Martin Scorsese isn’t exactly known for being an emotional filmmaker. He is celebrated for telling tales of grit and glamour, stories of crooked billionaires and New York mobs, and he does so with impressive attention to detail. His filmmaking style is technically immaculate, slick and seamless, even at its most violent and unhinged. Still, there is always a sense of palpable emotion beneath the polish.
In his 2010 thriller Shutter Island, for example, Scorsese refuses to compromise on style or on substance. The film is visually stunning. High-contrast cinematography provided by Robert Richardson serves to heighten the intensity of the plot, while one of the movie’s most devastating scenes takes inspiration from a painting by Gustav Klimt. It’s a marvel to look at, but it’s also completely emotionally draining.
As we follow Leonardo Dicaprio’s character around Shutter Island, through his desperate attempts to solve the case at hand and, later on, his attempts to understand the reasons for his migraines and mixed-up memories, it’s impossible not to feel the same unease and uncertainty that he does. Particularly on first watch, when viewers have no idea what’s to come, we experience everything alongside him.
From the dread-inducing runtime of Killers of the Flower Moon to the feelings of disgust that The Wolf of Wall Street is guaranteed to leave you with upon each watch, Scorsese’s direction isn’t limited to displays of greed and violence. He entertains and emotes on-screen just as much as he exercises his stylistic prowess. In fact, the two work in service of each other.
This is a balance he learned early on in his filmmaking career. Speaking about his approach to lighting during a conversation with the Directors Guild of America, Scorsese spoke about his initial difficulties portraying emotion through this medium. “I don’t quite know how to express emotion,” he explained, “to bring out the psychological aspects of a character, with lighting.”
The skills he picked up in this area came from his watching habits in the late 1940s and 1950s and then from his studies. He recalled, “When I became a film student in the early ‘60s, we were all thinking about natural light, trying to emulate [cinematographers] Henri Decaë, Peter Suschitzky, John Alcott, the great Geoffrey Unsworth, with bounced light, indirect light — all that kind of stuff.”
They’re certainly solid names to learn from. Suschitzky worked on the cinematography for The Empire Strikes Back, while Unsworth delivered the epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, each providing a masterclass in sci-fi visuals. They also used high contrast lighting to enhance the emotion or feeling of a scene, such as the pivotal reveal in The Empire Strikes Back.
Beyond the clashing of lightsabers, the lighting in the iconic “I am your father” scene only serves the emotion and dramatics of the scene. As the light reflects off Vader’s helmet and Luke grasps on for dear life, the defeat and devastation is all the more affecting.
It’s easy to see how the classic, high-contrast cinematography of his predecessors influenced Scorsese’s own approach to conveying emotion through light. His seamless cinematography and the lighting within it always works to enhance the emotion of his characters and audiences, while also adding to his endlessly entertaining and glossy storytelling style.