented photographically so that their effect loses the ability to reveal objects and is confined to or ‘localised’ on the screen. He argues that: “vision merely takes up on its own account and carries through the encompassing of the scene by those paths traced out for it by the lighting. … We perceive in conformity with the light, as we think in conformity with other people in verbal communication.” From this perspective, photographic lighting can be seen as the live orchestration of light and material to evoke an emotional response which then undergoes a process of materialisation to be presented to a viewer. Dealing specifically with the moving image, Jean Pierre Geuens claims that lighting in this domain cues viewers towards particular aspects of the image and in so doing exploits the way we perceive objects as external to us but understood through our internal faculties and constructs. He writes that: in film, light is never constant. Its nature rather is ephemeral, its character volatile. All sorts of adjustments keep breaking down the desired illusion for a stable reality. As each successive shot (close-ups, etc.) modulates the ­master

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shot’s original lighting setup, transcendental aspirations for a solid world vanish under the weight of vital accommodations. (Geuens 2000, 157)

Analysing the process of a typical production, he highlights here the processual nature of orchestrating light. He goes on to suggest that mood fundamentally resides outside the individual so that we inhabit ‘environments’ of mood—recognising an intrinsic connection between external stimuli and emotion. In most films, Geuens argues, the mood created for an audience through lighting mimics that which all of the characters are experiencing. He suggests that this reliance on cinematic convention and the simple illustration of a narrative is depriving viewers of any experience of the other (encounters with existence), which is how we necessarily view the world on a daily basis. According to this line of thought, lighting must break free from convention to offer viewing experiences that challenge and engage audiences with new constructs (cues, signifiers etc.) through which they can view filmic worlds. Drawing extensively on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Geuens’ argument seems primarily concerned with the possibility of achieving a state of transcendence during moving image reception. He suggests that because all manipulation of film lighting relies on ontic sources, it can never truly reveal the condition in which it works. This discussion hinges around the prospect of stepping outside ourselves to understand the true essence of being, about which Heidegger (2000, 95) wrote: “In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting. … Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.” Hence, through Geuens we recognise a consideration of lighting not through aesthetic or technical concerns but rather a more transcendental, ontological approach. Specifically this notion of ‘Lichtung’ (which varies in Heidegger’s uses but is roughly the ‘clearing’ described above—or the condition in which all light functions) that appears pivotal to the power of moving images for Geuens. Using the example of Bill Viola’s (1986) I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, and Alexander Sokurov’s (1990) The Second Circle, Geuens argues that when entities appear on screen as neither film characters nor real world inhabitants another realm of experience is exposed which can offer the audience a glimpse of the ‘Lichtung’. This theory purports that the ‘Lichtung’ is a transcendent force within which all instances of light occur—or, in accordance with Plummer’s arguments, perhaps an immaterial environment

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fundamentally beyond the material interactions that stimulate our visual perception. This notion of otherness and the ‘clearing’ is not unique to Heidegger. The Japanese concept ‘Ma’ is closely related to his writing on the topic, suggesting a deeper structure underlying our understanding of light and space. Derrick de Kerckhove offers a pertinent summary of ‘Ma’ in Western terms, quoting Michel Random: Ma is the Japanese word for space or ‘space-time’, but it does not correspond to our idea of space. The main difference is that when we say space we imply room or empty areas. To the Japanese, Ma connotes the complex network or relationships between people and objects. … ‘In a word, Ma is perceived behind everything as an undefinable musical chord, a sense of the precise interval eliciting the fullest and finest resonance.’ (Kerckhove 1997, 165–166)

As suggested here, ‘Ma’ may be seen as a connecting force between entities, giving agency to both animate and inanimate objects in a similar fashion to the way Plummer described vibrant exchanges of luminous matter. Junichiro Tanizaki’s (1991, 19) writing on the use of light in architecture provides strong evidence of the principles of ‘Ma’ in action through his suggested identity of Japanese design. He recognises “differences of national character” in the use of lighting in moving images, though this seems an illustrative point in his more comprehensive argument that is not explicitly developed. We can understand from these arguments that ‘Ma’ and the ‘Lichtung’ then present a possible understanding of lighting as something that cannot be ‘seen’ nor ‘thought’ in Alekan’s terms but instead works as an underlying structure in our relationship with the world, which can stir profound emotional and existential encounters.

Moving Image Materiality Developing Merleau-Ponty’s notion, this section will explore how the potentially emotive, existential power of this underlying structure of lighting is harnessed and conveyed for an audience during moving image production through material interactions which “localise” light on the screen. Such “localisation” involves a cinematographic process beginning with an idea, continuing through the exposure of an image during production and resulting in the apprehension of a projection or display of the resulting

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image. To understand the material interactions involved in this process, however, a more detailed explication of the notion of materiality in relation to moving imagery is necessary. As Daniel Miller (2005, 4) highlights in his edited collection on this topic, the term materiality, in colloquial use, tends to refer simply to quantities of objects (or artefacts) and hence does not explain a great deal because “this definition soon breaks down as we move on to consider the large compass of materiality, the ephemeral, the imaginary, the biological, and the theoretical; all that which would have been external to the simple definition of an artefact”. More specifically, while discussing the various ways that time can manifest itself in and on film, Bernd Herzogenrath summarises the necessity of the tradition of materialism in moving image studies and is worth quoting at length: Material culture is based on the premise that the materiality of objects is an integrative part and parcel of culture, that the material dimension is as fundamentally important in the understanding of culture as language or social relations—but material culture mainly focuses on the materiality of everyday objects and their representation in the media (literature, film, arts, etc.). Thus, a further and important step would be to redirect such an analysis to the materiality of the media itself, to put the probing finger not only at the thing in representation, but also at the thing of representation. (Herzogenrath 2015, 9)

Herzogenrath highlights an important distinction here between the materiality of objects as represented in moving imagery and the materiality of the medium itself, that affords such representations and in so doing calls into question the physical nature of media. Through an examination of the compositional properties and physical functionality of equipment involved in the creation of moving imagery in the way suggested above, Herzogenrath (2015, 6) argues that it is possible to acknowledge the interdependence of both cultural and natural factors to extend the understanding of a “medium”. He suggests that during an era where divisions between nature and culture are becoming more eroded, the concept of “matter as media” can help to broaden the discourse in cultural and media studies towards an inclusive “media ecology” perspective, which not only addresses increasing intermediality but “also allows matter, the materiality of media, its place in that inter, in that ecology”. Such studies of the materiality of moving imagery have become much more widespread in recent years, particularly in response to the rise of

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digital technology. Laura Marks’ writing is a good example of this, in which she traces the physical action of electrons through various moving image capture and display processes to explore the materiality of digital imagery. She argues that “electronic images, like all of us, owe their material being to electrons and their associated waveforms. We are physically implicated in the virtual realms we inhabit, and far from divorcing ourselves from the world when we enter electronic spaces, we are more connected than we may imagine” (2002, 174). While Marks differentiates analogue from digital in her observation that digital circuits only respond to behaviour of the masses of electrons, ignoring weaker signals and causing the wave-particle relationship to be overridden, she ultimately argues for the material basis of the digital moving image as enfolded in the interconnected mass of electrons through which it is transmitted along common waves. Marks’ emphasis on the atomic structures that constitute moving imagery in this physical sense demonstrates the potential for a material-centric perspective to further debates around digital processes. Another materialist perspective can be found in the writing of Nicholas Chare and Liz Watkins (2013) who, in a similar way but addressing experimental celluloid moving imagery rather than digital, seek to break from what they perceive as an entrenched emphasis on representation and signification amongst film scholars by proposing an investigation into the organic substances (materials) that constitute analogue film stock and the “carnal” sensual effects these can create for an audience. Discussing Bill Morrison’s (2001) Decasia and Peter Delpeut’s (1991) Lyrical Nitrate, both created through the reappropriation and editing of decomposed film, they suggest that “the footage now reveals a materiality, originally far less perceptible, concealed behind the ethereal, evanescent images that appeared on screen” (2013, 75). In their argument against representation, for example, Chare and Watkins liken the rotting reels of Decasia to an “impaired skin” which they suggest bestows the film with a horrific feeling due to its abject quality. Through this, and other connotations around the material properties of these old nitrate films, Chare and Watkins seek to look beyond “symbolic language” towards a “materialist ontology” that identifies the importance of matter in film. These studies demonstrate that regardless of analogue or digital means, materiality has become an essential and inescapable factor in understanding moving imagery and often arises in response to the dominance of representationalist ideas in film studies which efface the materiality of media.

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A more developed approach to the consideration of materiality in relation to moving imagery can perhaps be glimpsed through Jussi Parikka’s notion of “medianatures”. Emphasising minerals, raw elements and seeking to retrace a deeper timeline of matter in media, Parikka (2015, 4–5) suggests that Geology can be “a way to investigate materiality of the technological media world. It becomes a conceptual trajectory, a creative intervention to the cultural history of the contemporary … extending traditional notions of media materialism into a more environmental and ecological agenda.” Rather than seeking to interrogate the complex functions of media as they are presented to the practitioner or viewer, Parikka shifts the debate here to a wider perspective, arguing instead for the necessary consideration of physical environmental influences on, and impacts of, media. He suggests that on one hand media, through processes of recording and reproducing, become a way of ordering and understanding our relationship with the earth, while conversely the earth itself provides and constitutes media in their physical makeup as “the affordances of its geophysical reality make technical media happen” (Parikka 2015, 13). Hence the notion of “medianatures” affords recognition of these entanglements. Parikka (2015, 14) argues that specific depictions of such co-constituting materialities between media and nature are therefore also concerned with political issues such as “relations of power, economy and work”. This notion is predicated on Donna Haraway’s writing about technobiopolitics in which she outlines a similar concept of “naturecultures” while narrating companion relationships between humans and dogs. Haraway (2003, 8) uses this notion to get beyond “relations of significant otherness” such as “subjects, objects, kinds, races, species, genres, and genders” which she suggests are nothing more than “the products of their relating”. Haraway argues that instead of these binary oppositions, the consideration of naturecultures means a more nuanced relationality in which everything is always already entangled. She offers a topological perspective of nature and culture which understands the world through a series of transformations where infinite material surfaces continuously morph to form or generate boundaries such as nature and culture rather than presupposing them as fundamental divisions. Turning to Karan Barad’s writing can build on this insight, as well as Herzogenrath’s earlier suggestion of erosion between culture and nature. Barad offers a similar but more developed explication of the importance of matter, arguing against distinctions between nature and culture entirely in favour of a more radical understanding. Discussing the physicality of

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things, she suggests “the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather what Bohr terms ‘phenomena’. … phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components” (2007, 33 original emphasis). Barad attempts to reframe existence in a way that eschews ingrained notions of separateness, representation and divisions between objects to instead see matter as active and generative of change or differences. In contrast to other perspectives on materiality, Barad (2007, 140) proposes that matter not be read through inter-actions in which separate physical forces create specific cause and effects upon one another (i.e. the chemical reaction of light striking a film negative causing the latent image to have a particular aesthetic effect) but rather as intra-actions that are relations from within matter “through which part of the world makes itself differentially intelligible to another part of the world and through which causal structures are stabilized and destabilized”. An example of this would be how the moving image aesthetic differentiates the exposed negative from the unexposed negative. Barad (2007, 135) uses this notion of intra-­ agency to shift debate “from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality to matters of practices, doing and actions” and suggests that studying matter (or materiality) in the way proposed would be to study the enactment of boundaries during a constant production of difference. As with Parikka, Haraway’s writing is of central importance to Barad’s ideas surrounding materiality and particularly the notion of a “diffractive” methodology. Barad (2007, 24) suggests a diffractive approach is a counterpoint to common metaphors of reflection; “both are optical phenomena, but whereas reflection is about mirroring and sameness, diffraction attends to patterns of difference”. In this view, the notion of reflection emphasises and adheres to the separateness between phenomena that Barad argues against, but the metaphor of diffraction, on the other hand, is more suitable for addressing entanglements of ideas and materials as it entails an inherently generative perspective, seeking to explore the product of multiple phenomena which therefore enables an understanding of how such boundaries are produced rather than presuming them in advance. This can be traced back to Haraway’s (2004, 70) writing on diffraction as a methodological metaphor which further explains the notion, suggesting that “diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear.”

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As evidenced in Barad’s discussion of wave-particle duality, seeking to understand or study phenomena “diffractively” is to accept multiplicity, to embrace and look for the differences that these multiplicities create in their “interference” or juxtaposition with one another. This approach is employed frequently in New Materialist writing, a recent school of thought arising from feminist theory, with which Barad and Haraway identify. In an online entry on this topic, seeking to open these esoteric terms to wider audiences as part of a European New Materialist research initiative, Evelien Geerts and Iris van der Tuin (2016) outline how studies in this field can contribute new understandings, suggesting “rather than employing a hierarchical methodology that would put different texts, theories, and strands of thought against one another, diffractively engaging with texts and intellectual traditions means that they are dialogically read ‘through one another’ to engender creative, and unexpected outcomes”. Although these examples share a post-representational perspective, it is clear that the materiality to which they have turned is far from an agreed approach—the New Materialist perspective seen in the writing of Barad and Haraway differs implicitly to materiality as employed in Marks (2002) and Chare and Watkins’ (2013) writing for instance. The latter writers emphasise the “sensuous” or “carnal” nature of substance, relating this to the affect of moving imagery for an individual viewer’s senses and highlighting the importance of sensory engagement in understanding matter. They seek to investigate moving imagery through haptic, sensory, engagement by examining the finite components that constitute systems of capture and display in relation to an individual’s physical, tactile apprehension. Through Barad’s perspective, however, the materiality of moving imagery might be understood with a diffractive lens, seeking to examine the patterns of difference that are generated by capture and display processes through divergent readings of them. Again this highlights the difference that Barad proposes between inter-actions and intra-actions with regards to matter—whether to approach this as relations from within phenomena or relations between distinct agents. Although drawing on the common influence of Haraway’s writing, Parikka suggests another, somewhat Deleuzian, variation on the study of materiality, which revolves around the figure of the metallurgist as someone who follows a flow of materials and makes concrete forms (theories/depictions) from its endless potentialities. He argues that “there is a metallurgical way of conducting theoretical work: ambulant flows, transversal connections, and teasing out the materiality of matter in new places, in new assemblages of cultural life in

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contemporary technological media” (2015, 23). It could be argued that despite such differences, an important similarity in these studies of materiality is their drive to look beyond boundaries between nature and culture (or technology/media and nature) towards more entangled notions which presuppose or underpin traditional conceptual and representational divides as will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. As these writers show, we could perhaps outline materiality in relation to moving imagery “diffractively” through an appeal to intra-actions, considering human senses and the haptic qualities of the medium in conjunction with an investigation of the geology of the medium. However, light is one factor that none of these, or other studies towards the materiality of moving imagery, consider in great detail. This disjuncture is perhaps because, as Barad discusses, the physical nature of light itself has been long contested whereby: on the one hand, light seemed to behave like a wave, but under different experimental circumstances, light seemed to behave like a particle. Given these results, what can we conclude about the nature of light-is it a particle or a wave? Remarkably, it turns out that similar results are found for matter. (Barad 2007, 29)

As I outlined in Cinematographic Affordances (Nevill 2018), light is a powerful creative consideration for cinematographers and, taking cue from these theoretical perspectives, it is also materially implicated in the production of moving imagery just as much as the metal, plastic, glass, silicon and other substances involved in processes of capture and display. For instance, the particular minerals mined from the earth in the construction of camera sensors are sought for their light responsive and transmissive characteristics. The physical structure of celluloid and digital sensors are then engineered from these minerals to maximise the sensitivity to light across particular wavelengths. Projection theatres are lined with light absorbing fabrics to emphasise reflectively coated screens in an audience’s field of view. Specially refined glass funnels light into a camera and later emits it in the same dimensions during projection. Backlit liquid crystals in ubiquitous portable displays are physically coaxed between states to create an image. These material relations are just some of the ways in which, as Merleau-Ponty outlined, “light becomes localised on the surface of the screen”.

