Light makes the fairy tale… from Drive’s auteur Nicholas Wending Refn
I love this scene from Drive because it expresses this simple idea: light is magic. All my life I’ve believed that even if I haven’t said it aloud. But I know it because light has deeply affected me for as long as I can remember. Every time the winter would come I always found myself lost; drowning in some well of despair. As a teenager my responses became more pronounced as I fell into dark periods of depression that simply melted away when the spring came. Living in Chicago where the sun seemed to disappear for 9 months of the year only made it worse. It wasn’t until I left Chicago and went to Miami that I realized how important the sun really was to me. My skin felt so alive; I felt infused with energy, ambition and intention as I basked in the sun’s warmth, I might have even glowed. I now know that I have seasonal affective disorder but somehow I felt there was more to my relationship with the light; there was something deeper.
I have often associated darkness as a place of pain. However darkness is also a place of secrets, and in some ways secrets are a relative of pain. In my family I have learned that secrets are never good. Secrets beget shame; they hide things that we don’t want to see light: ugliness, agony, regret, sorrow. Secrets especially ones held for too long can hurt, they can injure. Personally I have learned that secrets can imprison. They can keep us from releasing some piece of our past; that piece can make us stay there and out of the present forever. In my memoir The Book to Light and Becoming I start to investigate the secrets that have held me back, the darkest corners of my memory that ensconced the stories I wished to forget. Unfortunately secrets are a part of my emotional and spiritual landscape; to deny them is to deny some piece of myself. What I discovered is when these secrets are kept, bad things happen. That may sound ominous but it’s true–secrets have a cost. It’s the secrets we don’t talk about that inflict the most damage on our physical selves but also our psyche, our spirit. But I believe we have a choice, a choice that I think the world wants us to make. I think that choice is provided to us in the reality where dreams exist. Flashbacks of rape, or incest, of death or violence, even profound disappointment and abandonment come to us parceled out. They come to us this way because sometimes we are not strong enough to process these whole experiences of our past. But if we can, I believe we find something mightier, something magnanimous. We find power in the truth; often we find freedom. This is the journey that Marie must make in Repass.
Lighting in a film is requisite. If the frame is the filmmaker’s canvas, then lighting is the paint; it is the language of visual storytelling. It is where the magic happens. The relationship between darkness and light can suggest obscurity, shadows summon suspicion. A light that leads us foreshadows, while a light we follow builds suspense. A light that expands or contracts shows a movement of time. Light can penetrate, infiltrate, and expose. Darkness hides, tantalizes, and frightens. Light can make that which is hard soft, and soften the hardest lines; the light can harm or heal. Our manipulation of the light is the most powerful tool we have not only as filmmakers, but as living beings. Light is the stuff of our dreams, of our happiness, of our spirit; light is the beginning of life itself as we leave the womb. It is the light that we each have, sometimes called our “inner light,” that defines us. I believe that is what we try to mimic on film. All the technology we have in the world we keep improving to do what natural light does: create magic because there is nothing in the world like it.
Imagine your favorite films and the scenes that you never forget. Often times they are deeply emotional scenes, but that emotion has been conveyed as a function of the light. There is nothing like the cascade of sun rays through a window, the waves of light that follow the setting sun, or even the moonlight that caresses the passionate kiss. There is nothing so enchanting as capturing those overlapping spheres of light as a film camera aims at the sun. It’s awe inspiring. It makes life seem livable. Lighting is not simply a set of nuts and bolts that create a bulb of electricity, or even the layers of shade we provide. It’s an art of the mind and the sight. Lighting is magic. It makes things happen and makes things come alive. If science and magic are at odds, let it not be over this—let them exchange luminosity with each other. As filmmakers we are so very lucky to have that gift which brings our frames to the screen. My most honorable thanks go to Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers.
As I approach my vision of lighting for Repass, I am meticulous about how the light should be articulated and the story it should tell. Light and dark play a pivotal role to the disclosing of a secret, a very special secret because it holds the key to the family’s survival. But that secret is parceled out to Marie and to the audience because the shame and the anguish, the guilt—whether deserved or undeserved—are too much to bear… for Marie but also for us as the audience.
On the hot burning streets of summer New Orleans, the light becomes ferocious, like a tiger. The sun is ever present during the day and harshest as it uncovers all the truths that have tried to remain hidden: dead bodies on the streets, rampant decay, defecation and emaciation, the assaulted, ravaged and abandoned. These are the truths which the cameras did not always see, did not want audiences to witness. The light bears down on all of this to reveal what was never been talked about when Hurricane Katrina came, the words and images that were suppressed. The sun does not apologize, it burns and seethes with anger for the suffering. On the streets as we follow Marie during the day, she runs from the truth so she runs from the light. And it is brutal. Searing palettes of sallow yellows and orange, almost red will intimidate and project alarm. We turn the light into a gruesome force because everyone wants to escape the truth.
But the darkness provides the illusion of safety and security just as in real life. We often want to pretend that conflicts don’t exist, that issues will go away, that problems will somehow resolve on their own even when we know this cannot be true. So the darkness of the water becomes solace, a siren to death. Darkness provides cover from the truth of what is happening. Marie is mesmerized by the rituals of her mother’s voodoo rituals. They are grotesque but she returns to them each time feeling an unspoken to connection not to her mother but to the ritual, the spirits, the gods themselves. Only in the cemeteries does she find comfort. There the light is at a balance because it is a place where the living and dead meet. Marie is strangely at peace here and with the dead and the dying, more so than any of the adults. A palette of blues, purples and greens envelope her.
As Marie moves through the story we watch the light transform as she comes closer to knowing the truth of what happened to her brother. The yellow softens, and blues become more black as reality seeps into the family’s consciousness. But it isn’t until the secret is revealed that the palettes meet each other finding a balance that makes the next day possible. A holy white light emerges, in segments at first and then with fullness as it foretells a tender ending of forgiveness and resilience. That light is the light that we all seek in the world, like the inner light that is in each of us: it is the light of hope that allows us to make our dreams reality.
The Making of The Repass 