Very nice b&w cinematography from 1951

[Karim D. Ghantous]

Someone was watching As Young as you Feel (1951) and although I didn't feel like watching the film, I noticed some amazing lighting in a particular scene:

It seems as if there's a bank of small spotlights with barn doors off to one side. Either that, or there is just one big light that's 100 feet away from the foreground. In addition, maybe there are some bounce boards on the ceiling to lower contrast a little bit. But I don't know any better. So what kind of lighting would have been used here? I really, really like it.

It's my understanding that b&w lighting is not as easy to get right as with colour. With colour you can get away without hair lights or rim lights, but with b&w, colours of the same shade can blend together if you don't take care to separate them. I think I'd be right in saying that knowing how to light for b&w is a skill set on its own.

 

[Erich Roland]

yes the DP did a great job in even-ing out the light in this room. Usually or always in those days were talking about hard lights with a bit of softening material at best. I don't think I've ever seen a "bounced" light in production photo's before mid-late 70's. One reason is the film stocks needs lots of light.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Often large sets in old movies look "soft" lit because they have to use multiple hard lights to get the spread, thus reducing the sharpness of the light and lowering the contrast. You see this particularly in 1930s movies when the stocks were so slow.

In the 1930s, closer shots did use diffused light, often light with spun glass on frames in front, sometimes big "scoop" reflector dish lamps (sometimes also diffused with spun glass.) Occasionally a large silk might be used in front of a large light. By the 1940s, even though there was a jump in speed for stocks in 1938, lighting became harder out of fashion, to get away from the romantic softness of 1930s photography. Lens diffusion was also reduced, and lenses got sharper.

Bounce lighting was rare until European films started doing it in the late 1950s -- Hitchcock famously tried to light most of "Torn Curtain" with bounced lighting in an attempt to get that "European" look but due to wanting a better light level for the color stock of the time (50 ASA), he bounced the lights off of large boards painted silver, which sort of missed the point since the light stayed semi-hard. But generally in the 1960's you saw a lot of experimentation with diffused and bounced light, particularly in the U.K., led by people like David Watkin and Ozzie Morris. I just watched "Marat/Sade" (1967), shot by Watkin, which all takes place on a set mainly lit with a single large diffused window frame. You can also see Watkin experimenting with softening lights on "Help!", which was only his second or third feature.

You see a lot of soft lighting in late 1920s silent era movies, thanks to the use of Cooper Hewitt lamps but those went away when sound came along.

Sets often filled soundstages back then so you wouldn't have had a lot of space to back up a big light, and then it would be harder to get a lot of exposure. Anyway, this scene does not look lit by a giant single carbon arc from 3/4 front, it looks like by a bunch of tungsten fresnels staggered in depth to light from foreground to background (either 2Ks or 5Ks), and probably a few rows of backlights and another row of fill light from the opposite side, hence all the hot spots you see on the glassware.