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Optical Metaphor and Epistemology It is perhaps unsurprising for Barad to employ optical terminology such as “reflection” and “diffraction” when outlining her theoretical approaches as light has long been considered epistemologically, with conceptual links to knowledge since the earliest recorded studies of vision. Euclid’s (1943) work on optics in c.300bc for instance, later developed by Claudius Ptolemy (1996) to introduce the concept of refraction in c.100ad, argued that the apprehension of objects is stimulated by visual rays extending out from the eye with a geometric approach that can be seen as the introduction of mathematics to the study of vision. Such early writing on vision was dominated by extramission theory (the notion that light rays emitted from the eye afford vision) and it was not until Ibn al-Haytham’s (1989) development in 1021 that understandings began to shift towards the notion of the eye receiving light. A subsequent series of debates took place during the Renaissance period to situate light as either a particle as per Isaac Newton’s (2010) investigations published in 1704, or a wave as suggested by René Descartes (1998) in 1637 and further embellished by Christiaan Huygens (2005) in 1690 which forged the grounds for contemporary assertions that light exhibits so-called wave-particle duality. Barad (2007, 86) discusses the field of quantum optics that has emerged from these debates, highlighting the distinctive nature of this recent scientific work and suggesting that “whereas classical mechanics and geometrical optics are (nowadays understood to be) approximation schemes that are useful under some circumstances, quantum mechanics and physical optics are understood to be formalisms that represent the full theory”. Offering an in-depth history of understandings about the nature of light, A. Mark Smith outlines the long evolution of these ideas and their epistemological connotations as a movement from sight-oriented to light-­ oriented perspectives. Discussing the work of Johannes Kepler specifically, he suggests that by the late seventeenth century “the rupture between light theory and sight theory implicit in Kepler’s account of retinal imaging was now absolutely explicit, and Descartes was pivotal in making it so by locating it at the juncture between body and mind” (2015, 415). According to Smith, Descartes developed a mechanised approach to sense and perception in conjunction with his earlier theory of light and vision. As suggested above, Smith argues that this mechanisation inherited an “epistemic gap” between subject and object (body and mind) from Kepler’s work, which therefore formed the basis for the dualism associated

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with Cartesian philosophy. To situate the use of optical metaphors about knowledge as arising through this evolution of epistemic perspectives reinforces Barad’s notion of a “diffractive” methodology. As I’ve suggested, Barad’s writing attempts to eschew boundaries between subject and object to recognise the intricate entanglement of phenomena and her break from the typical optical metaphor of “reflection” is indicative of this epistemological shift. The relationship between the nature of light, knowledge and vision is problematised further by Barbra Bolt’s writing about art practice. While discussing the difference between the harsh glare of Australia’s ubiquitous desert light and entrenched European concepts of light, she draws upon Martin Jay’s historical writing to outline traditional associations that are worth quoting at length here: Light, understood as the perfect linear form that operates according to the laws of geometric rays, was defined as lumen. Lumen was seen to be the essence of lumination. In contrast, lux emphasized the actual experience of human sight... This dualistic concept of light as lumen and lux complemented the dual concept of vision. On one hand, vision was conceived as observation with the two eyes of the body; whilst on the other, as speculation with the eye of the mind. (Bolt 2004, 126)

Bolt argues against these typical relations between a dualist approach to vision and the nature of light, suggesting that the dazzling glare of Australian sun provokes a different understanding in which the work of art no longer sheds light on matter but rather sheds light for matter. Drawing on Heidegger’s writing, Bolt (2004, 123) argues that the notion of art as “unconcealment” (discussed further in the chapter titled “Understanding Cinematography Technology”) is predicated on “Enlightenment metaphorics” due to the way in which the “beneficence of light allows truth (alétheia) to be revealed”. These metaphorical associations of light and revealing are also recognised by philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1993), who attempts to show how transformations of metaphor indicate changes in world-understanding and self-understanding, basing his discussion around metaphors of light for their expressive power and subtle capacity for change. He claims that the manipulation of light is the result of a long process so that what was once a homogeneous, presupposed medium of visibility affording neutral representation shifted in the nineteenth century to a localised factor which could be adjusted for an accentuating approach

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to vision. In the same way that Bolt uses Heidegger’s notion of “unconcealment” to represent the revealing power of art, Blumenberg argues that since the dawn of theatre, light has conceptually heralded the power to generate meaning because we presume dark to be the natural state. The prevalence of this notion of light as a form-giving, generative force is outlined further in Arthur Zajonc’s historical account of relations between light and mind. Zajonc introduces his subject by offering the example of a congenitally blind patient unable to recover their vision even after surgical treatment. He outlines how, although they might be physically capable of seeing, the patient cannot understand or process the newfound sense of vision because other cognitive capacities define their world and “give it substance and meaning” (1995, 6). From this observation, Zajonc concludes that “besides an outer light and eye, sight requires an “inner light”, one whose luminance compliments the familiar outer light and transforms raw sensation into meaningful perception. The light of the mind might flow into and marry with the light of nature to bring forth a world” (1995, 6). Zajonc’s discussion adheres firmly to a dualist perspective which Bolt would describe as equating light to form, knowledge and the subject as opposed to darkness which is equated with the irrational, to matter and the unknown. This idea is very similar to the way that Zajonc describes this relationship between an “outer” and “inner” light. Bolt’s objective is similar to Barad’s ideas discussed earlier in that she aims to go beyond this heliophilic Enlightenment notion of light and knowledge. Instead of light revealing the truth of the world then, Bolt (2004, 125) argues for an alternative perspective by drawing upon Paul Carter’s “performative principle of methexis”. Based on her landscape painting practice, Bolt outlines how the notion of “glare” can develop this understanding of the relationship between light and matter. She argues that the dazzling superfluity of light experienced in the midday sun can be so intense that form becomes “fuzzy” or “deterritorialised” in Deleuzian terminology and traditional rules of linear or aerial perspective are overwhelmed. She also describes the physical relationship between her body and the sun resulting in “pterygiums and sun beaten skin” occurring during her painting process to suggest that “light can no longer be postulated as the catalyst that joins objects whilst itself remaining unbent and unimplicated” (2004, 131). Arguing instead for a more performative perspective on knowledge, Bolt draws upon Aboriginal artwork which, she suggests, demonstrates how creative acts can be considered as generative rather than

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representational. Expanding upon this concept, she offers Carter’s notion of methexis (developed in discussion of such Aboriginal art practices) as a new way of understanding the world in which “meanings emerge in the facts of the matter. Rather than meaning being revealed or clarified” (2004, 142). In so doing, she argues that knowledge is embedded and locally situated rather than represented. In other words, shifting to a methektic perspective, which Bolt (2004, 142) suggests is demonstrated in Australian Aboriginal art prior to colonisation, entails an understanding of light that is materially implicated in the creative process: “Images no longer stand in for or signify concepts, ideas or things, nor are images signs that ceaselessly circulate. … Imaging produces real material effects.” Bolt steps away from Cartesian dualism by separating knowledge from the notion of light as a force which gives form to matter, to instead situate knowledge as material relations, therefore opening the possibility for light itself to perhaps be considered a malleable substance, similar to matter, in this creative context. There are strong parallels between Bolt’s notion of methexis and Barad’s notion of intra-agency that was touched upon earlier. As I’ve outlined, Barad uses intra-agency to shift the debate from what she critiques as a representationalist understanding of the world in which descriptions and reality are at odds with one another towards a more entangled perspective where boundaries are generated through the relations or interactions of matter. Bolt’s writing draws upon a similar underlying world-view to this, though her attention is directed specifically towards art practices rather than Barad’s more extensive metaphysical investigation. As Bolt argues, “to think methektically is to think quite differently about the potential of visual practices. It involves thinking through matter. … In this view, visual art practice is not concerned with shedding light on the matter, but can be conceived of as the relations in and between matter” (2004, 147–148). From this, we can see that Bolt’s notion methexis is akin to intra-agency in that it specifies a non-representational understanding in which matter itself is generative rather than having forms (or representations) imposed on it from a separate subject. Both writers also suggest that their perspective engenders a “performative” understanding of matter; for Barad (2007, 49 original emphasis) this concept recognises that “knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world”; however, for Bolt (2004, 150 original emphasis), a “productive materiality of performativity” means that “matter is transformed in the exchange between objects, bodies and

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images”. Although Bolt’s text precedes Barad’s and these two writers arrive at their position through very different arguments, they do draw upon a common post-structural lineage of Deleuze and Foucault when outlining these corresponding ideas towards a performative understanding of materiality. Thus it can be argued that Bolt’s writing applies a philosophy similar to Barad’s but in the context of creative art practice rather than scientific investigation. As argued previously, studies of materiality and moving imagery can be seen broadly as a reaction to or stance against representational perspectives that dominate the field. For example, Marks’ (2002) attempt to define digital capture and display processes as materially constituted in the same way as older analogue forms, along with Chare and Watkins’ (2013) suggestion that some meaning of film resides beneath its surface symbols in the material composition or decomposition of celluloid. In addition to this analysis, the previously discussed work of Parikka (2015) and Herzogenrath (2015) are perhaps both indicative of investigations into media which cast aside the representational entirely, seeking, in these instances, a wider perspective of deep time and an erosion of the boundaries between nature and culture towards an understanding that favours the raw materials implicit in production processes. The aforementioned performative understanding of materiality is well suited to this context and applying such a perspective to the study of lighting practices in moving image production might entail a new understanding of the creative discipline of cinematography. In an article addressing the relationship between New Materialism and media theory, Parikka “proposes a multiplicity of materialism” and suggests that “the matter of technical media is not only in their object-­ nature—even if that would help us think beyond representation, signification, or a correlationist predisposition” (2012, 98–99). Parikka is making the case here for New Materialism as a sort of meta-materialism which acts as a methodological guide to assist and advance the consideration of the varied aspects of materialism. The notion of performative materialism as discussed through Bolt’s methexis and Barad’s intra-agency then could be seen as one possible perspective which can help to understand how practitioners work with light in moving image production and may be considered in a broader framework of New Materialism and media theory as indicated by Parikka. The process of lighting in moving image practice involves the orchestration of light in front of a camera during production as well as control over the passage of light from a source through capture to eventual

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display. Developing an understanding of this which utilises the suggested perspective of materialism would be to cast the lighting practitioner as a participant in a series of material relations that generate images with real physical presence in the world, in which the images themselves perform (or are generative of) material effects rather than existing as the result of them. This performative view situates the practitioner in a concurrent, symbiotic relationship to light. Rather than a revealing force that sits outside of material processes, light can be seen as an implicated force to be worked with akin to the way that a potter might throw clay or a basket weaver might ply reed. This view can also further elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s (2002, 360) notion that light becomes “localised” on the screen as discussed earlier and evidenced in his suggestion that “reflections and lighting in photography are often badly reproduced because they are transformed into things”. It can be inferred from this that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of light appearing on screen entails a material process in which images have a physical presence, and a performative perspective of materiality might extend this idea to suggest further that light itself is implicated in the “thing” transformation that he describes. Merleau-Ponty suggests such a view in his description of film viewing whereby “the lighting directs my gaze and causes me to see the object so that in a sense it knows and sees the object” (2002, 361). While this might easily be mistaken for a dualist perspective in his seeming division of subject and object, Merleau-Ponty is going beyond the Cartesian notion of light equated to knowledge here by bestowing a sort of implicated agency rather than presuming it to be a neutral form-giving force. This “knowing and seeing” that he suggests is important as it indicates the active character of light itself in the constitution of moving imagery (my emphasis). The difference between Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion of lighting “localised” on a screen and the performative materiality that I’ve outlined through Bolt and Barad, however, is that in this latter view materials are not static entities in the same manner as the objects that Merleau-Ponty indicates but rather materials are seen as existing in a constant state of flux. As Barad argues, the performative nature of matter generates boundaries through intra-action (relations from within) and these boundaries are permeable and continuously changing. Bolt also suggests a similar changeability for the notion of methexis, arguing that matter is transformative and transformed.

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The writing of Tim Ingold, who specifically discusses creative processes of making, can help to outline further how a performative understanding of materiality might relate to lighting in moving image practices. Ingold outlines materials as: substances-in-becoming … forever overtaking the formal destinations that, at one time or another, have been assigned to them, and undergoing continual modulation as they do so. Whatever the objective forms in which they are currently cast, materials are always and already on their ways to becoming something else. (Ingold 2013, 31)

Ingold outlines a theory of making as “correspondence” with materials in which the practitioner participates in an ongoing evolution of forms (or boundaries), coaxing and altering the material’s trajectory in a continuing process of change. With this notion of “correspondence”, Ingold aims to investigate the materially engaged processes of making rather than what he critiques as “hylomorphic” considerations which are focused on an idea opposed to the outcome and hence approach making as the “imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance” (2013, 31). Following this statement, Ingold argues that materials elude description as this simply indicates a history of their attributes and instead he suggests that understanding entails a close working relationship during which the practitioner “corresponds” to the material, discovering its potentialities or character (my emphasis). In addition to the aforementioned post-representation perspectives, Ingold finds inspiration specifically in Jane Bennett’s writing about non-­ human “vitality”. Although focused on ethics, Bennett’s (2010, xvi) work similarly discusses agency across human and non-human, outlining a common tradition of “vitalism” in process philosophy to show how the term can mean “traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience”. Drawing on this idea, Ingold summarises the connection between vitalism and his idea of “correspondence” in creative processes by stating: “the generativity of action is that of animate life itself, and lies in the vitality of its materials” (2013, 97). Hence, vitalism is a useful concept within Ingold’s writing that can refer to an independent character of materials and will be touched upon again in the chapter titled “Understanding Cinematography Technology”. Ingold’s theorisation of making coincides with the performative understanding of materiality discussed through the writing of Bolt and Barad.

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This framework enables a consideration of lighting practice in which light itself can be thought of in a similar manner to other material substances implicit in creative production processes. In a similar way to Ingold, Bolt and Barad propose the ever-changing flux of matter, light thus exists in an ephemeral state, changing with the sun’s movement throughout a day or the individual photons emitted from an artificial source. In a cinematographic context, we might consider the practitioner as following a flow of light, for example, listening to its character, qualities and possibilities when illuminating each scene. This is similar to Plummer’s writing, discussed earlier, in which he argues that the specific qualities of light can elicit an animate sensation. The practitioner works with illumination to interoperate and coax meaning or emotion from potentialities amidst an ongoing landscape of changing light and shadow. To understand light as akin to a material in moving image practice then requires shifting perspective away from the conventional Cartesian divide between subject and object or matter and form, towards a methektic understanding which proposes the performative nature of phenomena such as imagery. Seen in this way, the process of lighting in cinematography is not conducted by an individual subject, revealing meanings through forms depicted in light, but rather the practice is a set of material relations, realisations or performances between ideas and light which, through their intra-agency, have a physical presence and material implication in the world.

References Alekan, Henri. 1991. Des Lumières et des Ombres. Paris: Librairie du Collectionneur. Al-Haytham, Ibn. 1989. The Optics of Ibn Al-Haytham: Books I-III, on Direct Vision. Translated by A.I.  Sabra. London: Warburg Institute, University of London. Alton, John. 1995. Painting with Light. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barad, Karan. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 1993. Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation. Edited by D.M. Levin. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bolt, Barbra. 2004. Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image. London: I.B. Tauris.

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Boyce, Peter. 2003. Human Factors in Lighting. 2nd ed. London: Taylor & Francis. Chare, Nicholas, and Liz Watkins. 2013. The Matter of Film: Decasia and Lyrical Nitrate. In Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ Through the Arts, ed. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, 75–87. London: I.B. Tauris. de Kerckhove, Derrick. 1997. The Skin of Culture: Investigating The New Electronic Reality. London: Kogan Page. Delpeut, Peter. 1991. Lyrical Nitrate [35mm film]. Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam. Descartes, René. 1998. Descartes: The World and Other Writings. Translated by S. Gaukroger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eliasson, Olafur. 2003. The Weather Project [Installation]. Tate Modern, London. Euclid. 1943. The Optics of Euclid. Translated by H.  Burton. Journal of the Optical Study of America 35: 357–372. Geerts, Evelien, and Iris van der Tuin. 2016. Diffraction & Reading Diffractively. New Materialism Almanac. https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/d/diffraction.html Geuens, Jean Pierre. 2000. Film Production Theory. New York: Suny Press. Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. ———. 2004. The Haraway Reader. Abingdon: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 2000. The Origin of the Work of Art. Edited by C. Cazeaux. Abingdon: Routledge. Herzogenrath, Bernd. 2015. Media/Matter: An Introduction. In Media/Matter: The Materiality of Media, Matter as Medium, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath, 1–16. London: Bloomsbury. Huygens, Christiaan. 2005. The Project Gutenberg eBook of Treatise on Light, by Christiaan Huygens. Project Gutenberg. Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge. Keating, Patrick. 2017. What Does It Mean to Say That Cinematography Is Like Painting With Light? In Transnational Cinematography Studies, ed. Lindsay Coleman, Daisuke Miyao, and Roberto Schaefer, 97–115. Lanham/Boulder/ New York: Lexington Books. Major, Mark, Jonathan Speirs, and Anthony Tischhauser. 2005. Made of Light: The Art of Light and Architecture. Basel: Birkhäuser. Marks, Laura U. 2002. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. 2nd ed. London: Routledge Classics. Miller, Daniel. 2005. Materiality. Durham: Duke University Press. Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. 1922. Light-Space Modulator [Sculpture]. Bauhaus Archive & Museum, Berlin. Morrison, Bill. 2001. Decasia [35mm film]. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Nevill, Alexander. 2018. Cinematographic Affordances: Creative Approaches to Lighting in Moving Image Practice. Media Practice and Education 19: 122–138. Newton, Isaac. 2010. The Project Gutenberg eBook of Opticks by Sir Isaac Newton. Project Gutenberg. Parikka, Jussi. 2012. New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9: 95–100. ———. 2015. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Plummer, Henry. 1987. Poetics of Light. Tokyo: Architecture+Urbanism Publishing. Ptolemy, Claudius. 1996. Ptolemy’s Theory of Visual Perception: An English Translation of the Optics with Introduction and Commentary. Translated by M.A. Smith. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 86: 1–61 63–261 263–269 279–300. Smith, Mark A. 2015. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sokurov, Alexander. 1990. The Second Circle [35mm film]. International Film Circuit, New York. Tanizaki, Junichiro. 1991. In Praise of Shadows. London: Jonathan Cape Publishers. Turrell, James. 2006. Deer Shelter Skyspace [Installation]. Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton. Viola, Bill. 1986. I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like [Video]. Electronic Arts Intermix, New York. Zajonc, Arthur. 1995. Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Understanding Cinematography Technology

Abstract  This chapter furthers a new-materialist discussion of lighting by defining an approach to technology that can enable a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between a practitioner and their equipment during moving image production. The chapter argues that technology in relation to these moving image phenomena should be read as an umbrella term—a domain within which specific equipment, tools and processes transform through use. This perspective affords a principled discussion of the increasingly diverse landscape of production and exhibition tools which supports the book’s wider investigation by considering some of the ways that production tools are implicated in lighting practices. To reconcile varying theoretical approaches, the work of Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and John Law is employed as a lens for studying technology. Situating the practitioner in the midst of an entangled network of forces, this chapter recognises the complex web of agency spreading across human and non-human actants which, as a whole, defines moving image practices. Keywords  Technology • Cinematography • Actor-network theory • Agency • Filmmaking The practice of cinematography involves an intrinsic combination of art and craft, providing opportunities to engage in creative expression and technical innovation with photography and image making. While it is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Nevill, Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65935-6_3

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undoubtedly the case that other filmmaking roles involve similar creative applications of technology, cinematography in particular necessitates an understanding of workflow, processes and equipment across all stages of a film production to create moving images that can communicate effectively with, or express a particular feeling for, an audience. From an industry standpoint, Dutch cinematographer Philippe Vié outlines the intertwined nature of technical and artistic pursuits in this discipline in relation to digital equipment, stating “cinematographers have to acquire sufficient knowledge to grasp the principles of all those ones and zeros … it is important to learn the principles of compression, colour sampling, colour depth and the Bayer pattern” (2012, 73). American cinematographer Frederick Elmes agrees, expressing a similar perspective in relation to traditional photochemical processes: “you have to know about technical things. You don’t need to know how to build film stock, but you should be aware of what a stock will do for you. You need the know how the laboratory develops it, so that you can understand where they have gone wrong” (2012, 149). While cinematographers may vary in the depth of knowledge through which they seek to understand these technical considerations, with some perhaps relying on assistants to manipulate processes for them, it is evident that all are immersed in and engage with a multitude of technologies during the creation of their work. Going further than this though, I would suggest that a creative process of lighting is not only an application or use of technologies but moreover is dependent on technological ways of perceiving an environment which enable a practitioner to pre-visualise, conduct and record these applications of technology in ways that evoke a desired visual aesthetic. In short, cinematography and lighting are fundamentally technical endeavours and those working within the field at whatever level are enmeshed in a complex web of technological relationships that I hope to begin to define and untangle.

