Lighting has been crucial to acting since the concoction of plays. Lighting is obviously a necessity to see what characters are feeling, but also with many movies watched at drive-ins, most movies had to be very brightly lit to be visible from their cars.

In early Hollywood films, three-point lighting was often used to capture every aspect of the character. But as time went on, new films tried different ways of lighting scenes to capture a different essence. One of the movies to do this was The Godfather. This movie contained many scenes in which only half of a character’s face was lit. As explained in the analysis below, this type of lighting was a way of illustrating that the characters had a level of secrecy. This kind of light deprivation had been used before, but The Godfather cinematographer, Gordon Willis, was named “The Prince of Darkness” for fully encapsulating the effect.

Lighting can surely affect the mood of films like in The Godfather. The change in lighting alone can tell its own story especially when the general mood of the film is a bit dreary. The Godfather truly shows that if the lighting matches the narrative, it proves for a captivating experience