The Ridley Scott Film Festival

Visually cool movies-o-rama


My goal of writing an entry every day hasn't worked out as well as could be hoped; so sue me.

What I have been doing is trying to finish up the quarter without the quarter finishing up me. My stomach has been doing cartwheels like you wouldn't believe; I'm stressed out over LA; and the house is a total mess. Oh yes, and I still haven't recovered from my insomnia of a few nights ago. Other than all this, I am as adorable and cheerful as ever.

One of the things I had to do to wrap up the quarter was write my final paper for my Film Lighting class. The optimal thing to do would have been to analyze the lighting in some project that I have shot over the past two years. However, I suffer from Embarrasitis Gigantitis; that is, I have a hell of a time looking at anything I've done without feeling a need to hide.

So instead I decided to analyze the lighting scheme for an entire film (one of the options for the assignment), and if you're going to analyze an entire film, pick one worth analyzing--say, anything by Ridley Scott. Usually Scott's film are derided for being "visually spectacular." As Mr. Scott himself would say, "They're films, aren't they, they're supposed to be good to look at."

I pulled out the Director's Cut of Blade Runner, which is a movie I haven't seen for a while, and started going through it, all the while asking myself the question: How did Scott and Co. get such a dark image on screen without resorting to simply showing two hours of unexposed film set to Vangelis music? When I get the paper back I'll post it up here, but suffice it to say I decided the key was the use of silhouette lighting: almost every scene is lighter in the background (often the deep background) than in the foreground, giving the entire film a dark and murky feel. The use of smoke and mist in every scene (not to mention giant puddles of water everywhere) underscores the murkiness.

All together now, Internet science-fiction fans: My God, Deckard is the sixth replicant!

Okay. So tonight the hilarity continued as I rented Alien, the movie Scott made right before Blade Runner. I hadn't seen it since it first came out in 1979. It's a pretty damn effective little film, the old "haunted house in space." A couple of us sat around and made jokes the whole time, but the film still got me a couple of times and I wasn't the only one who jumped.

We were left with one teeny-tiny question though: who the hell would dream up a self-destruct sequence on a cargo vessel? On a military vessel, sure...but wait a second: are battleships built with self-destruct sequences? Who thought this idea up?

By the way, the other reason I decided to pick up Alien this evening, other than to analyze Scott's nascent key-light-the-subject-on-the-far-side-of-the-face style, was because my stomach was feeling a little iffy. And sure enough: I was at dinner tonight in a restaurant and unable to contemplate eating anything on the plate in front of me. Darin begged me to try to eat something (I was so hungry, having had only 75 percent of a bagel and a candy bar up until that point). So I delicately munched down one bite of food. I began contemplation of the second bite when I realized I was going to start my dry heaving, never a pleasant thing to do during dinner, and I stood up to walk outside.

Blaaaaat! I tossed my bite of food and all the water I'd drunk all over the restaurant floor, which was, thankfully, made of tile.

During the movie later on I ate two pieces of cheese toast, which seem to have settled gracefully. Except for the fact that I'm writing this at 1am on the 21st. Hmmmm. I'd best rethink this.

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Last Updated: 21-Jun-96
©1996 Diane Patterson