Determinism Previous studies of technology have primarily attempted to offer an account of technological factors in relation to varying styles of cinematography with a hypothesis that technology and aesthetics are intrinsically connected. Patrick Keating (2014, 3) outlines the rationale of this approach in the introduction to his historical account of the discipline, stating that “the causal relationship between technology and style can go

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both ways. Just as a new technology might spark cinematographers to explore a new style, the stylistic preoccupations of cinematographers might push the industry to invest in certain technological research likely to have market potential.” Similarly, Barry Salt (2009, 401) investigates technological change through stylistic developments, drawing heavily on trade journals to offer an account in which “the films themselves form the basic material for research and reference” while proposing a “detailed rational explanation for what happened in the development of cinema”. Although these texts make it clear that technological change in cinematographic equipment or processes correlates to shifting film aesthetics over time, they stop short at a description and critique of such changes without fully considering the broader question of how and why they occur, or the implications changes might have had for a practitioner working in the field. Technological determinism is a risk for historical accounts using this approach as the authors tread a fine line between acknowledging an impact of technological change on film aesthetics without showing how the technologies themselves are causal. Picking up on this, Keating (2014, 4) clarifies Salt’s approach (as well as his own) by stating “Salt explicitly denies that technology drives stylistic change, instead, he emphasises the determining power of filmmakers’ intentions, praising the filmmakers who innovate the most influential styles”. Herein lies a fundamental divide amongst these studies—whether the emphasis should be placed between the filmmakers (or society), and the physical equipment (or technology) when accounting for complex relations and changes between the two. A deterministic technological perspective and the associated shortcomings of this line of enquiry can be glimpsed in Vilém Flusser’s writing on photography in which he suggests the invention of technical images is the second revolution in human culture. Flusser (2000, 10) argues that image technology is warping our individual experience of the world to the extent that “human beings’ lives finally become a function of the images they create. Human beings cease to decode the images and instead project them, still encoded, into the world ‘out there’, which meanwhile itself becomes like an image—a context of scenes, of states of things.” This notion of sensory enslavement through technological means has similarities to Martin Heidegger’s writing on technology, which will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. Briefly, in Heidegger’s (1977, 20) view, technology does not address specific physical functions (such as machines or processes) because it is a mode of experiencing or “revealing” and “the essence of technology” is found in the way we encounter entities.

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Heidegger (1977, 2) argues that we see and understand entities through the lens of technological procedures and is especially critical of an overarching technological bias in human activities or ways of thinking that he terms “enframing”. This perspective is similar then to Flusser’s argument that photography is a dominant cultural technique through which reality is understood and conditioned. Flusser (2000, 27) likens creative acts of image making to moves in a chess game; he argues cameras have a finite set of programmes which the user operates within (similar to how players follow the rules of a chess game) suggesting that “photographers are inside their apparatus and bound up with it. … This is a new kind of function in which human beings are neither the constant nor the variable but in which human beings and apparatus merge into a unity. It is therefore appropriate to call photographers functionaries.” Unlike Keating and Salt, there is no question of style or aesthetic choice in this account of photographic practice. Instead, Flusser’s view advances the notion that technology defines human activity. While he recognises the role of social feedback in changing specific cameras, for instance, his larger cautionary picture is one in which society is conditioned by the “photographic universe” because cameras, like other apparatuses “were invented in order to function automatically, in other words independently of future human involvement … and this intention has been successful without a doubt” (2000, 73). The qualities or “programmes” of technology in Flusser’s words undeniably have an impact on a practitioner’s image making. However, I’ve previously argued for the role of creativity in lighting processes, which signposts the agency of the individual against or within this set of finite possibilities. In moving and still image making, for example, practitioners frequently utilise their camera against its intended purposes; they might break or reveal the mechanisms at play behind their work in self-reflexive gestures or utilise outmoded tools in their work for a particular aesthetic effect. Flusser’s account of photography removes authorship over aesthetic then by taking a narrow perspective on the drive towards perfection in technological developments. Indeed, the limitation of deterministic perspectives of technology, in general, is the failure to account for human agency. This is particularly true with regards to lighting, which can be entirely natural in its origin (such as working with the sun as available light) but still aesthetically and technologically controlled by the practitioner (through their choice of lens, filters or light modifiers etc.). Therefore this perspective will not offer a complete account of the relationships between an individual and their equipment during moving

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image practices. As Heidegger (1977, 4) warns, being ensnared by technological ways of thinking prevents a true understanding as “we are delivered over to it [technology] in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology”. Given these shortcomings, Keating’s proposition that development in cinematographic style is a two-way exchange between practitioner and technology offers a more attractive and inclusive suggestion of how technology might be considered in relation to lighting practices.

Apparatus Flusser’s writing also employs a heavily theorised term in studies of moving image technology—the apparatus. Following William Wees’ (1992, 50) discussion of the popularisation of a corresponding theory amongst film scholars around 1970, the notion of an apparatus “carries the weight of two French terms: l’appareil, the basic machinery of cinema … and le dispositif, the combined physiological, psychological, perceptual and social mechanisms which provide a means of articulation between spectator and film”. Broadly speaking then, apparatus theory argues that perceptual conventions of moving images, such as lighting techniques, for instance, are constructed according to ideological assumptions towards what ought to constitute a ‘picture of reality’ and how it should be seen. Jean-Louis Comolli a prominent figure in French New-Wave cinema, whose writing appeared on numerous occasions in the influential Cahiers du Cinéma journal and whose work is closely associated with this theory, shows how original uses of the term apparatus differ from Flusser’s. Comolli (1980, 121) argues “the historical variation of cinematic techniques, their appearence-disappearence … depend not on a rational-linear order of technological perfectibility nor an autonomous instance of scientific ‘progress’, but much rather on the offsetting, adjustments, arrangements carried out by a social configuration in order to represent itself”. This idea is reinforced in relation to the discussion of production processes by Jean-Louis Baudry (1974, 46)—another writer involved in Cahiers du Cinéma—who suggests “the ideological mechanism at work in the cinema seems thus to be concentrated in the relationship between the camera and the subject. … What emerges here is the specific function fulfilled by the cinema as support and instrument of ideology.” Baudry, alongside Comolli and other affiliated writers, employs the notion of an

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apparatus to distinguish cinema from other art forms on the basis of its mechanical realisation and reproducibility. Their argument hinges around the representational qualities of photographic imagery, and they use this to interrogate ways in which cinematic techniques depend upon and reflect society. In stark opposition, Flusser (2000, 35) suggests that although “the apparatus functions as a function of the photographer’s intention, this intention itself functions as a function of the camera’s program”. In this view, technological factors are ultimately given precedence over ideological factors when considering changing/developing of techniques. Again it is clear by contrasting these approaches that neither a deterministic technology-centric perspective like Flusser’s nor an ideologically oriented perspective akin to Baudry and Comolli’s can adequately account for the relationships at play during a practitioners creative lighting processes. A problem arises between the two approaches in that they seem to be mutually exclusive. It is impossible to suggest that photographic imagery conditions human experience of the world—Flusser’s (2000, 26) view that people are subservient to a “programme” of the “photographic universe”—while also upholding that photographic mechanisms are fundamentally socially constructed: Comolli’s (1980, 122) view of the apparatus as an “arrangement” which “gives techniques a social status and function”. In order to escape this contradiction and find a viable way of accounting for technological relationships within a practitioner’s lighting processes, it is necessary to retrace the roots of these perspectives to find a common predecessor and to interrogate further their central notion of the apparatus, or the uniqueness of the photographic form. Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, it could be said that André Bazin’s highly influential work paved the way for ontological discussions of the cinema. Attempting to answer the question ‘what is cinema’, Bazin’s (1960, 7) central thesis that cinema should be considered apart from other art forms due to its mechanical processes is exemplified by his claim that “originality in photography as distinct from originality in painting lies in the essentially objective character of photography”. The impact of this notion in the field of film studies is thoroughly acknowledged. As an example, Stephen Rifkin investigates Bazin’s cinematic ontology in his doctoral dissertation, unravelling the many interpretations of this work in both English and French language film criticism, suggesting:

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it is well known that it was Bazin’s ideas to which the contributors to Cahiers themselves looked for inspiration. This genealogy (Bazin-Cahiers-English-­ language auteur theory) comprises a central part of the now-standard origin myth recounted in intellectual histories of Anglo-American film criticism and theory. (Rifkin 2011, 26–27)

Rifkin (2011, 176) later outlines how Baudry, Comolli and other writers associated with apparatus theory reject some central ideas in Bazin’s work in their suggestion that the film spectator is offered a “position of illusory mastery” rather than a Bazinian objective “impression of reality”. These distinctions are less important than the debt that apparatus theorists clearly owe to Bazin’s work and maintain the central notion that mechanical processes distinguish cinema from other art forms. Similarly and perhaps more directly, Flusser’s perspective can be seen as drawing upon this notion, even employing similar language to the renowned mummification analogy in Bazin’s (1960) The Ontology of the Photographic Image. Flusser (2000, 16–17) suggests the “fascination that flows out of the television or cinema screen is a different fascination from the sort that we observe in cave paintings or the frescoes of Etruscan tombs. Television and cinema are on a different level of existence from caves and the Etruscans.” Again it is the distinctness of cinema (or moving imagery in general) here that forms the basis for Flusser’s technologically deterministic argument. The significance of Bazin’s argument about cinema’s distinctiveness are well summarised in Stanley Cavell’s (1979, 23) personal and philosophical discussion of “movie-going” when he writes “photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, a way that could not satisfy painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction”. This response to the ontological problem of the mechanical nature of cinema—outlining it in opposition to the preexisting ‘plastic’ arts—is reductive because it fails to recognise the technological relations present in other creative practices. While painting and sculpture, for instance, might not be as visibly mechanically dependent as the photochemical processes that constituted cinema in the era during which most of these arguments were formed, they still employ a set of technological tools (the brush, canvas, chisel, furnace etc.) during their formation. Plastic arts also involve a correspondence with materials (paint, clay, wood etc.) in the same manner in which I’ve proposed light to be the ‘material’ of moving imagery. If

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we reject this distinction between cinema and other arts, Bazin’s (1960, 7) proposition that “the conflict between style and likeness is a relatively modern phenomenon of which there is no trace before the invention of the sensitised plate” is also brought into question. As moving imagery has proliferated beyond the proscenium arched theatre, merging with other forms of communication in recent years, it is perhaps easier with hindsight to approach this not as a unique form due to its mode of realisation, but rather as a series of technological relations occurring throughout a process of creation similar to any other art practice. To summarise, the writers I’ve discussed in relation to moving image technology thus far (with the exception of Keating and Salt, used to introduce the subject) seem haunted by the modernist notion of cinema as a unique art form. As such they all present incomplete and limited accounts of technological relationships implicit in the creation of moving imagery; whether focusing too intently on the technological factors as a driving force themselves or instead on the ideological/societal factors as an explanation for change, their attempts to understand what distinguishes a moving image from other art serves to produce, one way or another, a narrow perspective of technology.

Social Constructivism A question persists therefore about how to get beyond the deterministic versus ideological perspective of moving image techniques and find a more nuanced way to account for a practitioner’s relations to technology during lighting processes. As I will argue, an account in this intended fashion might draw partially upon a social constructivist perspective. Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes and Trevor Pinch (1993, 3) herald social constructivism as “moving away from the individual inventor (or ‘genius’) as the central explanatory concept, from technological determinism and from making distinctions among technical, social, economic and political aspects of technological development”. The authors suggest three applications of the term technology in relation to human behaviour as encompassing physical artefacts, activities or processes and applied knowledge such as the design and operation of equipment. Social constructivism sets a precedent for approaching social orders (the hierarchy and working practices of a film crew orchestrating light for instance) from a humanistic perspective; arguing that these structures, while commonly taken for granted, are actually dependent on historical

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and culturally variable conventions. In “showing how technology itself can be understood as a social product, or at least as possessing a social dimension”, Bijker, Hughes and Pinch (1993, 307) extend this humanistic approach to the study of technological structures and highlight how these result from a series of concerted practices at the level of the individual. Therefore, in relation to cinematography, we could perhaps argue for the advent of new lighting technology as a response to stylistic and cultural fashions such as the glamorous soft sources designed to flatter star actors and actresses in 1930s Hollywood films, or the dramatic chiaroscuro shadows of the film noir productions that followed in the 1940s and 1950s. An example of this social constructivist perspective can be found in Brian Winston’s writing, specifically in his argument that: if technologists are working to an agenda determined by society and subject to further social forces such as their own conditioning, they are not as likely to make ‘eureka’ discoveries. They are, as the historical record demonstrates, more likely to find similar or identical solutions for the same social need and to do so more or less at the same time. (Winston 1996, 6)

Building on the reductionist determinism (technological vs. ideological) debate, Winston suggests that an intersection of science, technology and the social sphere drive changes in “mass communication” which, in Winston’s view, incorporates moving imagery. Citing this example of the competing and often concurrent nature of technological “discoveries”, he interrogates the role of inventors or technologists themselves and argues that, as prisoners of their own culture, they are limited by supervening social necessity. Winston (1996, 6) seeks to account for “social necessity, transforming prototype into an invention and enabling its diffusion”, ultimately suggesting that the pace and characteristics of technological change are controlled by a social drive towards narrative and economic considerations. In Winston’s view, a technologist sees the possibility for a new technology or ‘prototype’ based on external social forces but the development of these ‘prototypes’ into ‘inventions’ is limited by suppressing economic forces which can also control the ‘diffusion’ of new technologies to the wider public. Winston’s model of technological development then, with this strong emphasis on social agency and control, broadly aligns with the principles of social constructivism.

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In addition, although Winston’s writing exhibits some similarities to the previously outlined apparatus theory through this emphasis on social forces driving moving image technology, it is important to distinguish his approach from those set out by Baudry, Comolli and others. To begin with, those writers are concerned with different questions; Winston addresses the “ways that technological change occurs in communications” while apparatus theorists coalesce around a central interest in explaining the “mechanisms of representation” in cinema. Examining the treatment of specific cinematic changes across Winston and Comolli’s writing, for instance, reveals the differences between these lines of enquiry. Comolli (1986, 433–434), writing about early lens choices and depth of field, argues that “the ideological instrument cinema was made as a gamble and staked itself completely on the desire to identify, duplicate, and recognise ‘life’ in visual forms … cinema is itself produced within these codes and by these systems of representation, completing, perfecting, and surpassing them”. Winston, by contrast, discussing the introduction of colour film, suggested that: the photographic image accommodates the previously established codes of representation just as the social circumstance in which these new images were and are consumed conform to pre-existing and culturally specific patterns … it could be argued that the entire development of Hollywood technology turns on the question of ‘standards’ and that these, when designated ‘professional’, operate as a form of suppression. (Winston 1996, 41)

These might seem like similar statements; both recognise the impact of codes of representation and social conventions in the formation of technology but where Comolli places an inevitability on the direction of “developments” based on a spectator’s desire for “visual-likeness”, Winston takes a more critical perspective by recognising the complex developmental process that occurs from “ideation” to “diffusion”. In addition, the approach of Comolli is limited by considering moving imagery a unique art form here whereas Winston’s perspective employs moving imagery as a wider example addressing “mass-communications” and hence is better equipped to account for factors such as the economic suppression of new technologies to practitioners or the social constraints of technologists themselves working on new equipment. A socially oriented framework such as Winston’s is useful therefore in considering how cinematographic practitioners interact with and help to

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develop their tools as arising from a set of cultural histories with social determinants. However, further clarification of the role that the technologies themselves play will be necessary to build a full account of relationships implicit in creative lighting work. I have discussed how the social constructivist approach necessarily presents a people-centric perspective concerning technology, seeking an understanding dominated by its human uses and applications. Hence, although he gives a compelling overview of developments in moving image equipment and their social connotations, the sort of investigation pursued by Winston cannot comprehensively analyse technology itself, its qualities and features. While offering an overview of critical discourse surrounding new media, Martin Lister et  al. (2009, 320) recognise that technology is both this culturally constructed unit of meaning and also physically constructed objects that are themselves constitutive of cultural phenomena, reinforcing the notion that an understanding will, therefore, require considerations of the question of technology and “asking what technology really is”. They go on to elucidate further the aforementioned problem of emphasis, stating “neither the insistence on pure, physical causality, of the sort modelled on the collisions of billiard balls, nor the equal and opposite insistence on no causality, only human agency, provides the framework necessary” (2009, 327). In summary, although social constructivism is an important perspective in understanding relationships between technologies and practitioners, it still cannot offer a complete account of creative lighting processes.

