This is a riff on a syllabus I made for a class about light: a little of its history; observing it; enjoying it; and using it for film/video-making. It’s an attempt to think about how evolving light technologies play out in cinema aesthetics and social lives. 

A reference for this syllabus is “All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes” by Haig Aivazian (2021)

All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes (2021) tracks the public administration of light and darkness as an essential policing tool. The video moves between cities like New York and London, with the artist’s native Beirut setting the central pulse. Creating an associative genealogy that moves from whale oil lamps to gas lanterns to LED bulbs, from blackouts to curfews, the video is comprised of found footage and material from the artist’s own phone. Layering, splicing, and confronting disparate kinds of sound and image, Aivazian generates a sensorial meditation on how the fundamentals of human vision—light hitting the retina—were mechanized into tools that capture our movements, be it in everyday life or on screen.

This video scrutinizes light and darkness as tools. It makes connections (sometimes funny ones) between light, its fuel/energy sources, and violence—how light is channeled for policing and war. I love the rapid associations made in this piece, and it dovetails with how I’ve been trying to look at light in a more nuanced way.  

Here are six topics related to light and light sources/light technologies of different eras, with a film and something to read for each one. 

1. Sun. 🌞 “Sunny” by Bobby Hebb.

It’s our original, best, brightest, most beloved light source. We all experience how sunlight influences our moods and activities in the day-to-day, and season-to-season. 

The Russian writer Alexander Chizhevsky proposed a novel relationship between people and the sun in his 1922 book The Earth in the Sun’s Embrace. He attributes socio-historical phenomena—revolutions, wars, surrender, treaties—to cycles of sunspot activity. 

Research into the relationship between the behavior of the masses during various historical events and the development of sunspots has allowed me to reach the following general conclusion: prolonged mass movements flow according to the cycle of solar activity and demonstrate fluctuations synchronous with this cycle. The behavior of the masses, expressed in varying degrees of neuropsychological excitability, undergoes fluctuations that run precisely parallel to fluctuations in the intensity of the sunspots.

An excerpt from Chizhevsky’s book is published in Russian Cosmism ed. Boris Groys.

Film: “The Green Ray” (2001) dir. Tacita Dean (not to be confused with Le rayon vert by Eric Rohmer, a related film, and one of my favs, both recommended in last week’s syllabus)

2. Shadow. “Whispers in the Shadow” by The Vyllies

Shadows are relaxing, inviting, a welcome break. They’re the shading of images, as necessary as the light is for creating contrast, shape, and texture. Different parts of shadows have distinct qualities. 

Umbra is the dark center of a shadow.
Penumbra is the secondary portion of the shadow, the “fuzzy” perimeter created by oblique rays of light coming around the edges of the subject.

In Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, the ecological writer David Abram proposes multi-dimensional way of thinking about shadows: 

Just as shadows are not flat shapes across the ground (but rather dense and voluminous spaces), neither are they measurable quantities, mere consequences of light and its interruption. Shadows are qualitative attributes of the bodies that secrete them. They are time-dependent realms that change their contours with the hour and season, momentary life zones where the shadow-casting mountain or boulder or body quietly envelops and gathers a range of other bodies under its sway.

Film: Vitalina Varela (2019) dir. Pedro Costa

3. Flame. “Fire” by Arthur Brown

Flattering, cozy, contemplative, fun to watch; we love candles for warm light and atmosphere. A wick focuses the light source to a fine point, rather than an uncontrolled inferno. In Disenchanted Night, a history of the development of artificial lighting, Wolfgang Schivelbusch compares the technology of the candle to its predecessor, the torch:

In the torch, people experienced the elemental, destructive power of fire—a reflection of their own still-untamed drives. In the candle flame, burning steadily and quietly, fire had become as pacified and regulated as the culture that it illuminated. The flame cultivated for light thousands of years ago re­mained essentially unchanged until the eighteenth century. When more light was needed, it was produced simply by multi­plying the number of individual lights. Like fireworks, festive illuminations were a standard part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century courtly culture. They were produced by burning thousands of individual lights, consuming sums similar to those spent on other forms of ostentatious waste under the ancien regime. In 1688, 24,000 lights were used to illuminate the park of Versailles alone, presumably all wax candles—an extremely costly form of lighting normally used for royal displays. (Feudal light festivals in other forms were also expensive, especially fireworks, which had developed out of the primal bonfire.)

Film: Orlando (1992) dir. Sally Potter
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) dir. Céline Sciamma, article about how that film was lit.

4. Electric Light. “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” by Richard and Linda Thompson

Disenchanted Night is full of anecdotes about social responses to artificial lighting technologies. The book shows people grappling with, and adjusting to, the new types of lights that keep emerging. Light is always shifting in color, quality, placement, intensity, the fuel it uses, and emotional states that it evokes. Older sources shine on alongside new lights. 

