Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro is a term in art for a contrast between light and dark. The term is usually applied to bold contrasts affecting a whole composition, but is also more technically used by artists and art historians for the use of effects representing contrasts of light, not necessarily strong, to achieve a sense of volume in modeling three-dimensional objects such as the human body.
Chiaroscuro is used in cinematography to indicate extreme low-key lighting to create distinct areas of light and darkness in films, especially in black and white films. Classic examples are The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941).
However, possibly the best-known example of chiaroscuro in modern filmmaking is the Italian film Cinema Paradiso.
Frank Miller's Sin City is an example of this style in both the graphic novel and the subsequent film, as is Mike Mignola's Hellboy.
In photography, chiaroscuro is often effected with the use of "Rembrandt lighting". In more highly-developed photographic processes, this technique may also be termed "ambient/natural lighting", although when done so for the effect, the look is artificial and not generally documentary in nature.0
Possibly the most direct personification of the intent of chiaroscuro in filmmaking, though, would perhaps be Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, in which the principal photography was shot primarily with a modified Mitchell BNC camera, and a Zeiss lens manufactured for the rigors of space photography, with a maximum aperture of f/.7. When informed that no lens currently had a wide enough aperture to shoot a costume drama set in grand palaces using only candle-light, Kubrick bought and retrofitted a special lens for these purposes. The naturally unaugmented lighting situations in the film exemplified low-key, natural lighting in filmwork at its most extreme outside of the Eastern European/Soviet filmmaking tradition (itself exemplified by the harsh low-key lighting style employed by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein).
With the recent advent of high-speed filmmaking, Barry Lyndon has not stood long as the lone example of unaugmented cinematic chiaroscuro realism. Darius Khondji (Se7en), Janus Kaminski (Saving Private Ryan), carry on the technique using film that, in some instances, is up to 20x faster than the film Kubrick shot Barry Lyndon on.