Non-anthropological Vitalism Conjuring explanations from perspectives with a fundamentally different grounding to those already discussed, the philosophical works of Gilbert Simondon and Martin Heidegger offer approaches more concerned with the essence of technology itself. Despite the seemingly separate world views these two uphold, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy outlines similarities in their writing with regards to this question of technology, which he uses as a bridge between their work. He suggests “it is not a misunderstanding that will underwrite the dialogue between Heidegger and Simondon, but their mutual demand for a non-‘anthropological’ thinking of technology” (2015, 47). Such an approach entails the consideration of technologies beyond their human usage, or, in the terms employed previously, beyond the implications they might have for a filmmaker or cinematographer’s

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style, which both would argue subsume technologies into categorisations based on their common workings. The argument underlying this approach is that the technology itself cannot be understood through a consideration of its uses alone—in other words, these thinkers separate the uses of technology and its essence; as Barthélémy (2015, 57) puts it; “in the same way that Simondon had distinguished between technology as operation, on the one hand, and the use to which we habitually reduce it on the other, Heidegger distinguishes between the ‘essence of technology’ and its common representation as a means directed towards an end”. The classification and understanding of technology through its relation to human appropriation then potentially stifles what actually defines a technical object. Breaking away from an anthropological consideration leads to novel ways of understanding the tools employed by cinematographers—a mechanical film camera, for instance, is perhaps more akin to a sewing machine than its contemporary digital equivalent, which itself is likely to have close similarities to a calculator, optical mouse or laptop computer. This understanding has implications for the consideration of change over time too as technology is seen to answer only to itself based on internal necessities rather than economic or societal influences. For Simondon (1980, 22), change is rooted in greater efficiency whereby, “it is in incompatibilities produced from the progressive saturation of the system of sub-­ ensembles that we find the play of limits whose overcoming is constitutive of progress”. For Heidegger (1977, 13–14) change is a sort of latent possibility in the world because “technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place. … The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored.” Both these approaches attempt to consider technological change without causal relation to human actions or societal outcomes. As I will argue, this attribution of agency to non-human materials, or technical objects, can be termed “vitalist” in the manner described in the chapter titled “Theorising Creative Lighting”. As touched upon earlier, Heidegger’s (1977, 6) investigation of technology lies in grasping its essence; he recognises that an “instrumental” approach to technology (understanding through uses and applications in a social constructivist/anthropological manner) is “correct” but suggests that this “still does not show us technology’s essence”. Heidegger argues that technology “enframes” human activity and reduces everything that is

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natural to a “standing reserve” for technological transformation (or “revealing”); a process that he terms “challenging-forth” and in which humans are implicated but ultimately unable to exert any control. For Heidegger (1977, 16) this is a never-ending process which he describes as a “revealing that rules throughout modern technology … the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew”. In this view everything appears to be dominated by technology; people and nature are reduced to a resource for processing. However, Heidegger argues this is just one manner of “revealing” and hence warns of succumbing to a purely technological mode of thinking or “enframing”. In his detailed analysis of Heidegger’s writing on technology, Mark Blitz (2014, 69) summarises the importance of “revealing” by suggesting that “things can show or reveal themselves to us in different ways, and it is attention to this that will help us recognise that technology is itself one of these ways, but only one. Other kinds of revealing, and attention to the realm of truth and being as such, will allow us to “experience the technological within its own bounds.” Expanding upon this, Heidegger’s (1977, 35) solution to the “question concerning technology”, his attempt to understand the “essence of technology”, is ultimately a creative, artistic form of “revealing” because “essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art.” Heidegger (1977, 35) argues that “the poetical thoroughly pervades every art, every revealing of coming to presence into the beautiful” and ascribes the Greek term “poiēsis” to this particular process or mode of revealing. To emphasise the relevance of this technological perspective in the investigation of moving image practices, it is useful to draw upon the writing of Richard Sinnerbrink who discusses the implications of Heidegger’s writing for the field of film studies. Sinnerbrink (2014, 77) argues that cinema can be considered “a revealing or bringing-forth of complex virtual worlds; the technologically mediated projection and disclosure of a world through audiovisual images”. Sinnerbrink elevates moving imagery to this creative form of “revealing”, claiming Heidegger’s notion of “poiēsis” is akin to the immersive experience that can be achieved through viewing some moving image works. Specifically, he discusses the films of Terrence Malick, suggesting that:

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Malick’s films express a cinematographic fascination with light … such “theophanic” cinematography is a way of using the technology of cinema to express the intimate relationship between human beings, nature, and the complexity of everyday experience. We might call this the luminous ‘realism’ of Malick’s cinema. (Sinnerbrink 2014, 78)

Sinnerbrink’s (2014, 79) case for “cinema as poiēsis” here gives a pertinent example of how Heidegger’s technological vitalism and pursuit of the essence of technology might be incorporated into an understanding of moving image practices. The socially oriented perspectives previously discussed incorporate and perhaps even find their basis in the notion of “cinematic representation”; as evidenced in Winston’s (1996, 25) notion that “addiction to realism thus created in the social sphere a number of elements which were to be crucial to the cinema”, or Comolli’s (1980, 133) claim that “what is at stake in the historicity of the technique, are the codes and modes of production of ‘realism’, the transmission, renewal or transformation of the ideological systems of recognition, specularity, truth-to-likeness”. Because a technological vitalist perspective as upheld by Heidegger would not bestow the same value on representation instead seeking to investigate the poetic qualities of moving imagery, it can perhaps offer a complimentary consideration of technology. In comparison to the representational perspective then, Sinnerbrink summarises the differences perceptively, arguing that: Heidegger’s critique of modern technology can help us acknowledge this often neglected dimension of cinematic poiēsis as an important supplement to representationalist theories of cinematic experience … cinema is the technological art form that most intimately reveals the ambiguity of modern technology as both a danger to our nature as thinking beings and as a “saving power” that might point to new ways of inhabiting the technological world. (Sinnerbrink 2014, 79)

Overall, Heidegger’s writing shows that it is through creative engagement with and uses of moving image practices that we might tangentially come closer to understanding the essence of the underlying technologies. At the same time, he argues for the importance of distinguishing this essence from an instrumental understanding that arises through social constructivist considerations of the human uses and applications of technologies.

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Turning to Simondon’s similarly non-anthropological argument gives further insight into this technological vitalism. As suggested, Simondon also warns against the consideration of technology (or machines) through human applications and in a similar approach to Heidegger does so by separating function from what he terms its “mode of existence” (akin to Heidegger’s technological “essence”). Simondon (1980, 11–12) argues that “usage brings together heterogeneous structures and functions in genres and species which get their meaning from the relationships between their particular functions and another function, that of the human being in action”. He argues that although technology is catalysed or imbued with specific functions based on human intention, the intentions alone cannot explain the prevailing “functional organisation”. To understand why this is the case, it is necessary to examine Simondon’s consideration of technology as a cultural phenomenon. The previous discussion of apparatus theory and social constructivism in this chapter indicates that studies of moving imagery favour the consideration of culture and technology as distinct topics of investigation, often defining these areas through their opposition to one another. Simondon’s approach, however, dissolves boundaries between culture and technology, attempting to marry the two by arguing that inventions often outweigh their original function and extend beyond a simple resolution to the problem for which they were developed. This excess functionality demonstrates a process Simondon (1980, 8) terms “concretisation” during which the technical object achieves its “mode of existence”, or as he writes “we might attempt to define the technical object in itself by a method of concretisation … the technical object is the end-product of an evolution”. Emphasising the origins (“genesis”) of technological objects and the process of their creation in this way draws a parallel with Winston’s aforementioned exploration of phases in technological change from “ideation” to “diffusion”. The differences here are significant however; while Winston refers to consumer demand and ideologically driven technologists to explain the popularisation of any particular technology, Simondon instead bestows innovations with spontaneity and suggests that once “concrete”, technology develops independently of human or natural factors. Offering an overview of Simondon’s philosophy, Pascal Chabot (2013, 15) summarises these notions of “concretisation” and technological independence, stating that “in operation, the technical object frees itself from its inventor. Its superabundant functionality separates it from any plans or intentions projected on to it. The object acquires a concrete character, an

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internal coherence.” Importantly, it is this “internal coherence” that enables Simondon to blend the cultural and technological. Through his suggestion that “artificiality is not a characteristic that denotes the manufactured origin of the object as opposed to nature’s productive spontaneity”, Simondon (1980, 46) effectively extends the notion of “artificiality” into the realm of nature. Following this, his suggestion that a “concrete technical object” exhibits self-sufficiency in the same way as a “natural object” calls into question the grounding for divisions between culture and technology. If nature can be artificially induced and technology can develop to exhibit a sort of spontaneity typically reserved for nature, then a new view of culture might “come to terms with technical entities as part of its body of knowledge and values” (1980, 1). Simondon’s perspective thus situates technology as an “ensemble” between humans, environment and materials which incorporates technical objects (machines) into culture, distinguishes their uses from their “mode of existence” and suggests that change occurs through the self-perpetuating coherence of functions on behalf of a technical object. To see how Simondon’s perspective could contribute to the application of Heidegger’s “poiēsis” within a study of moving image techniques, it is useful to draw upon Tim Ingold’s (2013, 8) writing which explores creative making processes, drawing comparisons in the way that artists and anthropologists “study the world”. Ingold suggests that making is a “process of growth” that places: the maker from the outset as a participant in amongst a world of active materials … far from standing aloof, imposing his designs on a world that is ready and waiting to receive them, the most he can do is to intervene in worldly processes that are already going on, and which give rise to the forms of the living world. (Ingold 2013, 21)

Here, the influence of process philosophy on Ingold’s writing is evident as he argues that existence does not consist of individual objects but rather of interwoven processes of changing materials, which therefore situates creative making practices in a relationship and involvement with these processes. This is part of Ingold’s (2013, 25) wider argument against the so-called hylomorphic models of enquiry touched upon in the chapter titled “Theorising Creative Lighting”. Ingold’s writing takes inspiration from and has similarities to Simondon’s notion of technology—just as Simondon argues that technology can be

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viewed as an ensemble, Ingold (2013, 115) suggests that “technical intelligence is to be found neither in the brain nor in the hand, nor even in the tool it holds. An object that might be used as a tool is, in and of itself, no more than an inert lump of stone, wood or metal of a certain shape. … It rather inheres in the technical act, the gesture, in which they are brought together.” Ingold’s use of the term “technical act” as bringing together of material and human functions is perhaps similar to Simondon’s notion of “concretisation” in which a technical object takes on its “mode of existence” and so to take an approach of technological vitalism in the study of moving image practices could be to depict and understand these constituting “technical acts”. Discussing this correspondence with materials further, Ingold (2013, 110) upholds storytelling as a way to capture or communicate such processes because “they provide practitioners with the means to tell of what they know without specifying it. They do not so much carry encrypted information as offer pointers of where to go and what to look out for.” Ingold distinguishes specifications as the definition of a project through factual accuracies whereas stories, he argues, arise “in the telling”. In this view, the “modality of performance” in storytelling enables those following to understand more fully work with materials during a making process due to their shared “itinerant” qualities. This perspective shows similarity to Heidegger’s argument that “poiēsis” can be a way of escaping technological ways of thinking as is necessary to understand the “essence of technology”. The bringing-forth of poetic thinking, Heidegger (1977, 21) suggests, enables “presences [to] come forth into unconcealment” in a similar manner to how technology can reveal new possibilities in the world. Both “poiēsis” and technological “enframing” operate or “bring-forth” the world in a similar way—just as Ingold (2013, 110) argues that both storytelling and making bring the practitioner into a relationship with the world through “moving bodies and vital materials” and hence enable an understanding of one another in the process of “correspondence”. Ingold (2013, 85) hints at such a similarity when he writes; “every thing, for Heidegger, is a coming together of materials in movement. To touch it, or to observe it, is to bring the movements of our own being into close and affective correspondence with those of its constituent materials.” Rather than specifications, storytelling could perhaps be one way to investigate moving image practice from a vitalist perspective—seeking to expose the creative processes which situate cinema as a form of “poiēsis” and hence reveal ways of

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inhabiting the world that are not “enframed” by technological thought but that instead depict this coming together of materials. In such accounts, recognising the formulation of technology as an ensemble catalysed by invention but ultimately responding to its own internal coherence while elucidating ways in which these structures form part of creative expression could offer a perspective complementary to human-centric views of technology. Although storytelling might seem the antitheses to a ‘non-anthropological’ perspective outlined earlier, Simondon has demonstrated how approaching technical objects as an aspect of culture in this way, rather than as an instrument through which culture is produced, might tangentially reveal something of the “essence of technology” or “technological mode of existence” within a practitioner’s making processes. Following this, as Heidegger argued, the way to understand technology in itself may, in this case, rely upon creative expression towards and through moving image forms. Or as Heidegger (1977, 35) summarises: “because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art.”

Actor-Network Theory So far discussion of approaches to technology in this chapter has presented several useful perspectives; chiefly the social constructivism of Bijker, Hughes and Pinch where technology is considered in relation to its societal implications or operations and also the non-anthropological vitalism of Simondon and Heidegger where technology is approached outside of human factors on the basis of its own qualities rather than uses. On one hand then we can understand the practice of lighting as socially determined, drawing upon a set of historical practices passed down from cinematographer to cinematographer and propagated with the cultural dissemination of moving imagery amongst audiences, while on the other hand it is important to recognise that these conventions and uses do not inform us about the technology itself. This is significant as different lighting fixtures emit unique qualities of illumination and, as I have argued elsewhere (Nevill 2018), varying technical processes may also impact the ways practitioners envisage or approach their creative work, so it is necessary to account for the tools themselves

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alongside human factors to form a detailed understanding of technological affordances. This builds on Keating’s (2014) idea discussed earlier that the causal relationship can go both ways (between filmmaker and technology) to in fact suggest that changes are determined by both simultaneously, whereby understanding might entail picturing these relations from a non-hierarchal perspective. In response to this, it is useful to draw upon actor-network theory which emerges in the work of Michel Callon (1986), Bruno Latour (1996) and John Law (2009). These writers collectively conceive of the framework known as actor-network theory (ANT), which Law (2009, 2) suggests, “describes the enactment of materially and discursively heterogeneous relations that produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors including objects, subjects, human beings, machines … it tells stories about ‘how’ relations assemble or don’t”. Callon, Latour, Law and other writers in this area argue against what they describe as the insular nature of scientific method which reports findings as if they occurred completely cut off from the world. While there have been numerous studies of technology that employ an actor-network approach which can provide points of information here, few have considered this in the context of creative practice. One of Latour’s early publications outlines the failure of a high-tech subway system developed in France during the 1980s, using what he calls a “multi-vocal” account to explore why and how the project ultimately halted before it had begun. Latour (1996, 24) warns of the pitfalls of discussing technology in this way, suggesting “the observer of technologies has to be very careful not to differentiate too hastily between signs and things, between projects and objects, between fiction and reality, between a novel about feelings and what is inscribed in the nature of things”. Considering technology to be partly fictional, in that it must at some point be constructed and imagined by an inventor, Latour is discussing here the importance of separating a technological fiction, or its idealised, prototype state, from the eventual, physically realised or invented incarnation. His account is sprawling and de-centred, weaving interviews and field study research he conducted into a “scientifiction” investigation conducted by an engineer and a sociologist who become spokespersons for Latour’s ideas towards studying technology. Crucially, in the preface Latour writes: I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural objects worthy of their attention and

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respect. … I have sought to show technicians that they cannot even conceive of a technological object without taking into account the mass of human beings with all their passions and politics and pitiful calculations. (Latour 1996, viii)

Here the use of this ANT approach in describing complex intersections between technical and social is foregrounded. Latour (1996, viii) goes on to suggest that the unusual rhetorical form of this work was necessary to “bring about this fusion of two so clearly separated universes, that of culture and that of technology”. Similarly but taking a perhaps more traditional written form, Callon writes about the failed technological project between electricity company EDF and car manufacturer Renault which were working towards an electric vehicle. Callon begins by outlining the social and political conditions that led to this project but goes on to recognise the technical imperatives involved, suggesting that: there are consumers, social movements and ministries. But it would be wrong to limit the inventory. There are also accumulators, fuel cells, electrodes, electrons, catalysts and electrolytes. For, if the electrons do not play their part or the catalysts become contaminated, the result would be no less disastrous than if the users rejected the new vehicle. (Callon 1986, 22)

ANT also provides the framework within which Callon combines technical and social considerations, in this case towards the study of the development of an electric vehicle. Callon goes on to argue that once these various constituent elements (or actants) have been established, the role of ANT is to describe their connection, and he puts forward the term “actor-­ world” to recognise the specific context in which these actants are performing. Callon (1986, 23–24) suggests that “the notion of the actor-world makes it possible to describe the contents of technical objects and theoretical knowledge” so that “an actor-world associates heterogeneous entities. It defines their identity, the roles they should play, the nature of the bonds that unite them, their respective sizes and the history in which they participate.” This aspect of ANT ensures the approach is useful in understanding technological processes as it not only proposes the redistribution of agency between human and non-human actors but also seeks to describe the context (or actor-world) that connects these actors and hence can offer an overall picture of how technology exists and functions.

