Ah, the lens flare.
An exciting effect, a beautiful image,
now reduced to another keystroke in a suite of special effects in the
digital cinematography platform.
I was watching a routine, earnest film
called “Denial,” when, near the end of the movie, the director
Mick Jackson and his cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, all of a
sudden seemed to have discovered the lens flare. None appeared in the
first 100 minutes of the movie, but in a few scenes in the last 10
minutes? Blue and golden horizontal streaks suddenly appear. It was
as though they had just watched a 'Star Trek' reboot. (A better title
for this earnest melodrama would have been 'Denied!')
That this has even become a thing is
due, of course, to JJ Abrams, the godfather of the aforementioned
'Star Trek' franchise, who took the horizontal blue streak lens flare
to something like a fetish, if not an art form.
There have been many articles written
in the past several years decrying the use of the fabricated lens
flare in digital photography, and there are reports that Abrams
himself has said he took the effect too far.
But where did it all
begin?
Without access to all the literature on
the subject, and reading published articles online, there seems to be
some consensus that the lens flare came into prominence in the late
1960s, thanks to the work of artists such as Conrad Hall, Haskell
Wexler, and Laszlo Kovacs. They each used the lens flare to reframe
the idea of what a modern movie should look like. If you showed
light, whether from the sun, or a headlght, refracted through the
camera lens, then you obviously did not shoot the film in a studio.
It was a great symbol for the new freedom.
Prior to that, lens flares were
assiduously avoided. It has been famously reported that Orson Welles
and Gregg Toland coated the lens of the camera during the shooting of
'Citizen Kane' to ensure that no lens flares occurred. The idea was
that the audience should not be aware that they were watching a film
— it was in a time when artists believed in the idea of the
'suspension of disbelief.'
Those days, as we have so often noted
here, are long gone.
But one of the great and most honored
cinematographers of all time, Leon Shamroy, experimented with the
idea of a lens flare before anyone else.
Shamroy was nominated for an Academy
Award 18 times, and won four. He was meticulous, and precise.
So when did he use the lens flare?
In “Leave Her To Heaven” a
gorgeously shot Technicolor film from 1945. It is often called the
first 'film noir' in color, but I'm not sure that's right. The
villain, played by Gene Tierney (in her only Oscar nominated role),
is insane, but no one else in the film is.
In the words of the great
JJ Hunsecker, the character played by Burt Lancaster in “The Sweet
Smell of Success,” every character in film noir should be “a
cookie full of arsenic.” Outside of Tierney's character Ellen
Berent, everyone in 'Leave Her To Heaven' is a saint. So this is no
film noir.
But there is one scene that is
deservedly famous; a nasty, brutal scene.
Ellen takes Danny, the
little brother of her new husband, swimming. Danny has polio and his legs
are paralyzed, but he wants to swim the length of the lake in Maine
where they are spending the summer. Ellen follows the boy in a rowboat. Danny, as Ellen knew he would, succumbs to his cramps and drowns.
But as Danny flounders and cries out, Ellen hears her husband whistling as he walks
on shore, and yells, in fake concern, “Danny!” and dives
into the water as if to save him. The husband, played by the reliably
wooden Cornel Wilde, hears the screams, and as he runs closer to the
lake, Shamroy employs a judicious lens flare to ratchet up the
tension. The effect is brief, maybe a second or so — a slight lens flare (seen below) — but it adds to the brutal realism of the scene. It's a beautiful cinematic moment. Shamroy knew what he was doing. After all, he won the Oscar for his work on this film.
It is up to scholars more estimable
than I to declare whether this is the first official use of a lens
flare.
But as John Lennon once said of The Beatles' single, “I Feel Fine,” that song may feature the first instance of guitar feedback on a recording, but unless it is on some unknown blues record that no one knows about, we'll never know for sure.
The lens flare occurs at 3:12 in the following clip: