VLVL2 (10) Realism, the young gaffer, 201

[Paul Nightingale]

(201.26-33) "Everybody in 24fps had their own ideas about light, and about
all they shared was the obsession. Meanings convened to take care of
business would turn into arguments about light that happened so often they
came to seem the essence of 24fps. Against Howie's advocacy of available
light because it was cheaper, Frenesi wanted actively to commit energy by
pouring in as much light as they could liberate from the local power
company."

Frenesi's commitment to artificial light ties her to the studio system her
father worked within, which returns us to the chapter's opening stand-off
between a production based on location-shooting and one based on the studio
system. Hence, another example of the chapter's interest in film-making as
the construction of realism (as opposed to the reproduction, or
representation, of reality).

Here, natural light is preferable because cheaper. However, artifice becomes
subversive, if they "[pour] in as much light as they could liberate from the
local power company". What appears to be conformity to the mainstream model
becomes something else. Hence the debate with which the passage begins,
discursively both 'aesthetic' and 'political', effectively deconstructs a
realism based on either-or.