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As seen through the writing of Latour and Callon, understanding technology in this context entails shifting grounds of knowledge to include both sociological and technological factors. In her account of the engineering relationships involved in bridge-building which acknowledges ANT as an underwriting intellectual tradition, Lucy Suchman (2000, 312) argues “a reconceptualisation of knowledge and action as located in ‘ecologies’ of social-material relations … [is] meant to break down received oppositions of nature and society on the one hand, society and technology on the other, drawing attention instead to the diverse discursive and material, human and artificial elements that must be assembled together in the construction of stable organisations and artefacts”. Suchman indicates another example of this perspective in the writing of John Fujimura who seeks to understand the “sociohistory” of a branch of scientific research related to cancer. Fujimura (1996, 2) contends that “while I give a history of this research employing selected accounts of technical achievements leading up to the proto-oncogene theory, I weave into my story an analysis of the representational, organizational, and rhetorical work done by researchers, students, sponsors, and audiences to create the ‘world’ of proto-oncogene research”. This account or “story” does not seek to advocate proto-oncogene research (the study of cellular genes that control cell division, associated with potential mutations which can contribute to cancer) or simply outline a history of its scientific knowledge but rather attempts to understand how the area came about through depiction of the broader non-scientific network that such research is conducted within— understanding that is again predicated on an ecological perspective of knowledge as social and material relations. Although investigating highly distinct fields, these two studies share a common approach that is inspired by ANT and hence present useful blueprints that could be followed to build an understanding of certain aspects of moving image production. By seeking this ecological infrastructure of combined human and non-human actants to account for creative lighting processes for instance, emphasis would be taken away from the individual practitioner to encompass instead the agency of diverse confounding factors including qualities of equipment itself and hence a more complete picture of technological relationships could be formed from an assemblage perspective. Discussing Latour’s work in the area, Lister et al. (2009, 338) describe the application of ANT in studies of media technology, summarising “it is as false to argue that a machine on its own has agency as it is to suggest that only humans do; rather it is the network as a whole that

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acts, effects and determines”. In accordance with this, ANT presents an opportunity to weave together elements of both the social constructivist and the non-anthropological, or vitalist, perspectives that have been outlined. Technology in relation to moving image phenomena could be read as an umbrella term then, a networked domain within which specific equipment, tools and processes transform through use. In cinematography, the creative and social parameters of a project impact lighting processes in equal measure to the specific technologies employed. Or in other words, throughout creative lighting, the individualistic qualities of equipment (its materials and properties) intersect with social forces (its individual uses and cultural context) to create a complex entanglement which collectively brings a film’s visual aesthetic to life. This perspective affords a principled discussion of the increasingly diverse landscape of production and exhibition tools. During the first International Cinematography Summit Conference societies representing active practitioners across the world issued a joint statement proposing that “we, as cinematographers are the custodians of the image. This is our heritage and our responsibility” (Johanson 2011). Considering lighting as a web of interrelations, in the manner suggested by actor-network theory, can enhance this notion of the practitioner as a custodian, providing a new theoretical framework to better understand how cinematographers are engaged in practices that combine aesthetic decisions with a range of diverse and creatively implicated equipment or formats. In the same way that cinematographers work amidst a network of relations with fellow crew members in traditional film production processes, they also function within a network of technological relations that are both socio-cultural and materially specific.

References Barthélémy, Jean-Hugues. 2015. Life and Technology: An Inquiry Into and Beyond Simondon. Lüneburg: Meson Press. Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1974. Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus. Film Quarterly 29: 39–47. Bazin, André. 1960. The Ontology of the Photographic Image. Film Quarterly 13: 4–9. Bijker, Wiebe, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch. 1993. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Blitz, Mark. 2014. Understanding Heidegger on Technology. The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society 41: 63–80. Callon, Michel. 1986. The Sociology of an Actor-Network: The Case of the Electric Vehicle. In Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World, ed. Michel Callon, John Law, and Arie Rip, 19–34. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Comolli, Jean-Louis. 1980. Machines of the Visible. In The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, 121–142. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 1986. Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. In Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field [Parts 3 and 4], ed. Philip Rosen, 421–443. New York: Columbia University Press. Elmes, Frederick. 2012. Interview. In Shooting Time: Conversations with Cinematographers, ed. Richard Van Oosterhout, Maarten Van Rossem, and Peter Verstraten, 145–150. Rotterdam: Post Editions. Flusser, Vilém. 2000. Toward a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books. Fujimura, John. 1996. Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New York: Harper Collins. Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge. Johanson, Ron. 2011. International Cinematography Summit Conference. Australian Cinematographers Society President’s Blog. http://www.cinematographer.org.au/cms/page.asp?ID=20188. Accessed 21 June 2020. Keating, Patrick. 2014. Cinematography: Behind the Silver Screen: A Modern History of Filmmaking. London: I.B. Tauris. Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis or The Love of Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Law, John. 2009. Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics. In The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, 141–158. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Lister, Martin, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, and Kieran Kelly. 2009. New Media: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Nevill, Alexander. 2018. Cinematographic Affordances: Creative Approaches to Lighting in Moving Image Practice. Media Practice and Education 19: 122–138. Rifkin, Stephen. 2011. André Bazin’s “Ontology of the Photographic Image”: Representation, Desire, and Presence. PhD, Carleton University Ottawa.

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Salt, Barry. 2009. Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. 3rd ed. London: Starword. Schuman, Lucy. 2000. Organizing Alignment: A Case of Bridge-Building. Organisation 7: 311–327. Simondon, Gilbert. 1980. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by N. Mellamphy. London/Ontario: University of Western Ontario. Sinnerbrink, Richard. 2014. Technē and Poiēsis: On Heidegger and Film Theory. In Techne/Technology. ̄ Researching Cinema and Media Technologies  – Their Development, Use, and Impact, ed. Annie Van Den Oever, 65–80. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Vié, Philippe. 2012. Custodians of the Image. In Shooting Time: Conversations with Cinematographers, ed. Richard Van Oosterhout, Maarten Van Rossem, and Peter Verstraten, 72–75. Rotterdam: Post Editions. Wees, William. 1992. Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film. Berkeley: University of California Press. Winston, Brian. 1996. Technologies of seeing: Photograph, Cinematography and Television. London: BFI Publishing.

Exploring Exposure Processes

Abstract  This chapter considers a performative perspective on lighting and relational understanding of technology in conjunction with traditional film industry structures and processes. The chapter revolves around an examination of practical exposure processes across distinct technological arenas, which serves to illustrate how the discipline of cinematography has evolved across analogue, digital and virtual production processes. In so doing, it relates some of the ideas about lighting from previous chapters to wider studies concerning the evolution of cinematography production processes to outline their relevance to contemporary practitioners. The chapter is framed around a conceptual examination of the cinematographer’s role which concludes that the principle of co-creation, as outlined by Maya Haviland and others, can help to maintain relevance in an era of rapidly changing technologies. As the role’s oversight and involvement expands across a more diverse range of processes, aesthetic leadership or partnership, with other artists should be emphasised as a key aspect of cinematography. Keywords  Exposure • Cinematography • Co-creativity • Aesthetic leadership • Filmmaking Disciplines fluctuate and, for cinematographers in particular, there seems to be increasing change and uncertainty surrounding expected day-to-day responsibilities and their place within wider film production forces. Such © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Nevill, Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65935-6_4

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changes have sparked questions towards the fundamental nature of cinematography. For instance, in a recent editorial entitled “But Is It Art?”, president of the British Society of Cinematographers, Barry Ackroyd (2016), grapples with the state of the industry while arguing for the creative contribution of the cinematographer. He suggests that cinematography is too often considered as a “craft that can be bought, interchanged or reproduced” despite the unique artistic sensibilities that each practitioner brings to a production. Meanwhile, veteran practitioner Janus Kaminiski publicly expressed his concern that the position of cinematographer is experiencing a diminishing “ownership of the image” due to the growing range of contributors involved in mainstream film production (Giardina 2020a). Beyond the shifting tools and technology employed in the field, cinematographers face wider existential challenges as they attempt to define a place within increasingly computer-oriented filmmaking procedures and new collaborative relationships such as closer work with Digital Imaging Technicians or Visual Effects teams. While there has been much writing around the role of a director in filmmaking, the field of cinematography enjoys less critical attention. Conventional wisdom suggests the cinematographer is a custodian of the image—ultimately responsible for decisions around camera and lighting arrangements in a film, with the director traditionally overseeing their work alongside the actors’ performance as well as wider elements of mise-­ en-­scène and eventually the film’s editing. Unsurprisingly, for most productions these two integral positions (director and cinematographer) overlap significantly and share entwined creative responsibilities throughout the filmmaking journey. During the development phase of a project the director and cinematographer often collaborate on storyboards, moodboards, lighting diagrams and other documentation that establishes a visual storytelling style. During the production phase, directors frequently rely on cinematographers to organise crew members and equipment to effectively photograph each scene. During post-production the cinematographer may also be consulted to ensure colour grading, visual effects and any other image adjustment processes remain consistent with the desired ‘look’ for the film. While this gives a very general overview, the specific responsibilities of the cinematographer are in fact far from consistent and will vary dependent on production conditions or the collaboration preferences of each individual. As the accomplished Spanish practitioner Nestor Almendros (1984, 3) summarised, a cinematographer does “almost everything and hardly anything. His function differs so

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much from one film to another that it is hard to define exactly. … In the extreme case of the huge super-productions with all their special effects, one hardly knows who is responsible for the photography, for it ends up absorbing everything and everybody.”

Defining Cinematography The fluctuating nature of this filmmaking position is indicated in the array of different titles it has been given across cultural and historical contexts. For instance, introducing the edited collection Transnational Cinematography Studies, Daisuke Miyao (2017, 2) suggests the title of ‘director of photography’ may have been used as early as the 1920s to indicate more senior practitioners overseeing the work of other cameramen and film development procedures in large Hollywood studios. Despite this, he also notes that, ‘cameraman’ and ‘cinematographer’ remained the most common terms to describe the profession until at least the mid-1930s. More recently, with the popularisation of the title director of photography, the term cinematographer has become a mark of respect amongst practitioners, as an informal recognition of those with significant experience photographing feature length films or high-end television series. It could be argued that the professional discipline of cinematography emerged with the Lumiére brothers’ franchising endeavours in the final years of the nineteenth century. In order to distribute, monetise and solidify the cultural impact of their moving image technology, Louis Lumiére began training ‘operateurs’ who could travel and capture footage proficiently from far away regions of the world. As H. Mario Raimondo-Souto (2007, 11) outlines in his history of motion picture photography, these new cameramen “improved their profession with continuous practice. The results obtained were scrupulously checked at Lyon. Some of the material was analysed and the authors received the examiners’ comments.” The organisation and industrious approach that Lumiéres adopted is significant as it can be seen as the first step towards the professionalisation of cinematography and a recognition of moving image camera work as a craft. In France today, a common title for this production role is ‘chef opérateur’, perhaps harking back to Lumiére’s earlier terminology, while another trend in Francophone cinema is simply noting the role as ‘image’ in a film’s credits which takes account of the evolving and multifarious nature of the position.

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Questions around the cinematographer’s role and their associated responsibilities are closely linked to ongoing debates about film authorship and the allocation (or lack thereof) of royalty payments amongst the creative contributors to a production.1 In an international survey of cinematography societies from 54 countries, Nadia McGowan (2016, 532) outlines how cinematographers are often overlooked in both regards: “the general tendency is for cinematographers to neither be recognized as co-­ authors of an audiovisual piece nor to receive financial rights derived from the income generated by these works they have been a part of”. Writing around authorship and cinematography is typically presented in response to auteur-oriented perspectives which are dominant within the field of film studies and suggest the director is a sole creative force behind a film. For instance, citing the collaboration between Orson Welles and Greg Toland, Philip Cowan (2012) reframes discussion of the visual aesthetic of Citizen Kane (1941) to argue that Toland heavily and creatively influenced the film. Studying the cinematographer’s earlier career, he highlights Toland’s exploration of many of the techniques that have made Citizen Kane iconic, and which are typically ascribed to the director, such as staging in depth, low camera angles, ceilinged sets and long takes of continuous action. Cowan attributes the film’s success to an effective collaboration between Welles, Toland and other key practitioners involved to ultimately suggest that authorship can only belong to a combination of individuals and will vary from production to production. A similar argument is presented in an article by Evan Lieberman and Kerry Hegarty (2010, 48) who seek to expand auteur theory to recognise that a collaborative approach to film authorship can “open our eyes to a more accurate understanding of the process of filmmaking, as well as a more intimate comprehension of the construction of cinematic meaning”. Citing Greg Toland’s filmography again, alongside the work of Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, the authors suggest that individual artistic contribution is demonstrated by a strong consistency of imagery in these films across the varying directors with whom they collaborated. Building on this, Lieberman and Kerry go on to argue that both cinematographers employed similar technical innovations for different conceptual and thematic concerns which shows how visual language can 1  This is well illustrated by the work of the IMAGO Authorship Committee (Busch 2019) which surveyed cinematography societies around the world to establish which countries routinely pay royalties to their members.

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reflect distinct national or ideological perspectives through collaborative authorship. Hence, in recognising the authorial contribution that a cinematographer brings to their filmmaking, each of these writers helps to carve out a fruitful space for further consideration of the role, its cultural impact or functioning amongst a wider crew and how this may be changing with increasingly information-driven processes. Focusing specifically on practical responsibilities, Cathy Greenhalgh (2003, 2010, 2018) offers a sustained investigation of the collaborative processes of camera department crew, as well as the “skilled vision” of the cinematographer over a number of publications. Taking an ethnographic perspective, Greenhalgh is interested in understanding how knowledge is generated and transmitted to constitute varying disciplines of filmmaking practice. She uses the concept of ‘disembodied cognition’, as initially employed by anthropologist Edwin Hutchins (1996) to describe a form of team knowledge spread out amongst a group of individuals, in recognition of the creative collaboration dynamic within a camera crew. In accordance with aforementioned accounts, Greenhalgh suggests that technological changes can dilute the cinematographer’s direct control over imagery, whereby: digital convergence technology and physical on-set collaboration produces specific performative relationships and positions practice, organization and creativity through film production as a transformative and dynamic, processual, dialogical, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary activity. (Greenhalgh 2003, 313–314)

Greenhalgh argues that creative fields of production, such as cinematography, can be understood based on three levels of description—practice (the domain-view of an area of activity), process (the flow of activity which occurs during production) and procedure (specific steps and tasks within an activity). Citing the example of digital intermediate technology in film post-production, she suggests that these three areas are thoroughly interwoven so that small changes in procedure “can gradually occur and build up to the extent that the whole practice changes”, or similarly, changes in process might lead to questioning the whole area of practice (2010, 310). This perhaps explains a recent sentiment that cinematographers like Ackroyd, Kaminski and others have expressed. As I will outline, the introduction of data-centric procedures in recent years has resulted in evolving processes (such as the digital intermediate followed by widespread adoption

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of chroma-key production for the incorporation of computer-generated imagery and more recently real-time rendering technologies) which have ultimately become significant enough in their totality to question the practice itself. Addressing the introduction of digital technologies in cinematography in more detail, Daniel Maddock (2019) offers a contrasting perspective. He highlights how, contrary to the widespread idea that digital visual effects have changed the ways films are made, analogue filmmaking continuously featured “composite images” which employ complex exposures superimposing miniatures or matte paintings on shots of actors, sets and locations, in much the same way that computer software now composites different visual elements in a frame. His article entitled Reframing Cinematography takes an optimistic perspective on the incorporation of digital technologies, citing successful cross-overs such as the consultation of cinematographer Roger Deakins on Pixar’s animation WALL-E (Stanton 2008) and Bill Pope’s effects-heavy cinematography for The Jungle Book (Faverau 2016). Employing the increasingly popular term “virtual cinematography”, Maddock (2019, 1) argues that technological changes do not fundamentally alter the role of cinematographers, who have continuously embraced new techniques throughout film history, but do impact associated responsibilities dramatically, extending practitioner’s remit to the digital domain and requiring them to adapt their skills. Other writers have similarly inferred that new technologies do not change the overall role of a cinematographer. For instance, John Mateer (2014, 13) acknowledges significant changes in the methods and processes employed during production but argues that regardless of the tools used “the role [of the cinematographer] is still centered on the creation of images through an understanding of light, optics and story”. Although there is significant merit to the prevailing creative considerations outlined here, Mateer and Maddock minimise the effect that gradual processual changes can have on a wider industry practice by upholding cinematography as a ‘fixed’ discipline. In a chapter outlining the splintering of a cinematographer’s collaborative relationships alongside developments of Hollywood visual style between 2000 and 2014, Christopher Lucas indicates the need for renewed attention to this debate, his which is worth quoting at length: this shift also unmasks the degree to which cinematography has always been a form of labor, a set of specializations within the Hollywood division of

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labor … the cinema-imaging worker will take on a more anonymous character in the years to come—still creative, still aesthetic, but one eye among many, the artisan rather than the artiste. (Lucas 2014, 157)

Expanding and integrating the insight offered by these prior studies then, I propose an alternative account of the shifting (or perhaps splintering) role of a cinematographer which follows Greenhalgh’s ethnographic insight that practice, process and procedure are deeply imbricated. This recognition is also supported by a plethora of industry practitioner testimonials, including those introduced at the beginning of this chapter, who feel their input amidst a filmmaking process is significantly altered or displaced by ongoing changes.2 As I have outlined, while there may be commonly agreed-upon aspects of the cinematographer’s position, many are also flexible and vary from production to production. Similarly, the recognition of a cinematographer’s creative input to a film, their authorship, is contested and often overlooked due to the wide spread influence of auteur theory. In recent decades, new procedures and processes are expected of cinematographers which have led some notable practitioners and academics to express uncertainty and concern around the longevity of this position in a changing industry. Cinematography then is in state of transition and to more fully grasp these changes, it is worth examining the process of image exposure which is at the heart of moving (and still) image production. In a technical sense, exposure is a measurement of the amount of light reaching the sensitive area of a camera (i.e. the film plane or digital sensor) as determined by the “reciprocity function”, H = Et where “H is exposure, E is the subject illuminance and t is exposure duration” (Bilissi et al. 2011, 227). As I will argue however, the term can also extend to a practitioner’s creative decision-making process around the specific combination of settings used to control the outcome of this measurement. This process is therefore intrinsic to lighting practices and changes in the ways that practitioners navigate their exposure choice offer an indication of the splintering role of the cinematographer that coincides with a move towards data-driven imaging processes. As I will suggest, it is a combination of 2  See the Bristol International Cinematography Festival panel discussion Cinematography State of the Art, (2015) as well as the American Cinematographer Magazine online article Future of Cinematography (Witmer and Fish 2019) for insight into changing practices from an industry standpoint.

