Word: chiaroscuro
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...CONFIDENTIAL Everybody knows the rudiments of the classic film-noir manner: chiaroscuro lighting, labyrinthine plots, dialogue written in battery acid. Working up imitations of it has become one of modern Hollywood's minor vices. But--a point usually missed--the style was never an end in itself. At its best it conveyed an idea about how the rottenness of big cities touches everyone, high and low, respectable and raffish. Director Curtis Hanson, working off James Ellroy's bitterly brewed novel about corrupt 1950s cops, gets that wonderfully right in a smart, complex film that exuberantly mixes comic excess, melodramatic pressure...
...directors improvised as well. In early talkies the camera could hardly move, but Dudley Murphy's Black and Tan Fantasy (1929) daringly depicted the Duke Ellington composition in bold chiaroscuro, then used woozy prismatic images to show that a star dancer (the gorgeous Fredi Washington) is feeling ill before she goes on for a fatal final number. Fred Waller directed Ellington's Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1934) with artful lighting of black laborers, and moody shadows caressing the young Billie Holiday. Aubrey Scotto set most of A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932) in a cleaning...
...visitor a coup de theatre, and it does. After a low entranceway the space soars, thanks to a circular well that rises clear through the building and finishes in the slanting oculus 130 ft. above. It transmits enough light down through the building for Botta to use a dramatic chiaroscuro of materials without sinking the interior in gloom-a striped floor of black and gray granite, for example...
...Cartier-Bresson. Just as Peter Greenaway calls to mind old master paintings in the composition of his scenes, Kaurismaki insinuates these great photographers of Paris, as well as the tradition of French black-and-white film. He spares no effort to achieve this effect, using a double dose of chiaroscuro lighting and urban mist...
...When Nathan Leopold (Craig Chester) and Richard Loeb (Daniel Schlachet), two rich young homosexuals, murdered the child Bobby Franks, they were creating a portrait of themselves: powerful elitists, unsullied by the vulgarity of conscience. Director Kalin -- a comer -- is smart enough not to explain the murderers. Instead, in a chiaroscuro cinema style that suggests morgue photos taken by Cecil Beaton, he presents the pair as stars of their own camp pageant, a sickly sweet deb ball, where the revelers dance all night on the bodies of their inferiors, then wake up to find their dreams in chains...