ABSTRACT
Both fi lm students and independent fi lmmakers should look instead at the fi lmmakers who have made great movies with very little-whether out of necessity or by choiceand who have conceived of simple, elegant, and expressive lighting designs. For example, look at the brilliantly innovative fi lms from the French New Wave like Masculin/Féminin (Godard/Kurant), and the New German Cinema movement like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder/Jürges), and the more recent American Independent and European fi lms like Personal Velocity (Miller/Kuras) and Reconstruction (Boe/Claro), and, of course, the fearless lighting of recent Asian fi lms like Chungking Express (KarWai/Doyle) (Figure 13-1). These pictures all had relatively scant lighting resources, but used them with a profound understanding of artistry, sensitivity, and technique, which can teach us far more about lighting, camerawork, and storytelling than can the latest $150,000,000 Hollywood production.
