If cinema can lay claim to a single square on the periodic table, it’s the one listed under atomic number 10: neon. Neon is cinema’s element. Cinema is modernity’s art form. They just fit.
Film and neon came of age practically simultaneously. Auguste and Louis Lumière hold their first public film screening in 1895; British chemists Sir William Ramsay and Morris Travers discover neon in 1898. Excellently timed for the turn of the century, the chemists give their discovery a name derived from neos, the Greek word for new. Both newfangled wonders proliferate rapidly through urbanizing cities. A new public hungers to be dazzled by electric light in sensational colours and a flood of images in hypnotizing motion. Purveyors of the latter soon seize upon the former, building cinemas luxurious enough to warrant the term “movie palace” and crowning them with tubes twirled and bent into regal names: the Rex, the Coronet, the Grand, the Colosseum. An audience can now be beckoned from blocks away.
In a storm, in the Bible, and in film history, light always comes before sound. Even before they can render it in colour, and certainly before they can capture its buzz, filmmakers train their cameras on the new glow. Seconds after darkness falls in Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, Walter Ruttmann fills the screen with the signs of his city’s glistening movie palaces. Marquees shimmer back at him from the surfaces of tram windows and wet streets. Welcome to the new city of the 20th century, enlivened by a new neon nighttime.
"An audience can now be beckoned from blocks away."
Television proliferates, and it drains the movie palaces of loyal (and paying) subjects. The once-faithful now congregate in living rooms instead of Le Louxor, El Capitan, or The Castro. But there is one territory where television cannot go for decency’s sake, and it saves a very specific type of cinema: movie palace as pleasure palace. For Christine in Bette Gordon’s neo-noir Variety, selling tickets at one such upstanding establishment in pre-Giuliani Times Square is just a job. When she takes a call in the nearby phone booth, the neon-lit words “PUSSYCAT” and “GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS” pulse, blink, flicker over her face behind its glass. Bit by bit, she becomes obsessed with the explicit images and with one of her theatre’s regulars. Illicit fascination almost radiates off the lights, and seeps, it seems, straight into her skin.
To the human eye, neon has no natural analogue. Its yellow glow bears no resemblance to sunlight. To experience the full effect, it needs to be dark. It needs to be like a cinema, where sunlight is necessarily forbidden. Absent natural light we lose our bearings. It’s jarring to emerge from a theatre into nighttime, having entered it in the brightness of the afternoon. In Dario Argento’s Suspiria, daylight rarely penetrates Tanz Akademie. Its twisted funhouse labyrinth is lit in hyper-saturated greens, blues, and reds—neon hues without neon sources. Forget the witches. This alone is enough to unmoor a girl from her most basic senses of time, direction, and space.
Filmed correctly, a neon sign can be as interesting as that which it sheds light on. Its illumination can act as a demarcation that separates the all-seeing decency of daytime from evening’s more shadowy pleasures. Natural dusk is neon dawn, captured perfectly in the montage of Los Angeles’ neon signs stuttering to life in Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood. Electricity floods the tubes of Musso & Frank’s Grill and Chili John’s in short, halting bursts. It looks and sounds effortful. Watching it happen on screen invokes one of Robert Bresson’s shortest, strangest notes on le cinématographe: “Shudderings of images awakening.”
Neon communicates. It emits light while saying something. The elemental material is the message. The message is the material bent into language. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, neon offers stark declarations of a domineering supercomputer’s unyielding logic: NORD, SUD, E=mc2. The camera looks into the light-as-message, and into the pitch-black behind it. Gone is Paris’ famed ambient glow. Gone is any gray area. There is only the capital as a brutal, binary, Huxleyan cityscape.
Neon signs mark the cityscape—not only Godard’s reconfigured version of Paris but Michael Mann’s faithfully rendered Chicago in Thief. Shot from above, the city’s neon glides over the hood of James Caan’s black Cadillac, symmetrical and kaleidoscopic. In a straightforward thriller populated by otherwise “plausible people,” to quote Roger Ebert, it’s a moment of decadent visual seduction.
And who can resist? Neon seduces because such harmony of colour and light is seductive, because it looks so beautiful against black, because people look beautiful awash in it. In the climactic scene of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Romeo—bloodied, grief-stricken, and come to die—is bathed in the cold blue light of the neon crosses lining the church. Sleeping Juliet, blissfully unaware of the fatal chaos that has transpired, lies in the soft golden hue of several hundred candles. The camera drifts slowly from desperation to tranquillity, cold to warm, unfeeling electric light to our most basic, warmth-giving light source. The end is inevitable. But don’t they both look so beautiful?
Even snuffed out, neon creates atmosphere in a movie that could otherwise never be described as atmospheric. In Mars Attacks!, Danny DeVito gets blown to smithereens by an alien invader among the rows of disused signs in Las Vegas’ neon graveyard. The aftershock inadvertently zaps several of the surrounding signs back to glittering life in a sort of morbidly campy visual gag. Elsewhere the most satisfying neon scenes are the subtlest ones. Behind the counter of the Sweetheart Wines & Liquor in Moonstruck, a husband and wife quibble over his wandering eye. A beat, while the change switches hands. “You know what I see in you?” he responds. “The girl I married.” Everyone smiles, even Cher’s Loretta, whose pragmatism regarding matters of the heart borders on cynicism. The scene practically emanates from the blushing pink glow of the heart-shaped sign hanging in the background.
Neon and cinema beguile for much the same reasons, with their sensory-upending and unconcealed artificiality that nevertheless illuminates. They share the basic principles of light, darkness, colour, and contrast. The electric glow is the medium, and the medium is modernity manifest.
