Chiaroscuro Lighting in Film — Balancing Cinematic Light & Darkness

What is chiaroscuro? In this video on cinematic lighting techniques, we discuss the power of chiaroscuro lighting in film.

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Chapters:
00:00 - What is Chiaroscuro Lighting?
00:19 - Chiaroscuro Meaning & Definition
00:49 - Origin of Chiaroscuro
01:44 - Usage in Cinema
02:34 - Chiaroscuro in Mid-Century
03:14 - Scene Examples
05:14 - Chiaroscuro Takeaways

Chiaroscuro Meaning: The term comes from the Italian words for “light” and “dark” — the perfect definition for a lighting style that mixes the two to great effect. Chiaroscuro lighting is a visually stunning technique that helps turn a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional scene.

It was Renaissance painters like Caravaggio that mastered this technique long before filmmakers got their hands on it. But when they did, they thrived in it. In this video essay, we’ll trace the roots of chiaroscuro lighting from Caravaggio, through German Expressionism, Film Noir, and everything in between.

Like painting, cinema is (usually) a 2D medium. To add that third critical dimension, cinematic lighting can be used to create depth. Similar to how leading lines and shapes can guide the viewer’s eye to a perceived background in the distance, so too can light and shadow. In the early days of German Expressionism, cinematic lighting pushed the balance between light and dark to the extreme. The dark subject matter of these films could be enhanced by embracing shadows along with the light.

But beyond its ability to add dimensionality to the image, cinematic lighting techniques like chiaroscuro can also be used to emphasize the thematic questions posed in these films.
American filmmakers brought these cinematic lighting techniques to the gritty and pessimistic underworld in Film Noir classics. In these films, we find good characters led into corruption and the chiaroscuro lighting helped trap them in moral and existential dilemmas. Filmmakers figured out that there is tension between mixing light and shadow and have relied on the power of chiaroscuro lighting for over a century.

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