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changing tools alongside changing cultural and production landscapes which lead cinematographers to new approaches to image capture.

Wet Exposure To understand exposure as a process in more detail, it is useful to first turn to accounts of early photographic practices which offer insight into its centrality to the medium. These origins, as well as the complex technical, material and societal relationships around the formation of photography are well documented. For instance, M. Susan Barger and William B. White (1991, 15) offer a detailed history of early imaging techniques, indicating that “there was a great deal of both theoretical and empirical activity concerning light and its effect on a wide variety of materials” around the early nineteenth century. Similarly, in the introduction to their edited collection, Tanya Sheehan and Andres Zervigon (2014) emphasise the need to recognise and embrace contradictions, complications and general messiness in historical accounts of photographic technologies. As these writers highlight, early photographic technologies cannot simply be explained as the product of a single inventor nor pinpointed to an isolated moment in time which accords with my critique of technological determinism in the chapter titled “Understanding Cinematography Technology”. With these complications in mind, the notion of exposure as a photographic process can be traced at least as far back as Humphry Davy’s account of the light sensitive properties of silver nitrate during an experiment conducted by Thomas Wedgewood, in which he claims: when a surface, covered with solution of nitrate of silver, is placed behind a painting on glass exposed to the solarlight; the rays transmitted through the differently painted surfaces produce distinct tints of brown or black, sensibly differing in intensity according to the shades of the picture. (Davy 1802 my emphasis)

This founding article is significant, not only for the chemical experimentation that is documents (silver nitrate had previously only been used for light sensitive inks, rather than this ‘photogram’, or imaging, purpose) but also because Davy’s description of the “agency of light”, and the pictorial effects of the sun’s ray on photosensitive material, perfectly outline the process of exposure which is central to analogue, or so-called wet photography.

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Expanding on this, three early pioneers of photography, Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot in conjunction with the specific qualities of materials with which they were experimenting and the societal influences of their era, coalesced around improving speed—or the necessary duration of exposure required to create an image—in their collective attempts to refine photographic processes.3 According to photographer and writer Robert Hirsch (2017, 13), the exact exposure times required for early photographic processes are uncertain. He suggests, varying accounts of Niépce’s ‘heliographs’ produced around the late 1820s indicate exposure times varying from 8 to 40 hours. Shortly after, in 1837, Daguerre created positive plate images which reduced “exposure to 20 minutes in bright sunlight”. In an encyclopaedia of early photographic techniques, John Ward (2013, 516) notes that, by 1840, Talbot had improved upon this again using coated paper to create negative images whereby “gallic acid added to silver nitrate produced a latent image … with exposure times reduced to a few minutes”. These lengthy initial exposure times, which posed a challenge when photographing moving subjects, were dictated by properties of the light sensitive materials used in each process. For instance, Niépce’s early experiments involved coating various metal plates with a bitumen-based emulsion and were limited by the low sensitivity of this substance which took hours to harden under the feint light transmitted through a camera. Building on Niépce’s work, Daguerre coated his plates with silver which were then fumed with iodine (creating silver iodide) so they would react to light much more rapidly. His process formed ‘latent images’ that would appear when exposed to mercury flames.4 Likewise, Talbot switched his experimentation with paper coatings from silver chloride, which produced a positive image, to silver iodide which produced negative images, when he noticed its increased sensitivity to light and in doing so was able to significantly reduce exposure time. Throughout this early period 3  Robert Hirsch cites forces of modernity such as the rise of mechanisation, a growing demand for information amongst an increasingly literate population and a burgeoning middle class concerned with appearances of social status as some of the driving factors in the formation of photographic practices. He states: “people wanted to know exactly what their world looked like, and the photographic image was read to arrive at this rope moment with the type of proof they have been prepared to accept” (2017, 7). 4  For a more detailed technical account of Dagurre’s process, see Barger and White (1991, 28).

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photographic exposure was unregulated by a shutter and instead relied on the camera operator to uncover their lens, manually allowing light onto the sensitive surface for a desired interval. Although exposure procedures later practised by cinematographers are quite different, the wider process is comparable. These early photographic methods highlight two obvious and fundamental procedures in analogue exposure: (i) a sufficient quantity and/or duration of light striking a receptive surface which creates a latent image and (ii) developing the latent image, or register of light, to reveal a visible image. This staged process is outlined more thoroughly in philosopher Diarmuid Costello’s (2017, 116) analysis of the medium, in which he suggests “a light image is necessary but not sufficient for the creation of a photograph, since the latter requires the recording of that image plus further stages of processing to make it visible”. Hence, we can understand the analogue exposure process as involving multiple stages, or procedures, which centre around duration (the amount of time the sensitive material reacts to light or the amount of time it is developed to reveal the image) and which also need to occur in sequence to create a photographic image, lending a further durational quality to the process. In more recent photography guides, a rudimentary triangle diagram is widely used to understand the different camera and lens settings that impact exposure.5 Each side of the triangle indicates one of three distinct variables; ASA (or ISO in later digital derivatives), shutter speed and aperture with annotated scales to help the practitioner relate their technical settings to the resulting change of image exposure. When assessing the distribution of light in a scene, the practitioner typically decides two of these three variables (commonly ASA and shutter speed) and uses a light metre, or other measurement method, to arrive at a setting for the third variable (i.e. aperture). The decision around these initial two variables is often dictated by the practitioner’s specific tools, or by the impact these variables will have on other image elements. For instance, altering the shutter speed will impact motion blur, choosing film stock with a different ASA will impact the presence of grain in the image and altering aperture will impact depth of field. Therefore, negotiating these three variables has 5  For instance, see Bryan Peterson’s (2010) Understanding Exposure, Andrew Gibson’s (2011) Exposure and Understanding the Histogram or Sean McHugh’s (2018) Understanding Photography.

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a significant bearing on the overall aesthetic qualities of the image which indicates part of the creative decision-making involved in exposure processes. Although it is not always possible to control lighting, cinematography practitioners will usually arrange light sources and adjust the intensity of individual light fixtures in conjunction with the camera and lens settings for each scene being photographed, which complicates the exposure process further. This is where correspondence, a term I touched upon in the chapter titled “Theorising Creative Lighting”, can be useful in connecting the choice of ISO, shutter speed and aperture settings to the orchestration of lighting in the scene. As I have argued elsewhere (Nevill 2018), John Alton (1995) and Ansel Adams (2005) outline approaches that consider the luminance in areas of a scene in relation to an abstracted scale of brightness values. Corresponding measurements in this manner helps a cinematographer/photographer to perceive how exposure choices will impact the final tonalities of the image. Importantly, it is also a strategy for overcoming an intuitive and creative factor in the exposure process; relating a measurement of light (typically from a metre reading) to a specific choice of camera and lens setting, as this is rarely a straightforward relationship and necessitates some understanding of material implications in the manner suggested by Tim Ingold (2013, 97). Human vision has an adaptive response to light; our eyes can adjust to see dramatic changes in luminance more subtly under bright conditions, or conversely, subtle changes in luminance more dramatically in dim conditions, which affords a greater sense of visibility. Unlike human vision however, the light sensitive materials employed in common cinematography measurement devices, such as selenium or silicone in light metres, respond to variations of incoming light in a linear fashion. The measurements taken as a practitioner assesses lighting in their scene are therefore detached from context and always give readings that will expose an image (or area of an image) to appear at a mid-level of brightness. In analogue methods, practitioners working with light metres will therefore typically relate their readings to the film stock’s dynamic range capabilities to expose the scene in a way which preserves their intended variations of brightness in the resulting image. Doing so requires an evaluation of the material qualities (such as reflection, diffusion and specular highlights)

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within a scene, and also familiarity with the responsive characteristics of light sensitive media (such as film emulsion).6 By way of summary, basic analogue ‘wet’ exposure processes involve multiple stages (or procedures) which begin with the practitioner measuring light in their scene. In conjunction with their arrangement of light sources, these measurements are used to negotiate a balance between camera and lens settings such as ISO, aperture and shutter speed. The choice of settings determines an intensity and duration of light impacting the sensitive area within the camera which causes the formation of a latent image. Subsequent development of the latent image reveals a visible image which necessarily occurs after the time of production.

Exposure as Data As video artist and engineer Stephen Jones (2015, 84) outlines, in a photographic context, both ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ conceptions of light revolve around the collection of discrete objects. Exploring the various ways light is mediated by technology, he suggests that “a photon can be considered as a discretely located (within the limits of Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty’) ripple of greater amplitude within the electromagnetic field”. Jones argues for an equivalence between analogue and digital process based on the physical behaviour of light in a similar manner to materialist discourse outlined through the writing of Laura Marks (2002) and others in the chapter titled “Theorising Creative Lighting”. Drawing on this, exposure processes in cinematography could be seen as a form of information gathering regardless of analogue or digital methods. This is summarised well by photographic theorist Daniel Rubenstein who states: What the camera outputs is determined, not by the object that is being photographed, but by the authors of the code that instructs the algorithms how to process the input data. … Traditional analogue photographs are also the outcome of a process that computes the real and outputs it as information. (Rubinstein 2020, 4)

Connecting analogue and digital photographic practices, Rubenstein argues for the moment of exposure as an indivisible entanglement of 6  A light surface reflects more light, whereas a dark surface less. Adams (2005) gives a more detailed overview of this in his discussion of ‘The Negative’.

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process and image that is simultaneously the “objectifying process” and the “material presence” which relates to the previously discussed idea of correspondence as outlined by Ingold (2013). Importantly, Rubenstein suggests photography emerged at moment where Western society was moving from being invested in the world of labour and machines to instead being invested in information, “immaterial labour” and data processing. Contemporary cinematography is subject to the information-­ centric context that Rubenstein indicates whereby exposure operates as a form of data capture. This conception of exposure results from post-­digital societies that bring non-representational values to imagery and can therefore be distinguished from traditional approaches formed when ‘wet’ photography was the dominant method of image creation.7 This is illustrated by Sean Cubitt’s (2014, 244) suggestion that photographic media “employ analogous chemical and electronic transformations to a record of the exposure as a two-dimensional field. In both instances, that field can be treated as a dataset.” From this we can see that approaching exposure as a data capture process is not intrinsic to digital camera technologies, but instead results from the context of contemporary information-driven societies. In a pragmatic sense, this data-centric process of image exposure is recognised amongst industry practitioners. For instance, cinematographer Steve Yedlin’s (2019) Display Prep demonstration assesses the tools (predominantly capture formats) and methods (specific digital image manipulation processes) which filmmaking practitioners can employ in pursuit of crafting their desired aesthetic. Based on detailed comparisons, Yedlin argues that an audience’s perceptual experience of the final film image is not ultimately determined by the choice of camera format (i.e. film or digital capture processes) because the aesthetics are significantly determined “downstream” in the image processing pipeline. As such, he suggests cinematographers should “think of a camera not as a look maker, but as a data collection device, or survey instrument, that records uninterpreted data about the light coming through the lens”. This is similar to John Mateer’s (2014) suggestion that that the data-centric nature of digital cinema leads practitioners to capture the broadest range of information 7  This concept is further discussed by Rubenstein (2020, 5) who suggests an alternative to indexical understandings of photography are necessary because “in the digital age, a photograph is no more a representation of the world than a url is a representation of online content”.

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for manipulation in post-production. Mateer focuses on the incorporation of digital tools into mainstream film production processes however so does not fully address the significant shift that post-production image manipulation entails for the field of cinematography. Yedlin on the other hand concentrates on this distinction between capture and display processes to highlight that, in the information age, both analogue and digital capture can be understood in terms of data acquisition.8 This shift towards data acquisition reframes the exposure process that was outlined in relation to ‘wet’ photography significantly. As I have discussed, practitioners working with exclusively photochemical methods assessed their selection of ASA, shutter speed and aperture to control, or sculpt, the rendition of an image through its brightness tonalities. However, with the advent of the Digital Intermediate, and more sophisticated post-production image manipulation software, cinematography practitioners are instead led to assess their lighting, camera and lens settings to preserve the greatest range of brightness values possible. This data can then be sculpted into the intended aesthetic at a later point by the film’s colourist who works either in conjunction with the cinematographer or sometimes more independently depending on the production context. Hence, with the advent of an information-centric culture, creative choices about areas of an image that might be intentionally kept ‘underexposed’ or ‘overexposed’ in the final image aesthetic are made during a film’s colour grading process, rather than during the process of exposure itself. This disruption to the traditions of aesthetic decision-making is again recognised amongst industry practitioners. As part of a special issue of the magazine British Cinematographer in 2014, leading cinematographers were asked for their perspective on the biggest challenges facing the discipline. Many cited the extensive ability to manipulate images after capture as a potential impediment for their creative contribution to a film. For instance, Roberto Schaefer (Giardina et al. 2014, 30) suggests the move towards data capture makes it “hard for any cinematographer to have real control over the final product” while, Polly Morgan outlined how “cinematographers have to fight to be trusted with the image and keep their vision true to the end” (Giardina et al. 2014, 38). Similarly, Natasha Braier suggests “we are still not accounted-for fully in the post-production 8  For a more detailed technical explanation of exposure as information acquisition see Blaine Brown’s (2014, 97–128) chapter on Exposure in The Filmmaker’s Guide to Digital Imaging.

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process, so part of it can escape our hands. … We can’t really make strong irreversible decisions in-camera like before” (Giardina et al. 2014, 39). From a creative standpoint there is a significant advantage to approaching exposure as a form of data acquisition as the level of manipulation and nuance afforded by colour grading software far surpasses what can be achieved through in-camera effects and adjustments alone. Alfonso Cuarón’s Netflix distributed drama Roma (2018), which received an Academy Award for its cinematography in 2019, is a pertinent example of one way this change can impact traditional discipline responsibilities. The film is atypical by contemporary Hollywood standards as Cuarón worked across conventional production roles, serving as the writer, director, producer and cinematographer. Furthermore, although Roma was intended as a black and white film from inception, colour “information” was captured during production to allow work with greenscreens and to give greater flexibility for post-production image adjustments. In an interview with American Cinematographer magazine Joshua Pines, president of imaging research and development at Technicolor, one of the companies involved with post-production for the film, highlights the huge significance of image manipulation software for the aesthetic of Roma. Pines suggests that “a custom final-output rendering transform provided an overall creative look for the movie, in addition to desaturating the image to black-and-white” (Dillon 2019, 50). Further conveying the extent to which the film’s aesthetic was created during post-production, Cuarón estimates that almost all shots in the film feature visual effects, and that the colour grading process alone involved 973 hours of adjustment (Dillon 2019, 58). Considering this heavy use of image manipulation software, Cuarón (2019) directly compares his work in Roma to the photography of Ansel Adams suggesting that traditional darkroom processes, such as pushing the brightness levels in an area of the image, can now be applied to every single frame of the film with “amazing digital tools”. This extensive level of post-production image manipulation in Roma is quite common amongst contemporary high-budget films and Cuarón’s revealing comparison to darkroom processes here serves to highlight the greater flexibility these productions are afforded in approaching the exposure process as data gathering. By embracing digital post-production technology to such a high degree, Roma effectively demonstrates that a shift of exposure processes from image rendition to data capture enables new forms of collaboration which, in Cuarón’s words, “shortcut” traditional ways of working (Hogg 2019,

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68). Whether in collaboration with a cinematographer or not, the conversation and decision-making around a film’s final aesthetic has shifted to software-based processes which, in the context of mainstream film production, are often heavily controlled by colourists and large post-­ production teams. In pursuit of greater flexibility and efficiency in image making then, could the role of a cinematographer becomes more instrumental; eschewing creative oversight of the film’s final aesthetic to instead capture appropriate data as part of an extended collaborative process? As I’ve outlined, in analogue cinematography the practitioner relied on measurements and their approximation (or ‘pre-visualisation’ in Adam’s terms) of brightness values at the time of capture as the image couldn’t be properly viewed until later developed. With a shift of exposure process towards data capture, multiple renditions of the image are available to view alongside, and prior to the capture process, through digital monitors and viewfinders.9 This proliferation of screens during production reframes the individual ‘pre-visualisation’ of the exposure process towards a more open form of decision-making which is available for all key collaborators to see. While the overall aesthetic in ‘wet’ cinematography was mysterious (or at least somewhat uncommunicated) to those outside the camera and lighting departments, digital screens enable everyone involved to view an approximation of the image. This approximation however is only one possible result of the dataset generated from image exposure and can easily be adjusted depending on each display’s colour, contrast and brightness settings. Hence, for the cinematographer, approaching an image as information allows viewing creative results without the lengthy development process, but also requires detailed display management and suggests a more collaborative or inclusive approach where they may have made decisions independently before. Again, many cinematographers acknowledge this change, for instance Reed Moreno laments the mysticism of analogue processes, suggesting that the transparency of data-driven workflows “can invite a lot of unwanted discussion. Cinematography was a much more private, magical art” (Giardina et al. 2014, 28). Going further, Richard Crudo highlights 9  Sean Cubitt (2014, 102) outlines in further detail how digital and analogue both involve latency. In analogue processes the undeveloped negative is an obvious latent image, whereas digital processes reorder time through codec compression and the way that information is read from a sensor. Beyond this technical level however I would argue that the more or less perceptive immediacy of digital displays has led to a significant shift in the collaborative approach of many practitioners working in film production.

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how cinematographers face “the erosion of respect for our job and our position in the creative process. Because they [collaborators] can now view an immediate image on a monitor” (Giardina et al. 2014, 28). As these quotes suggest, practitioners recognise and are reflecting on the new ways of working in light of such data-driven image processes. To reiterate however, these changes should not be directly correlated to the differences between analogue and digital capture formats (for instance, on-set monitors offered an approximation of image aesthetics well before digital capture was widespread in cinematography); they are instead the culmination of societal shifts towards ubiquitous data processing and a reflection of the proliferated presence of screens throughout our daily lives. This context has instigated an approach to imagery that presides wider collaborative forms of manipulation and ultimately reframes exposure as form of data acquisition.

Virtual Production In 2009, a committee of six Hollywood-based organisations, including the American Society of Cinematographers, the Visual Effects Society and the International Cinematographers Guild, formed to explore the then nascent area of virtual production, broadly outlining their purview as “the process of shooting a movie with realtime computer graphics, either for all-CG movies … or for visual effects movies with live action” (Clark et al. 2010, 44). In a comprehensive handbook on visual effects, committee members Bruno Sargeant, David Morin and John Schelle (2014, 445) later defined virtual cinematography more specifically as “the application of cinematographic principles to a computer graphics scene, producing solutions for cinematographers to compose and shoot as if it were live action”. In the simplest sense then, we can understand virtual production as a meeting of live-action and computer-generated image (CGI) making processes, often with a desire to maintain a photographic aesthetic. As mainstream filmmaking increasing incorporates CGI and these virtual production techniques, the exposure processes that I have outlined in relation to ‘wet’ and ‘digital’ cinematography are transposed to rendering software graphical user interfaces. Although CGI is not limited to the physical behaviours of light and does not need to adhere to an optical path which features a lens and camera, emulating such live-action processes has become the dominant approach for effects as well as stand-alone animations. In a comprehensive

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exploration of the notion of reality in cinema, John Mullarkey (2009, 54) suggests this is a common tactic whereby CGI often intentionally incorporates visual artefacts that would be considered ‘flaws’ in live-action production environments such as lens flare and blur as a token of ‘realism’. Similarly, philosopher Berys Gaut (2010, 66) highlights this ambition to create imagery that “does not employ a comparison of the image to how a real object would look to provide a standard of realism … but rather compares the image to a photograph of an object”. In a more pragmatic sense, striving for photorealism, rather than perceptual illusionism, also helps CGI practitioners to match and incorporate their work into existing live-action production aesthetics, perpetuating this notion of virtual production. As previously discussed, exposure in live-action production (i.e. wet or digital photography) involves controlling the brightness and duration of light entering the camera as well as the development of the latent image. Although a cinematographer is not necessarily involved, comparable camera and lens settings are typically present in CGI due to the drive for photorealism and mimicry of live-action production processes. Departing from the processes that I have discussed however, there is also an additional stage which could be considered part of the exposure process— known as rendering—where practitioners specify the way light is modelled to form an image. Rendering essentially creates a two-dimensional image from a three-dimensional model, employing algorithms to determine the specific light value of each image pixel based on the position of the virtual camera (or point of view) and scene information. There are a number of technologies for modelling light in three-­ dimensional CGI, with rasterisation, ray-tracing and radiosity forming the dominant approaches. Each of these entails a different computational method which has bearing on the overall rendering time, and therefore the cost, as well as the resulting image aesthetic. In her discussion of CGI’s significance for the ontological status of light, Cathryn Vasseleu (2003) outlines how these methods can impact an image, suggesting that “the virtualization, animation, automation and augmentation of the optical properties of light, using ray-tracing and radiosity software, enable artists and scientists to determine the conditions of virtual light’s self-­ propagation”. In conventional CGI animation rendering is typically the responsibility of a lighting artist and/or a visual effects supervisor. Rendering CGI requires specification of the amount of light falling on the scene, the reflective qualities of the scene and the position of the

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camera. While a lighting artist typically has some autonomy over the placement and quality of light during rendering, for large-scale productions many related decisions such as camera position, the reflective qualities of objects (also referred to as digital assets) or the overall aesthetic of the image will involve heavy collaboration with other visual effects practitioners.10 Hence, in the context of CGI, aesthetic responsibilities that were once inherent to the photographic process and defined by the cinematographer, such as the distribution of brightness values in a scene, are shifted across a team of individuals. Despite this shift, the workflow for most CGI still adheres to traditional phases of film production. For instance, as part of a comprehensive edited collection on the production process of visual effects, Renne Dunlop outlines how CGI pipelines interface with traditional pre-production, production and post-production phases of filmmaking. While many CGI procedures such as modelling, texturing or animating could be more appropriately considered as ‘production’ (i.e. they are conducted prior to the formation of final images), Dunlop (2014, 35) suggests that in the film industry most of the visual effects work, including lighting and rendering, is considered part of the ‘post-production’ phase of a project. This distinction serves to separate practitioners working in the live-action context from those working in the virtual context, despite shared aesthetic goals and the comparable processes of exposure that I have indicated. In principle, collaboration between cinematographers and visual effects teams is welcomed from both sides however practical situations and labour dynamics tend to create a disconnect with practitioners siloed to separate phases of the filmmaking process. Analysing the discourse surrounding production roles in effects-heavy films, Julie Turnock (2017, 200) highlights this disconnect, suggesting that cinematographers often move onto another project before a film is completed and are rarely paid for their work in post-production, while effects teams are typically considered low skilled “button pushers” at the end of the process leaving little room for collaboration between these roles. The wide incorporation of CGI in mainstream film production disperses responsibilities then, with elements of the exposure processes that would typically be controlled by a cinematographer moving to visual effects teams and leaving them little oversight of the overall image aesthetic. 10  Jeremy Birn (2014, 25) gives a more detailed overview of the responsibility of lighting artists in virtual productions.

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At the time of writing however, convergence technologies which interface CGI with live-action production environments are becoming widespread, holding promise for future collaborations between cinematographers and visual effects teams. Notably, some mainstream Hollywood productions now prepare final quality CGI ahead of the live-action production so these effects can be incorporated into the shooting process. For instance, the biopic First Man (Chazelle 2018) avoided using chroma-key backdrops for many shots in favour of a large wall of light emitting diodes (LEDs) acting as a screen to display pre-generated effects. The film’s visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert suggested this allowed the actors to see elements of the scene rather than their studio surroundings and provided interactive light reflections on the physical set which otherwise would have involved complex compositing to achieve after the shoot (Robertson 2019). Similarly, Linus Sandgren, the film’s cinematographer, outlined how this factored into his exposure process, explaining that “the size of the screen helped us to get a realistic light effect … it measured f81/2, and it gave an incident light on the craft of f8—a loss of only 1/2 stop— which [provided] very realistic light effects” (Kadner 2018, 33). With the incorporation of these LED screens in live-action shooting then, CGI becomes another light source which is orchestrated by the cinematographer to maintain their desired distribution of brightness values in the scene. Moreover, improvements in computational power have made it possible to view high quality CGI sequences with an imperceptible rendering delay. These so-called real-time graphics enable filmmakers to watch an approximation of CGI sequences during live-action production through handheld monitors fitted with position tracking sensors or virtual reality headsets and have become popular techniques for the production of large budget effects-driven Hollywood films.11 Taking this further, real-time graphics can also combine with the aforementioned LED screen environments enabling productions to generate, adjust and incorporate CGI elements of a scene within a live-action shooting process. This entails capturing live-action and effects pixels together in camera, reframing what would have been hours of post-production compositing work and allowing the cinematographer to assess the balance of different elements of the image again. Episodic series, such as Lucasfilm’s The Mandalorian 11  For instance, visual effects supervisor Habib Zargarpour (2018) outlines the implementation and development of such tools during the production of several Hollywood blockbusters in a SIGGRAPH conference presentation.

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(Favreau 2019) and HBO’s Run (Jones 2020) were amongst the first to take full advantage of real-time graphics and LED wall technologies in this way, perhaps due to the economic advantages of the ‘final pixel’ approach. These convergences, moving CGI rendering into or before the live-action process, bring some control of the overall aesthetic, as well as the exposure process, back to the cinematographer. Taking an optimistic perspective, this may encourage further collaboration with visual effects teams that are necessarily more involved throughout each phase of the film production. The potential benefits of these real-time graphics technologies, such as their impact on production flexibility and collaborative approaches, have gained significant recognition amongst industry practitioners in recent decades. For instance, discussing the introduction of real-time CGI rendering during the production of Avatar (Cameron 2009), the film’s virtual art director Rob Powers suggests “virtual production workflows are really like a merger of real-time gaming technology with film and television production. This new innovative resulting workflow enhances overall team collaboration” (Vaughan 2012, 72). Similarly, cinematographer and visual effects supervisor Sam Nicholson suggested “virtual production empowers the DP; the director, and the actors to collaborate much more directly” and “it’s a much better working environment for visual effects people because … [they are] brought in very early in the process” (Kadner 2019a, 81–83). In summary, virtual production seeks to interface CGI with live-action production environments in ways that enhance collaboration and integrates visual effects teams throughout each phase of a film’s creation. As I’ve indicated, these approaches merge exposure processes with visual effects and moreover entail substantial methodological changes for cinematographers whose work is increasingly related too and interspersed with areas that have conventionally been understood as the responsibility of separate production departments.

Aesthetic Leadership At the beginning of this chapter I suggested cinematographers are conventionally considered custodians of the image and I have subsequently outlined how this custodianship is stretched or adapted during various exposure processes. Although nearly all film productions are now ultimately viewed or at least aesthetically finished via digital technologies, a recent commitment to maintain photochemical processes from Hollywood studios suggests that both formats will remain in wide use for the

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foreseeable future (Giardina 2020b). Hence, contemporary cinematographers work in a landscape of both photochemical and data-centric processes, with their choice of capture format often depending varying economic, methodological and aesthetic opportunities. As I’ve argued, CGI is also increasingly incorporated in mainstream filmmaking which has given rise to further processes that reshape the role and responsibilities of cinematographers, such as virtual production techniques. Discussing the continued use of analogue technologies in contemporary culture, such as the popularity of mechanical typewriters alongside more recent forms of communication like internet imageboard memes, Florian Cramer suggests the term post-digital can be useful for understanding this current confluence of technologies. Cramer (2014, 17–18) outlines post-digital as a functional repurposing of analogue technologies in relation to digital culture which causes an eradication of “the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, in theory as well as in practice”. Digital technology may no longer be considered disruptive to the field of cinematography but has repurposed the ways that practitioners engage with analogue processes. This notion of post-digital accurately summarises the current state of cinematography then, as practitioners reckon with the various exposure processes I have outlined across ‘wet’, ‘data driven’ and ‘virtual’ production techniques. Some attempts have already been made amongst industry practitioners to reframe the role of a cinematographer in light of this post-digital condition. This has led to new terms arising which recognise the shifting facets of exposure processes and wider changes of responsibility. For instance, in a panel discussing the future of cinematography at the industry technology expo Cine Gear, Yuri Neyman suggested: the concept of the director of photography is slightly outdated. It’s not a profession, it is a position. Before it was cameraman, then it became cinematographer, then director of photography, and now with all these virtual things, it’s now more than that. … We suggested director of imaging or director of visuals. (Heuring 2018)

This idea of replacing ‘photography’ with ‘imaging’ or ‘visuals’ is indicative of the additional live-action responsibilities beyond photochemical and optoelectronic capture which are ushered in by virtual production. Neymen’s suggestion is also emblematic of some practitioners in the industry who suggest the cinematographer’s responsibilities should

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encompass a film’s aesthetic dimension regardless of whether the imagery is considered ‘photographic’ or otherwise. In a similar manner, other terms have been introduced to define various aspects of production, such as the title “virtual imaging technician” or the aforementioned “virtual art department”, which indicate how these questions, and the post-digital condition, effect wider filmmaking disciplines beyond cinematography (Kadner 2019b). With the cinematographer’s practice shifting to oversight and involvement of a more diverse range of processes, aesthetic leadership, or partnership, with other artists should be emphasised as a key aspect of this production role. As new forms of collaboration arise, an emerging idea of “co-creativity” could be central to reframing cinematography for the post-­ digital era. This concept is most widespread in relation to business theory or participatory art practices and as Hannah Zeilig et al. (2018, 138) outline can be broadly understood as “a focus on shared process … inclusivity, reciprocity and relationality”. Approaching filmmaking processes from a standpoint of co-creativity involves stepping back from typical hierarchical structures and attempting to redefine the production relationships that bring a project to life. At its most basic, this would mean recognising that each individual contribution to a production is as important as the next because the combination of all these elements is necessary for the successful realisation of the film. The focus-puller, data-wrangler or visual effects artist is as valuable as the cinematographer, director or lead actor. Maya Haviland (2016, 131) elaborates the idea further while discussing community media organisations and suggests that recognising co-­creativity helps to overcome “a discomfort with public recognition of the facilitative labour that surrounds many acts of contemporary cultural production … a persistent deferral by Western audiences and institutions to the idea of singular creative authorship”. Moreover, Haviland (2016, 132) refers to the Bolivian Cinematography Education and Production Centre (CEFREC) as a model of co-creativity which highlights how filmmaking can be a truly collaborative process involving social and creative relations that extend beyond the production of a specific work. Encompassing new forms of collaboration beyond the specific processes and knowledge that conventionally define cinematography is a fundamental shift which goes beyond the technical changes observed in Daniel Maddock’s and John Mateer’s writing as discussed earlier in this chapter. Taking inspiration from this notion of co-creativity, we might understand the role of a cinematographer akin to a facilitator, bringing together

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different disciplines and cultural frameworks during a shared creative project and beyond. As Haviland (2016, 138) outlines the “immaterial labor” of such facilitators often involves the formation and maintenance of social relationships, working dynamics, administration, support for individuals and the development of group organisation structures and processes. All these elements are, to some extent, present in conventional Hollywood understandings of a cinematographer who, as a ‘head of department’, holds responsibility for the working process and well-being of team of individuals which often form relationships spanning many productions. To fully embrace co-creativity in this discipline however means reframing existing production dynamics from a top-down structure where the cinematographer encompasses the creative input and labour of these other practitioners towards a more equitable structure that recognises all involved in the creation of a film. As I’ve indicated, the notion of aesthetic leadership is useful in unpicking the cinematographer’s contribution and understanding how they facilitate production processes, while also recognising the collective effort and contribution implied by co-creativity. Cathy Greenhalgh (2018, 147) offers a brief definition of this, suggesting that cinematography is a particular form of thinking and collaborative activity where practitioners “influence the wider culture with their work, ideas and approach”. In post-digital environments the increasing fluctuation of film production procedures contribute to already loosely defined cinematography processes as practitioners may be involved with highly different aspects of a film depending on the production budget, context and approach. What remains constant amidst this nebulous array of a cinematographer’s responsibilities is their aesthetic engagement, or leadership, through which they guide the formation and manipulation of imagery towards a specific visual style. Nestor Almendros’ (1984, 10) aforementioned writing sheds light on this in his suggestion that “the main qualities a director of photography needs are plastic sensitivity and a solid cultural background. So-called cinematographic technique is only of secondary importance and depends above all on one’s assistants.” Recognising cinematography as aesthetic leadership in this way, rather than as a defined set of technological, logistic or creative responsibilities, also addresses and builds on the challenge of authorship in film production as touched upon earlier through the writing of Philip Cowan as well as Evan Lieberman and Kerry Hegarty. Aesthetic leadership necessarily draws on the expertise and input of collaborators to facilitate creative work and therefore acknowledges that

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authorship can only belong to a combination of individuals varying from production to production, rather than being encompassed by one key individual. In contrast to these optimistic notions of co-creativity and aesthetic leadership, the potential challenges of a changing industry are highlighted by Julie Turnock who cautions against the slippage of the role of a cinematographer while arguing that visual effects and cinematography have a long history of interrelation. Turnock warns that recent notions of convergence and blurring professional roles which coincided with the introduction of digital processes are the result of Hollywood corporate rhetoric designed to weaken labour relations, rather than actual technological distinctions. To counteract this industry pressure, she suggests: A lighting designer would streamline this unfavorable situation and bring the effects team in earlier in the production pipeline. Advancing the idea of the expanded role of the DP as “lighting designer” is a way to produce a category that does not yet exist, but benefits the role and status of the DP. (Turnock 2017, 196)

To maintain relevance in a post-digital culture, the terminology that cinematographers employ in their work may be an important element that can help to recognise and establish their artistic contribution within new forms of film production. As I suggested at the outset of this chapter, the specific titles bestowed on cinematography practitioners have shifted throughout the past century dependent on their professional recognition and cultural context. New title permutations which seek to account for emerging production arenas, such as Turnock’s “lighting designer” or Neyman’s aforementioned “director of imaging”, are perhaps to be expected as the discipline that grapples with and explores different processes and procedures. Over the past century, many national societies and related industry organisations, such as the IMAGO International Federation of Cinematographers, have advocated for the artistry of cinematography and worked closely with their representative unions to protect intellectual or working rights for practitioners. These organisations could play an instrumental role in reimagining the position of a cinematographer towards a more inclusive and co-creative functionality should their members actively explore, promote and educate new talent about different production approaches and new conceptions of camera department dynamics. In an

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extreme case, as virtual production techniques become more widespread, the term cinematography could expand to incorporate elements of several new disciplines responsible for the aesthetic leadership of a film (such as the visual effects supervisors, or virtual art directors mentioned previously). The precedent for such diversification is illustrated in a recent change made by the American Society of Cinematographers who elected Sharon Calahan as a member in 2014 for her achievements working exclusively in computer animation, rather than live-action films as per all previous members. By way of summary, as I’ve argued throughout this book, the industry definition and practical responsibilities of a cinematographer are shifting with a recent trend towards increasingly computer-oriented filmmaking procedures and new collaborative relationships. The consideration of analogue, digital and virtual production processes in this chapter highlights how light remains an intrinsic and potentially expressive aspect of moving imagery regardless of the shape, form and resolution that specific capture and display devices might take in future. As I suggested in the chapter titled “Theorising Creative Lighting”, a set of material relations, realisations or performances between ideas and light will therefore remain central to the position of cinematographer regardless of the specific technologies that are employed. Further to this, in the chapter titled “Understanding Cinematography Technology”, I suggested the cinematographer’s practical lighting efforts are conducted amidst an entangled network of forces whereby agency is distributed across human and technological factors which collectively define the film’s visual aesthetic. Ultimately then, the practice of cinematography is a form of aesthetic leadership which involves creative lighting sensibilities, material correspondences and technological negotiations during the facilitation of collaborative processes that evoke stylised moving image artefacts and experiences.

