Lens flare is everywhere.
It glows on our Supermen, near our Iron Men, and around our method-acted oilmen.
It’s in the fifth dimension, the final frontier, and definitely the fictional town of Lillian,
Ohio.
The lens flare is a technical phenomenon and distinct sensibility — that’s taken over.
Lens flares can get pretty complicated.
There are countless lenses from the past century of filmmaking, not to mention the physics
involved.
But a movie fan can identify flare pretty quickly.
The basics are that each lens has a bunch of parts, and when bright light shines at
the right intensity or angle, it can bounce around in those parts.
That bouncing produces a bright haze as well as lens flare.
The flare’s shape depends on how diaphragm blades — these things — close to create
the aperture, which is where light gets in.
If they have fewer blades, you might get a hexagon-shaped flare.
More blades and it’ll be closer to a circle.
Anamorphic lenses have a different flare.
They’re designed with an oval-shape to squish more information onto a piece of 35 millimeter
film.
When they’re projected out with another lens, it’s in a wider format.
And all that makes lens flares that can be like stripes of light across the picture.
But these flares weren’t always so trendy.
For decades, cinematographers fought to hide them.
When Gregg Toland shot Citizen Kane, he and director Orson Welles innovated — constantly.
Famously, they used deep focus to show a lot of stuff clearly and at the same time.
They increased the depth of field by making the aperture tiny and using really really
bright lights.
So, Toland coated his lenses with Vard Opticoat to reduce glare and lens flare from all that
light.
And it set a norm and a path for innovation.
Lenses were constantly coated with new and better technologies that helped keep light
from bouncing around and creating flare.
It also set an expectation: to make an immersive, professional movie, you did not have flare
— until a revolution in moviemaking changed it.
In the 1960s, new filmmakers wanted to show their movies weren’t made in a box.
They turned to flare to capture a documentary-like look.
Legendary cinematographer Conrad L. Hall’s work in Cool Hand Luke was a rebellion that
turned into a movement.
He even talked about it in 1992’s Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography.
“I feel particularly involved in helping make mistakes acceptable.
If the light shone in the lens and flared the lens, that was considered a mistake.
Somebody would report that, the operator would report — oh, it hit the lens, it flared
the lens.
Cut!”
He showed the heat of chain gang life by keeping in the flare, and that quickly spread to rebel
movies like The Graduate and Easy Rider.
They symbolized authenticity and, as a result, lens flares did too.
Just as flare helped sell the reality of characters, it could sell a sense of wonder.
Flare spread really quickly, like in 1968’s Planet of the Apes: “You maniacs!”
And later, Steven Spielberg brought it into Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Flare had entered the sci-fi and action canon.
If early flare said, “these feelings are real,” now it said, “these spacemen and
explosions are real, too.”
And though J.J.
Abrams gets slammed for his gratuitous lens flare use, its use as a tool of realism and
wonder has impressed everyone from schlock jocks like Michael Bay to true artistes from
Sofia Coppola to Terrence Malick.
Malick can’t get enough.
It’s in videogames, political logos, and maybe your phone’s weather screen.
Movies in the 60s had to prove they weren’t made in this box, and in the 90s they used
lens flare to try to prove they weren’t made in this one, even though flare’s become
available with just a few clicks.
Lens flare used to be a mistake you tried to avoid.
Now, it’s a choice you can’t escape.
So you’ve seen a lot of computer generated lens flare today, but all of this stuff is
actually legitimate.
However, to get it to show up reliably, I had to place the light really close to the
camera.
That’s because modern lenses have a protective coating that’s pretty good at stopping flare.
It’s also the reason that cinematographers on movies like There Will Be Blood and Saving
Private Ryan have actually stripped away that coating just so that they can get the old
school flare look.