Painting with Light

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An experimental video essay, Painting With Light, adapts a chapter from John Alton's 1949 cinematography textbook of the same name. In a section titled "Day or Night, Ladies watch your Light," Alton proposes an aesthetics of feminine masquerade, arguing that the soft lighting glamour photography principles of Hollywood ought to be practiced by all women in everyday life. We treat Alton's ideas as a bad gender theory object, a window into the conscientious process of gender construction operative in the classical Hollywood and our own visual culture. In her contribution to Women in Film Noir, Pam Cook writes that "light is the masculine principle which heralds the dawn of patriarchal culture." Alton was a preeminent cinematographer of film noir. This film takes Cook's claim literally. Painting With Light emphasizes continuities between industrial fantasy and gendered reality, as well as between the classical Hollywood and the #MeToo era. Set at an interdisciplinary crossroads between theory and film history, this film makes innovative use of the moving image's relationship to sound in order to revive and interrogate the hauntological presence of industrialized patriarchy within the film industry, presenting theoretical and historical research that extends beyond and internally critiques the study of film itself.