Richard Linklater’s film Nouvelle Vague suggests that the visual naturalism of modern cinema finds one of its founding origins in neorealism. Between the late 1950s and early 1960s, the directors of the French movement opened themselves to a cinema capable of freeing itself from the heaviest technical and production apparatus. The reality of places and the light stolen from them enter the image as if it were a documentary. An approach that influenced cinema worldwide, contributing to the birth of the New Hollywood in the 1970s, when American cinema too freed itself from the studio stages and lightened the camera apparatus.
Digital cameras — light, sensitive and compact — seem perfectly suited to a cinema inspired by that same pursuit of simplicity. Against this backdrop, reflection on the way light constructs the cinematic image today comes back to the fore: light as something governed by the rules of technique, expressive coherence and interpretation.
The progressive increase in film sensitivity consolidates the naturalistic approach, shifting attention away from the technical dimension and towards the idea of a gaze. Lights embedded within set elements become active participants in this construction, and diegetic light — central to the work of Stanley Kubrick — establishes itself as an indispensable element of contemporary cinematic language.
In Kubrick’s case, this was a genuine operational rule that allowed him to move freely through spaces, unencumbered by the constraints of classical three-point lighting. That academic system, then firmly dominant, was difficult to overcome without a director’s own initiative. The design of these light sources is today a discipline known as Practical Light Design — an approach widespread in both film and television drama, particularly in recurring settings such as police stations, hospitals, newsrooms and courtrooms, which renders environments effectively ready to shoot at any time.
Practical Light Design concerns the management of light sources visible within the frame, and represents an evolution of what was once known as “placement lighting.” This transformation profoundly alters the relationship between freedom of mise en scène and the demands of illumination. The approach requires close collaboration between the production designer and the director of photography, since the choice of light sources involves not only the appearance of the fixtures when unlit, but also their behaviour once switched on. Lamps, signs, ceiling fittings, neon tubes and sources integrated into the set become as important as the traditional equipment hired from cinematographic suppliers. Working alongside lighting workshops, the scene’s light sources are designed, modified and managed accordingly. There are some interesting Italian examples, which we shall address later.
A decisive element of this naturalistic approach — one that defines the modern image — is perceptual in nature: the lighting apparatus outside the frame must produce light that is plausible as a continuation of the diegetic source visible within the scene. The harmonisation between external lights and those inside the frame gives rise to a kind of light shaped “by ear”, governed more by personal sensitivity than by calculation.
Visual naturalism has been so thoroughly absorbed by the film and television industry that it has become the default starting point even where there is no full awareness of the language of light. What initially appears as a liberation from the infrastructure and artifice of classical staging gradually transforms into a new form of aesthetic automatism. Every visual language, once established, tends to become invisible to those who practise it — and the recent debates around so-called “Netflix light” can be partly attributed to a certain widespread lack of awareness. Hence the need to identify other terms capable of describing contemporary work on light with greater precision.
What is diegetic light?
Diegetic light is a light source that belongs to the world of the story on screen. It is a source of light that characters can see, touch or otherwise interact with: a light bulb, a window, a neon lamp, a fire, a candle, the headlights of a car at night. It is visible within the frame and contributes to illuminating the scene from inside the image.
What is agogics?
Agogics refers to the full range of expressive variations in tempo within the performance of a musical piece. It does not alter the written notes, but concerns minute variations that can have a considerable impact on the final performance: accelerations or decelerations of tempo, the lengthening or shortening of pauses, the flexibility of rhythmic flow. Notes, melody and harmony remain untouched.
What is diagogic light?
The term “diagogic light” — much like the earlier definition of “involuntary colour” — arises from the sense that the language of modern cinematographic photography lacks terms capable of describing contemporary creative processes. “Diagogic” is a compound word that brings together the concepts of diegetic and agogic.
Just as in music agogics offers the conductor a space of interpretative freedom confined to parameters such as tempo and pauses — without altering notes, melody or harmony — so diagogic light comes into being when a diegetic light source is modulated in intensity, colour, position or diffusion, continuing to illuminate the scene whilst its narrative function within the frame remains unchanged.
As an example: if we shoot a scene on a street using the actual natural light of the street lamps, we are working with diegetic light. If we intervene on those lamps — changing their bulbs, colour, intensity or diffusion — we are working within a diagogic interpretation of light, as the images from A Clockwork Orange illustrate. The narrative source remains the street lamp, the scene remains a night-time street, but these modifications can substantially alter the reading of the scene’s light.
The word “diagogic” emerges here from an attempt to fill certain terminological gaps in the language of contemporary cinematographic photography — in an area, that of the visual design of light, which still has relatively few terms to describe the work itself.
