Our theme for the month of March is “light.”

I want to be the Messiah again, he says in voice-over as the shot tracks in suddenly on his upper body, poised in the center of the frame with arms outstretched on a shoddily constructed cross. He’s naked with his knees tucked towards his chest, a heavy crown of thorns on his bowed head, thin streams of blood on his torso. He raises his head slowly, and it begins to cut back and forth between pensive close-ups of his face and what he casts his gaze around to see: a turbulent crowd, thieves groaning on adjacent crosses, his crying mother. And he begins to smile, his head lifting to the left as his mouth slowly widens into something like joy: It is accomplished. He says it again, but this time quietly and to himself, a series of shrieking, shrill sounds following— and his image gives way to a warble of color, distortions that bleach the screen into yellow before melding into a rusty red, and something like Easter bells rise to the top of the sound mix as the credits roll. 

Behind-the-scenes legend has it that the overexposure which concludes The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988) was by accident. When we used to capture the vast majority of films on actual celluloid (in the far-off times of pre-2008), one of the assumed parameters was protecting the film strip from an excess of light. The basic chemical process of photography—exposing light-sensitive crystals to just enough light to recall an image—requires careful execution and handling of the material. If the image was exposed to too much light, it would cause too many of the crystals to react and fill in the distinctions of the image. This creates the color-warbling effect in the final moments of The Last Temptation, with the concluding shot seamlessly giving way to various shifting hues as—supposedly—the film strip was overexposed by a camera operating error.

I have never verified whether it is true that this overexposure was unintentional; in fact, I have never tried to verify it. Some of this is that, at times, behind-the-scenes legends are difficult to prove or disprove—hearsay is difficult to track, and many studios value the attention of rumors over their truth. But the primary reason is that I want to believe it was by accident. 

For years, film theorists, critics, and academics debated fundamental questions about the relationship of film to reality: is it reproduction or representation? Should film be trying to mimic reality as closely as it can, or should it embrace—or perhaps even maximize—its ability to reshape our perception? Is objectivity possible in film? I think it is easy to see how the debate has shaken out, at least in practice; in a cinematic landscape of massive budgets, increasingly computer generated worlds, and numerous post-production options, it is hard to see examples of—or really even make the case for—film adhering to perceptual reality in a committed way.

But I am still partial—if only on an emotional (or perhaps spiritual) level—to this idea that film and reality are fundamentally tied together, perhaps even in ways that go beyond photographic reproduction. That whatever connects us to the experiences on screen, whatever lulls us into them or gets us into theaters is more than just creative construction, an artificial manipulation of factors to cue viewers into particular effects and attitudes. I want to believe that—despite the ways that even when a film is trying to mimic perceptual reality, it still doctors it in numerous ways—part of the power of the cinematic experience is really the power of our world, of our plain, everyday, boring reality and its plain, everyday, boring people.

One of the basic assumptions in film studies is that everything you see on screen is deliberately there, either specifically designed and executed or the result of pragmatic, structural parameters. Each frame precisely composed and cut, each music or audio cue carefully timed, each second of the screen labored over, such that when light comes down the aperture whatever has been laid out before it arrives for a purpose on the film strip. That image, now mapped onto celluloid, then tastes light again in just the right amount, the purpose it holds emerging in color and shape before being edited into a precise order. 

But what about when reality imposes itself on the image—and not just its basic spatial rules or physical being that filmmakers must organize around via staging, set design, cinematography, and so forth? What about when the light reaches into the camera too quickly, too fully, and the image of a man on a cross emulsifies into flaming colors, as if the image itself could not contain him, as if somehow the act of sacrifice and redemption that fundamentally alters our very reality could not be captured by composing reality, but rather reality had to assert itself in strands of light, in photochemical processes to maintain its mystery, and by extension, speak its truth? 

What about those times when the world was light before us, light reaching into our eyes like it does the aperture, and we did not, or perhaps could not, notice the mystery that reality is until it asserted itself? What if the world only needs to be witnessed in its workings, rather than aimed towards a purpose? What if the light coming down the aperture is enough for the world to speak?

Kipp De Man

Kipp De Man graduated from Calvin University in 2023, having majored in film and media studies. He is currently working towards a master’s degree in the same discipline at Washington University in St. Louis. He enjoys reading and writing poetry, rock climbing, and Coke Zero.