Urgh. I LOVE Ava Duvernay. This is an interview about her direction of the last episode of #Scandal (which was CRAY!) but she also touches on a few other amazing topics including the lighting of Black folks on the screen: “I don’t appreciate seeing black folks that are unlit,” she said. “For example, although I really desperately want to work on Boardwalk Empire, I do not appreciate the way that Chalky White is not lit properly. And that doesn’t mean that he has to be over-lit. It means that’s a dark brother, and if he’s in a frame with a lighter-skinned person, you have to — you don’t automatically light for the lighter-skinned person and leave him in shadow.” Still, she loves shadows. The lighting in Middle of Nowhere was “a deliberate decision to find the beauty of black people in dark spaces. You know, because a lot of black film that’s constructed by the studios have black people in bright places all the time, and always very brightly lit and sometimes it’s lovely and beautiful. If it’s a romantic comedy, it should be that way, but the story that we were telling with Ruby, the protagonist from Middle of Nowhere, began in the house, at the end of a long shift at the hospital, and when I walk into my house, the lights aren’t on. So what do I look like when that happens, right?” DuVernay is passionate on the topic, picking up steam: “[T]he standard is ‘OK. A black woman is walking into a dark room. That’s not gonna fly. Turn a light on.’ Right? And we’ll say, ‘No. There’s natural light coming through the window and how do we shoot that so it’s just as beautiful as if all the lights are on?’ Or more beautiful. So those are the kinds of conversations [we have] and I just think it’s about really examining and pushing ourselves to go beyond the norms of how you light black folks, which is ‘turn on all the lights and hope it works.’” Friggin love her. buzzfeed/tnwhiskeywoman/ava-duvernay-is-used-to-being-her-own-shonda-rhimes
Posted on: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 23:40:57 +0000
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