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Barger, M.  Susan, and William B.  White. 1991. The Daguerreotype: Nineteenth-­ Century Technology and Modern Science. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Bilissi, Efthimia, Elizabeth Allen, and Sophie Triantaphillidou. 2011. Exposure and Image Control. In The Manual of Photography, ed. Elizabeth Allen and Sophie Triantaphillidou, 227–243. Abingdon: Focal Press. Birn, Jeremy. 2014. Digital Light and Rendering. 3rd ed. Berkeley: New Riders. Brown, Blain. 2014. The filmmaker’s Guide to Digital Imaging: for Cinematographers, Digital Imaging Technicians, and Camera Assistants. Abingdon: Focal Press. Busch, Cristina. 2019. Authorship Committee Report. IMAGO International Annual General Assembly, Belgrade. https://www.imago.org/images/pdfs/ AUTHORSHIP/IAGA%202019%20Definitivo%20bis.pdf. Accessed 12 May 2020. Chazelle, Damien. 2018. First Man [Film]. Universal Pictures, Universal City, California. Cinematography State of the Art. 2015. Bristol international festival of cinematography. https://youtu.be/BW20T2q0avg. Accessed 10 Sept 2020. Clark, Curtis, Michael Goi, David Reisner, David Stump, Richard Edlund, John Bailey, Lou Levinson, et  al. 2010. American Society of Cinematographers Technology Committee Progress Report. SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal 119: 33–46. Costello, Diarmuid. 2017. On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry. Abingdon: Routledge. Cowan, Philip. 2012. Underexposed: The Neglected Art of the Cinematographer. Journal of Media Practice 13: 75–96. Cramer, Florian. 2014. What Is Post-Digital? A Peer-Reviewed Journal About 3: 10–24. Cuarón, A. 2019. Interview with Alfonso Cuarón for Technicolor. Technicolor Website. https://www.technicolor.com/news/alfonso-­cuaron-­discusses-­his-­ oscar-­winning-­film-­roma-­and-­work-­technicolor-­exclusive-­interview. Accessed 11 Mar 2020. Cubitt, Sean. 2014. The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Curaón, Alfonso. 2018. Roma [Film]. Netflix, Los Gatos, California. Davy, Humphry. 1802. An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings Upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light Upon Nitrate of Silver. Journals of The Royal Institution of Great Britain 1: 170–171. Dillon, Mark. 2019. Memories of Mexico. American Cinematographer 100: 48–58. Dunlop, Renne. 2014. Production Pipeline Fundamentals for Film and Game. Abingdon: Focal Press.

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Favreau, Jon. 2016. The Jungle Book [Film]. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Burbank, California. ———. 2019. The Mandalorian [TV Series]. Disney Media Distribution, Burbank, California. Gaut, Berys. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giardina, Carolyn. 2020a. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski Warns That Directors of Photography Are Losing Control of Images They Shoot. The Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-­screen/ cinematographer-­janusz-­kaminski-­warns-­directors-­photography-­are-­losing-­ control-­images-­they-­shoot-­1101082. Accessed May 19. ———. 2020b. Studios Re-Up Kodak Deals to Keep Celluloid Film Alive. Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-­screen/ studios-­up-­kodak-­deals-­keep-­celluloid-­film-­alive-­1274709. Accessed 12 June 2020. Giardina, Carolyn, Adrian Pennington, and Ron Prince. 2014. Past, Present and Future of Cinematography. British Cinematographer 65: 27–40. Gibson, Andrew S. 2011. Exposure and Understanding the Histogram. Berkeley: Peachpit Press. Greenhalgh, Cathy. 2003. Shooting form the Heart: Cinematographers and Their Medium. In Making Pictures: A Century of European Cinematography, ed. Michael Leitch, 94–155. New York: Abrams Books. ———. 2010. Cinematography and Camera Crew: Practice, Process and Procedure. In Theorising Media and Practice, ed. Birgit Bräucher and John Postill, 303–324. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2018. Cinematographers Skilled Vision and Aesthetic Praxis. In Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity, ed. Stephanie Bunn, 204–216. Routledge: Abingdon. Haviland, Maya Lolen Devereaux. 2016. Side by Side? Community Art and the Challenge of Co-Creativity. Abingdon: Routledge. Heuring, David. 2018. The Future of Cinematography (Part 1 of 2). American Cinematographer Blog. https://ascmag.com/blog/parallax-­view/the-­future-­ of-­cinematography-­part-­1-­of-­2. Accessed 3 Dec 2019. Hirsch, Robert. 2017. Seizing the Light: A Social & Aesthetic History of Photography. 3rd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Hogg, Trevor. 2019. Ghostly Past. British Cinematographer Magazine 91: 68–69. Hutchins, Edwin. 1996. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge. Jones, Stephen. 2015. What Is Digital Light? In Digital Light, ed. Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer, and Nathaniel Tkacz. London: Open Humanities Press. Jones, Vicky. 2020. Run [TV Series]. HBO, New York.

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Kadner, Noah. 2018. Moon Shot. American Cinematographer 99: 30–41. ———. 2019a. Interview with Sam Nicholson, ASC. In The Virtual Production Field Guide, 80–83. Cary: Epic Games. ———. 2019b. The Virtual Production Field Guide. Cary: Epic Games. Lieberman, Evan, and Kerry Hegarty. 2010. Authors of the Image: Cinematographers Gabriel Figueroa and Gregg Toland. Journal of Film and Video 62: 31–51. Lucas, Christopher. 2014. The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000– Present. In Cinematography, ed. Patrick Keating, 132–158. London: I.B. Tauris. Maddock, Daniel. 2019. Reframing Cinematography. Media Practice and Education 20: 44–66. Marks, Laura. U. 2002. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mateer, J. 2014. Digital Cinematography: Evolution of Craft or Revolution in Production? Journal of Film & Video 66: 3–14. McGowan, Nadia. 2016. Light Creators: An Overview of Cinematographer’s Authorship. In Nuevas Formas de Expresión en Comunicación, ed. Carlos del Valle Rojas and Carmen Salgado Santamaría, 526–536. Madrid: McGraw Hill Education. McHugh, Sean T. 2018. Understanding Photography: Master Your Digital Camera and Capture That Perfect Photo. San Francisco: No Starch Press. Miyao, Daisuke. 2017. Introduction. In Transnational Cinematography Studies, ed. Lindsay Coleman, Daisuke Miyao, and Roberto Schaefer, 1–10. Lanham: Lexington Books. Mullarkey, John. 2009. Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nevill, Alexander. 2018. Cinematographic Affordances: Creative Approaches to Lighting in Moving Image Practice. Media Practice and Education 19(2):122–138. Peterson, Bryan. 2010. Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with Any Camera. New York: Amphoto Books. Raimonodo-Souto, H.M. 2007. Motion Picture Photography: A History, 1891–1960. Jefferson: McFarland. Robertson, Barbara. 2019. Oscar-Nominated VFX Supervisor Paul Lambert on First Man. Studio Daily. https://www.studiodaily.com/2019/02/oscar-­ nominated-­vfx-­supervisor-­paul-­lambert-­first-­man/. Accessed 21 Jan 2020. Rubinstein, Daniel. 2020. Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age. Abingdon: Routledge. Sargeant, Bruno, David Morin, and John Schelle. 2014. Virtual Production. In The VES Handbook of Visual Effects: Industry Standard VFX Practices and Procedures, ed. Susan Zwerman and Jeffrey A.  Okun, 443–445. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Sheehan, Tanya, and Andres Zervigon. 2014. Photography and Its Origins. Abingdon: Routledge. Stanton, Andrew. 2008. WALL-E [Film]. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Burbank, California. Turnock, Julie. 2017. Gravity and the ‘Lighting Designer’ Controversy: Cinematographers, Special Visual Effects Artists and the Rhetoric of Digital Convergence. In Transnational Cinematography, ed. Lindsay Coleman, Daisuke Miyao, and Roberto Saheafer, 187–216. London: Lexington Books. Vasseleu, Cathryn. 2003. What Is Virtual Light? Culture Machine 5. Vaughan, William. 2012. Digital Modelling. Berkeley: New Riders. Ward, John. 2013. Exposure. In Encyclopaedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography: Volume 1 A-I Index, ed. John Hannavy, 516. Abingdon: Routledge. Welles, Orson, and Greg Toland. 1941. Citizen Kane [Film]. Warner Bros., Burbank, California. Witmer, Jon, and Andrew Fish. 2019. Future of Cinematography: The Next 100 Years  – The American Cinematographer. https://ascmag.com/articles/the-­ next-­100-­years. Accessed 30 May 2020. Yedlin, Steve. 2019. Display Prep Demo: Version 2. Steve Yedlin Website. http:// www.yedlin.net/DisplayPrepDemo. Accessed 15 Apr 2020. Zargarpour, Habib. 2018. Using a Real-Time Engine in Movie Production: Expozure & Virtual Film Tools. SIGGRAPH. https://youtu.be/U_ NG7WfoI7s. Accessed 15 Apr 2020. Zeilig, H., J. West, and M. Williams. 2018. Co-creativity: Possibilities for Using the Arts with People with a Dementia. Quality in Ageing and Older Adults 19: 135–145.

Index

A Ackroyd, Barry, 58, 61 Actor-network theory, 50–54 Adams, Ansel, 67, 71 Aesthetic leadership, 79, 80, 82 Affordance, 51 Agency and technology, 35, 36, 39, 43, 44, 47, 50, 52 Alekan, Henri, 14, 16 Al-Haytham, Ibn, 23 Almendros, Nestor, 58, 80 Alton, John, 67 Analogue film, 18, 34, 68, 72 Anthropology, 44, 48, 61 Apparatus theory, 37–40, 42, 47 Architecture, 2, 11, 13, 16 Auteur theory, 39, 60, 63 Authorship, 3, 10, 36, 60, 61, 63, 79, 81 B Barad, Karan, 19, 23–25, 28 Barger, Susan M., 64

Barthélémy, Jean-Hugues, 43 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 37, 39, 42 Bazin, André, 38, 40 Bennett, Jane, 29 Bijker, Wiebe, 40, 50 Blumenberg, Hans, 24 Bolt, Barbara, 24, 25, 28 Boyce, Peter, 13 Braier, Natasha, 70 Bresson, Robert, 2 C Cahiers du Cinéma, 37 Calahan, Sharon, 82 Callon, Michel, 51, 52 Camera, 2, 5, 22, 27, 36, 37, 44, 58–60, 63, 65–67, 69, 70, 75 Capture and display, 4, 5, 18, 21, 22, 27, 69, 70, 82 Carter, Paul, 25 Cartesian divide, 2, 19, 23, 26, 28, 30 Cavell, Stanley, 39 Celluloid, 18, 22, 27

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Nevill, Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65935-6

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INDEX

Chabot, Pascal, 47 Character of light, 11, 30, 68 Chare, Nicholas, 18 Cinematographer (production role), 6, 10, 11, 34, 54, 57–59, 72, 75, 77–79, 82 Cinematographer, 35 Cinematographic style, 35, 44, 82 Co-creativity, 79, 81 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 37, 39, 42, 46 Computer-generated imagery, 5, 6, 62, 73, 74, 76–78 Correspondence, 20, 29, 49, 67 Costello, Diarmuid, 6, 66 Cowan, Philip, 60, 80 Craft, 6, 33, 58, 59, 76 Cramer, Florian, 78 Crudo, Richard, 72 Cuarón, Alfonso, 71 Cubitt, Sean, 69 Cultural technique, 4, 36 D Daguerre, Louis, 65 Davy, Humphry, 64 Deakins, Roger, 62 Deep time, 19, 27 Deleuze, Gilles, 21, 25, 27 Delpeut, Peter, 18 Depth of field, 42, 60, 66 Descartes, René, 23 Diffraction, 20, 23 Digital film theory, 4, 18, 58, 61, 63, 68, 72 Digital sensor, 22, 34, 63, 67, 68 Director of photography, 59, 77, 78, 80 Dispositif, 37 Dunlop, Renne, 75

E Eliasson, Olafur, 12 Elmes, Frederick, 34 Elsaesser, Thomas, 5 Entanglement, 20, 22, 34, 40, 48, 50, 51, 54, 82 Epistemology, 23 Ethnography, 3, 63 Euclid, 23 Exposure, 5, 16, 20, 63–66, 69–72, 74, 76, 77 Extramission theory, 23 F Figueroa, Gabriel, 60 Film aesthetics, 35, 54 Film noir, 41 Film plane, 63 Film speed, 66, 68, 70 Flusser, Vilém, 35, 37, 39 Fujimura, John, 53 G Gaut, Berys, 74 Geerts, Evelien, 21 Generative, 11, 20, 25, 26, 28 Geuen, Jean Pierre, 14 Greenhalgh, Cathy, 3, 61, 80 H Haraway, Donna, 19, 20 Haviland, Maya, 79 Hegarty, Kerry, 60, 80 Heidegger, Martin, 15, 24, 35, 37, 43, 45, 49, 50 Herzogenrath, Bernd, 17, 27 Hirsch, Robert, 65

 INDEX 

Hughes, Thomas, 40, 50 Hutchins, Edwin, 61 Huygens, Christiaan, 23 Hylomorphic, 29, 48 I Ingold, Tim, 29, 48, 67, 69 Intra-agency, 20, 22, 27, 28, 30 J Jay, Martin, 24 Jones, Stephen, 68 K Kaminiski, Janus, 58, 61 Kepler, Johannes, 23 L Lambert, Paul, 76 Latent image, 65, 66 Latour, Bruno, 51 Law, John, 51 Lieberman, Evan, 60, 80 Light art, 11 Lucas, Christopher, 62 Lumiére, Louis, 2, 59 M ‘Ma,’ 16 Maddock, Daniel, 62, 79 Malick, Terrence, 45 Manovich, Lev, 6 Marks, Laura, 18, 27, 68 Mateer, John, 62, 69, 79 Materiality, 11, 16–22, 27–29, 39, 49–51, 53 McGowan, Nadia, 60

Medium specificity, 4, 6, 17 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2, 14, 16, 22, 28 Methexis, 25, 26, 28, 30 Miller, Daniel, 17 Miyao, Daisuke, 59 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 11 Moreno, Reed, 72 Morgan, Polly, 70 Morin, David, 73 Morrison, Bill, 18 Mullarkey, John, 74 N Nature-culture, 17, 19, 22, 48 New-materialism, 4, 21, 27 New media, 43 Newton, Isaac, 23 Neyman, Yuri, 78 Nicholson, Sam, 77 Niépce, Nicéphore, 65 O Ontology, 2, 15, 18, 20, 38, 39, 74 Orchestrating light, 15, 27, 40 P Pandian, Anand, 3 Parikka, Jussi, 19, 21, 27 Patrick Keating, 3, 34, 36, 37, 51 Perception, 2, 10, 13, 16, 23, 25, 37, 67 Performative, 25, 27–29, 49 Phenomenology, 2 Photochemical, 5, 39, 42, 64, 66, 70, 78 Photography, 6, 28, 35, 38, 64 Photorealism, 74 Pinch, Trevor, 40, 50

89

90 

INDEX

Pines, Joshua, 71 Plummer, Henry, 2, 11, 30 Poiēsis, 45, 48, 49 Pope, Bill, 62 Post-digital, 5, 69, 78, 81 Powers, Rob, 77 Ptolemy, 23 R Radiosity, 74 Raimondo-Souto, Mario H., 59 Rasterization, 74 Ray-tracing, 74 Reflection, 13, 14, 20, 23, 67 Rendering, 74, 75 Representation, 18, 20, 21, 24, 27, 37, 42, 46, 69 Rifkin, Stephen, 38 Rodowick, David, 5 Rubenstein, Daniel, 68 S Salt, Barry, 3, 35, 36 Sandgren, Linus, 76 Sargeant, Bruno, 73 Schaefer, Roberto, 70 Schelle, John, 73 Shadow, 11, 30, 41 Sheehan, Tanya, 64 Simondon, Gilbert, 43, 47, 48, 50 Sinnerbrink, Richard, 45, 46 Smith, Mark A., 23 Social constructivism, 40–44, 47, 50, 54 Storytelling, 49, 53, 58, 62 Suchman, Lucy, 53

T Talbot, William Henry Fox, 65 Tanizaki, Junichiro, 16 Technological determinism, 34–41, 64 Thompson, Lara, 3 Toland, Greg, 60 Tuin, Iris van der, 21 Turnock, Julie, 75, 81 Turrell, James, 12 V Vasseleu, Cathryn, 74 Video art, 15 Vié, Philippe, 34 Viola, Bill, 15 Virtual production, 62, 73, 75, 78, 82 Vitalism, 29, 43–50, 54 W Ward, John, 65 Watkins, Liz, 18 Wees, William, 37 Welles, Orson, 60 White, William B., 64 Winston, Brian, 41, 43, 46, 47 Workflow, 34, 75, 77 Y Yedlin, Steve, 69 Z Zajonc, Arthur, 25 Zervigon, Andres, 64