The detail is so precise, so committed that every flicker crawls under the skin, projecting terrible uncertainty and fear to the audience.In MGM’s pursuit of making their own film adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 hit play Gas Light, the studio unknowingly played a little gaslighting themselves. The heaviness of the atmosphere brings us even closer to Paula’s mental state, trapping us with her. Gaslight features much more stern lamps, hanging fixtures that marry elegance with a sinister sort of restraint.īetween the streetlights outside and the fixtures within, the mood is forever dimmed. This is before the arrival of the Arts and Crafts movement, a fad that introduced floral and folk designs into more sober Victorian homes. Moreover, the light fixtures themselves capture an even more specific time. This story could only take place in Victorian London. In the late 1930s, when the original play was written, gas lighting was already gone. The other important piece is that these lights signify a constricting temporality as well. It lends an eerie incompleteness to the spaces, as well as a subtle metaphor of how completely Gregory keeps Paula in the dark. So he makes her doubt her senses, severing her ties to reality.Īs you’ll notice in the picture, only one of the four lights in the fixture is illuminated in the first place. That and the sounds of someone rummaging above. However, gas lighting works in such a way that she’ll know from the dimming of the lights in her bedroom that someone is in the attic. He needs to get into the attic without Paula knowing, so he can search for her aunt’s jewels. He proceeds to systematically destroy Paula’s psychological well-being, taking terrible advantage of this preserved locus of trauma.īut it’s the specific, highly-plotted reason for his cruel deceptions that make Gaslight so iconic. On Gregory’s request, they move back to Alice’s London house. Their honeymoon on Lake Como is utterly ridiculous, a suspicious fantasy en plein air before the dank misery and abuse to follow. Then the film leaps forward to the end of her studies and her abrupt marriage to Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), a creep. Her niece, Paula (Bergman), is sent away to a friend of her aunt’s in Italy. Alice Alquist, a world-famous opera singer, is murdered in her London home. The first thing we see are the streetlights, surrounded by a heavy darkness. The film begins with a quick, almost vague impression of an initial trauma. In Gaslight, the lighting of the set is no more or less important than the lighting in the set. The look of a film is always the product of collaboration between artists. We may usually think of shadows and light as the domain of the cinematographer, but there’s much more that goes into an image. Gaslight’s second Oscar went to its design team, art directors Cedric Gibbons and William Ferrari and set decorators Edwin B. Nor for cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg, who lost to Joseph LaShelle’s work on Laura. Not for director George Cukor, who wasn’t even nominated. However, the film did win a second Oscar. Her performance is astonishing, newly powerful with each successive viewing. The 1944 version is mostly remembered for winning Ingrid Bergman her first Oscar, and deservedly so. Of course, these days the term has been almost completely divorced from memory of the original play or its various adaptations. It was so effective that “gaslighting” stuck, and has remained a popularly understood concept nearly 75 years after the film debuted. Basically, I’d like to talk about the way that Gaslight (1944) uses gas lighting to distill the concept of gaslighting. That’s in addition to gaslighting, which is obviously related. This week I’d like to talk about gas lighting. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail. "The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design.
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