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            In the director’s commentary to The Godfather Francis Ford Coppola argues that the potential for art in film remains largely untapped, saying that filmmakers have only gotten about eight percent of what the medium can achieve. The number seems arbitrary, but I agree with the sentiment – a lot of the movies out there do not push what filmmaking can do in any meaningful ways. I remember watching Metropolis on a train in Spain last year, and feeling like filmmaking was a new invention, and then lamenting how little progress film has made as an art form. This is not the fault of the artist. The film industry works on a for profit basis, making films to entertain us, not enlighten. It is a business, and the final product has to gross more than the overhead. That means audiences have to be catered to – we are given actors we are used to seeing, music that tells us how to feel, camerawork that tells us where to look, and stories that reaffirm what we already know, all within

When a film is good, we are drawn into the story, despite knowing that the characters are actually actors, that most often the place they are acting is a set, and that the clothes they wear are costumes. Even if we remain aware of all this, in the course of a movie we are likely to not think of all the technical elements that went into making it. Specifically, a regular audience never thinks about how films are lit. Perhaps some of you have read up on this or worked on films, and know something about lighting, maybe you even know that often films are lit from a fake ceiling. Lighting helps to establish a certain mood and feel for a film, and how a film is lit is always carefully considered before production begins. I thought it would be interesting to look at three films from one director that used different methods of lighting. It is no secret that I see Stanley Kubrick as the master of film. People are lucky if they create one masterpiece in life, he made no less than seven. He intr