If cinema can lay claim to a single square on the periodic table, it’s the one listed under atomic number 10: neon. Neon is cinema’s element. Cinema is modernity’s art form. They just fit.
Film and neon came of age practically simultaneously. Auguste and Louis Lumière hold their first public film screening in 1895; British chemists Sir William Ramsay and Morris Travers discover neon in 1898. Excellently timed for the turn of the century, the chemists give their discovery a name derived from neos, the Greek word for new. Both newfangled wonders proliferate rapidly through urbanizing cities. A new public hungers to be dazzled by electric light in sensational colours and a flood of images in hypnotizing motion. Purveyors of the latter soon seize upon the former, building cinemas luxurious enough to warrant the term “movie palace” and crowning them with tubes twirled and bent into regal names: the Rex, the Coronet, the Grand, the Colosseum. An audience can now be beckoned from blocks away.
In a storm, in the Bible, and in film history, light always comes before sound. Even before they can render it in colour, and certainly before they can capture its buzz, filmmakers train their cameras on the new glow. Seconds after darkness falls in Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, Walter Ruttmann fills the screen with the signs of his city’s glistening movie palaces. Marquees shimmer back at him from the surfaces of tram windows and wet streets. Welcome to the new city of the 20th century, enlivened by a new neon nighttime.
"An audience can now be beckoned from blocks away."
Television proliferates, and it drains the movie palaces of loyal (and paying) subjects. The once-faithful now congregate in living rooms instead of Le Louxor, El Capitan, or The Castro. But there is one territory where television cannot go for decency’s sake, and it saves a very specific type of cinema: movie palace as pleasure palace. For Christine in Bette Gordon’s neo-noir Variety, selling tickets at one such upstanding establishment in pre-Giuliani Times Square is just a job. When she takes a call in the nearby phone booth, the neon-lit words “PUSSYCAT” and “GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS” pulse, blink, flicker over her face behind its glass. Bit by bit, she becomes obsessed with the explicit images and with one of her theatre’s regulars. Illicit fascination almost radiates off the lights, and seeps, it seems, straight into her skin.
To the human eye, neon has no natural analogue. Its yellow glow bears no resemblance to sunlight. To experience the full effect, it needs to be dark. It needs to be like a cinema, where sunlight is necessarily forbidden. Absent natural light we lose our bearings. It’s jarring to emerge from a theatre into nighttime, having entered it in the brightness of the afternoon. In Dario Argento’s Suspiria, daylight rarely penetrates Tanz Akademie. Its twisted funhouse labyrinth is lit in hyper-saturated greens, blues, and reds—neon hues without neon sources. Forget the witches. This alone is enough to unmoor a girl from her most basic senses of time, direction, and space.
Filmed correctly, a neon sign can be as interesting as that which it sheds light on. Its illumination can act as a demarcation that separates the all-seeing decency of daytime from evening’s more shadowy pleasures. Natural dusk is neon dawn, captured perfectly in the montage of Los Angeles’ neon signs stuttering to life in Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood. Electricity floods the tubes of Musso & Frank’s Grill and Chili John’s in short, halting bursts. It looks and sounds effortful. Watching it happen on screen invokes one of Robert Bresson’s shortest, strangest notes on le cinématographe: “Shudderings of images awakening.”
Neon communicates. It emits light while saying something. The elemental material is the message. The message is the material bent into language. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, neon offers stark declarations of a domineering supercomputer’s unyielding logic: NORD, SUD, E=mc2. The camera looks into the light-as-message, and into the pitch-black behind it. Gone is Paris’ famed ambient glow. Gone is any gray area. There is only the capital as a brutal, binary, Huxleyan cityscape.
Neon signs mark the cityscape—not only Godard’s reconfigured version of Paris but Michael Mann’s faithfully rendered Chicago in Thief. Shot from above, the city’s neon glides over the hood of James Caan’s black Cadillac, symmetrical and kaleidoscopic. In a straightforward thriller populated by otherwise “plausible people,” to quote Roger Ebert, it’s a moment of decadent visual seduction.
And who can resist? Neon seduces because such harmony of colour and light is seductive, because it looks so beautiful against black, because people look beautiful awash in it. In the climactic scene of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Romeo—bloodied, grief-stricken, and come to die—is bathed in the cold blue light of the neon crosses lining the church. Sleeping Juliet, blissfully unaware of the fatal chaos that has transpired, lies in the soft golden hue of several hundred candles. The camera drifts slowly from desperation to tranquillity, cold to warm, unfeeling electric light to our most basic, warmth-giving light source. The end is inevitable. But don’t they both look so beautiful?
Even snuffed out, neon creates atmosphere in a movie that could otherwise never be described as atmospheric. In Mars Attacks!, Danny DeVito gets blown to smithereens by an alien invader among the rows of disused signs in Las Vegas’ neon graveyard. The aftershock inadvertently zaps several of the surrounding signs back to glittering life in a sort of morbidly campy visual gag. Elsewhere the most satisfying neon scenes are the subtlest ones. Behind the counter of the Sweetheart Wines & Liquor in Moonstruck, a husband and wife quibble over his wandering eye. A beat, while the change switches hands. “You know what I see in you?” he responds. “The girl I married.” Everyone smiles, even Cher’s Loretta, whose pragmatism regarding matters of the heart borders on cynicism. The scene practically emanates from the blushing pink glow of the heart-shaped sign hanging in the background.
Neon and cinema beguile for much the same reasons, with their sensory-upending and unconcealed artificiality that nevertheless illuminates. They share the basic principles of light, darkness, colour, and contrast. The electric glow is the medium, and the medium is modernity manifest.