One shift that Disenchanted Night traces in the late 19th century is from gaslight to electricity in homes and public spaces. Some inventors and city planners were dazzled at first by the potential of bright, white overhead electric arc lights (instead of relatively dim gas streetlamps). Electric arc lights might work like artificial suns, eliminating darkness over a large area. Schivelbusch says “the aim of all public lighting in the 1880s was to make the streets so bright that one could read a newspaper and see the flies on the walls of houses.” 

He describes how peoples’ eyes reacted to a mix of older (gas) and new electric streetlights, quoting an 1880s medical text:

In the middle of the night, we emerge into the brightest daylight. Shop and street signs can be recognised clearly from across the street. We can even see the features of people’s faces well from quite a distance, and what is especially remarkable, the eye accustoms itself to this intense light immediately and without the slightest strain. But this impression is misleading. As soon as we look away from the broad thoroughfare into one of the side streets, where a miserable, dim gaslight is flickering, the eye-strain begins. Here darkness reigns supreme, or rather, a weak, reddish glow, that is hardly enough to prevent collisions in the entrances of houses or on the stairs; in a word, the most wretched light prevails. The pupil dilates laboriously and the retina tries to catch the smallest ray of light. The electric lantern, by contrast, emits a powerful light which illuminates both sides of the streets, chases away the shadows, floods every corner with light, because it is reflected from the pavement and the walls of houses, and eventually dissipates into the clouds.

Towering electric lights were impractical for a lot of cities, but Schivelbusch cites Detroit, MI, as an example of a city that actually implemented an arc light tower system in the 1880s. A network of 150 feet-high towers “created districts or belts of light that bore no relation to individual streets. They simply laid themselves over the town like a uniform carpet of light.” 

These overpowering overhead light towers look to me like the contemporary light towers that the NYPD uses for surveillance. Detroit’s towers were eventually replaced with more spatially-aware electric street lamps. 

Film: Dazed and Confused (1993), dir. Richard Linklater. This NYT article talks about Austin, TX’s “Moon Towers”—a nickname for the electric arc lights sold to the city of Austin after being decommissioned in Detroit. One of the towers is a location in the film. 

5. City as Light Source. “Downtown” by Petula Clark

Now that big cities have long been electrified, one of the pleasures of living in an urban place is the mix of bright lights: commercial lighting, street lighting, vehicles, windows. Neon, incandescent, fluorescent, LED—cityscapes at night are a visual spectacle illuminated by a grid of overlapping light sources.

There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks in the clouds. Only Hieronymus Bosch’s hell can match this inferno effect. The muted fluorescence of all the diagonals: Wilshire, Lincoln, Sunset, Santa Monica. Already, flying over San Fernando Valley, you can see the horizontal infinite in every direction. But, once you are beyond the mountain, a city ten times larger hits you. You will never have encountered anything that stretches as far as this before. Even the sea cannot match it, since it is not divided up geometrically. The irregular, scattered flickering of European cities does not produce the same parallel lines, the same vanishing points, the same aerial perspectives either. They are medieval cities. This one condenses by night the entire future geometry of the networks of human relations, gleaming in their abstraction, luminous in their extension, astral in their reproduction to infinity. Mulholland Drive by night is an extraterrestrial’s vantage point on earth, or conversely, an earth-dweller’s vantage point on the galactic metropolis.  

From America (1988) by Jean Baudrillard, excerpted in West of the West : imagining California : an anthology (1995).

The academic subfield of “Night Studies” is a nice detour here. It studies the nuances of how people live at night, moving between light and darkness. 

Films: The Exiles (1961), dir. Kent Mackenzie 

Still from The Exiles featuring the 3rd street tunnel in Los Angeles. Sodium halide streetlights were the standard at this time in LA. The Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting has a cool little museum about the history of the city’s streetlights, you can tour it virtually. 

6. LED. “Love Shine a Light” by Katrina and the Waves

The contemporary era is increasingly lit by LED (light-emitting diode) fixtures of all kinds. They’re less expensive, and more energy efficient and long-lasting than older lights. The 3rd street tunnel in Los Angeles featured in The Exiles (pictured above) now looks like this (a little tacky IMO, but LEDs obviously don’t have to be).

Light is cheaper and more abundant than ever, in a lot of places, which is obviously useful, but more light doesn’t come without its problems. Light pollution is rampant, and animals and insects may be confused by the increased disruption of natural light-and-dark cycles. Scientists have found that bright LED lights endanger fireflies, for one, by disrupting their mating cycle (Massive Science article). The fireflies are entranced by bright LED lights and don’t want to leave them—lights function as a trap. The Dark-Sky Association works “to protect the night from light pollution.” Their website has a list of dark sky parks and preserves to visit to see the stars.

In a bright time, many films don’t look that illuminated—you don’t technically need as much light to film contemporary video images, thanks to highly sensitive digital sensors that can function in very low light. Contemporary LED film/video lighting often bathes an environment in a dreamy, soft wash, without the harder edges and the intensity of older light sources. 

Film: Cemetery of Splendor (2015) dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Looking at Light references The Beach: Beginnings and Endings, a syllabus by Emma Ben Ayoun.