In the kingdom of shadows: the semiotics of cinema

By Piotr Sadowski

When we are watching a film everything we see consists technically of

shadows—insubstantial, fleeting photographic representations of life
projected as light effects on a flat rectangular surface of the screen. Cast
shadows are simply the essence of cinema. After attending the screening of
the Lumière brothers’ films at a Russian fair in July 1896, the writer Maxim
Gorky could sum up the nature of the new medium in one sentence: “Last
night I was in the kingdom of shadows.”[1] The Russian writer was right: when
the light in the projector hits the unexposed, dark parts of the frame in the film
strip it is obstructed in proportion to the opacity of the unexposed areas,
producing correspondingly dark light effects, or shadows, on the screen. (The
digital revolution has replaced the celluloid strip with a light-sensitive
electronic chip, but the principle remains the same.) From an optical point of
view therefore the experience of cinema is indeed the experience of shadows,
and in a double sense: first in the form of the translucent photographic images
captured on celluloid or recorded on an electronic chip, and second in the form
of “shadows within shadows,” when the natural shadows of objects from the
outside world are caught by the camera.

The prototypes of screen shadows are indeed the shadows we experience in

our daily lives. On a sunny day with a clear sky we are accompanied all the
time by our dark equivalent, especially visible when projected on a bright
surface such as a wall or pavement. Our shadow is real but at the same time
strangely elusive: we cannot touch or feel it, it may be on the ground in front
of us but we cannot jump over it or shake it off, and if it is behind us we cannot
run away from it. Our shadow imitates or mocks our appearance and
movements, at the same time remaining curiously transparent and immaterial,
unlike our solid bodies. As the psychologist of art Rudolf Arnheim also reminds
us, a cast shadow may no longer be perceived as a casual superimposition on a
light surface but as an independent dark shape and an actual part of that
surface.[2] In other words, the shadow can sometimes be perceived as having
a substance and life of its own, independent of its owner.
Despite its ethereality the shadow testifies unmistakably to the solidity of an
object, for what casts a shadow must be real. The physical connection
between an object and its shadow explains folk beliefs in the properties shared
between the two, as in the legend of the healing power of the shadow cast by
Saint Peter, illustrated for example in the fresco by Masaccio (1425) from the
church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. The healing power of St. Peter’s shadow. Painting by

Masaccio (1425)
At the same time the contrast between a solid object and its
insubstantial shadow is too compelling not to stimulate the
imagination. A person’s shadow will accordingly be
considered as a second, filmy self, a “dark” alter ego, a Doppelgänger. For
example, a shadow of the sinister Dr. Caligari on a promotional still for Robert
Wiene’s famous film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1920 is revealing in this
psychological sense. In the photograph Caligari is holding a book with his right
hand, while his left hand clenched into a fist is turned towards his chest (Fig.
2).

Fig. 2. The shadow of Dr. Caligari on a promotional

still for Robert Wiene’s film The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari (1920).

The book refers to the treatise on somnambulism which Caligari used to study
as the director of the mental asylum, and in the photograph the doctor stands
facing the viewer, as if lecturing passionately on his favorite subject. What
dominates the picture, however, is the gigantic projection of Caligari’s shadow
on the white wall to the right. Larger than the person, the shadow both
externalizes and expands Caligari’s inner character, his evil intentions and
megalomania.[3]
While Caligari’s stance, with his arms as if protecting his chests, appears
harmless and benign, his enormous shadow with its unclenched fist and
shriveled fingers reveals the doctor’s hidden sinister self. As in folk beliefs in
which a person’s true character is betrayed by his shadow, in the promotion
still for Robert Wiene’s film the distorted, menacing shadow reveals a Mr.
Hyde behind the benevolent looking Dr. Jekyll, here a respectable director of
the mental asylum.

Why should a common, perfectly natural optical side effect stimulate the
imagination to such an extent? The shadow is a function of light, and
responsiveness to light helps most living creatures, us included, to get around
in the world, to find food and mates, and to avoid danger; in a word, to
survive. Shadows as side effects of light falling on opaque objects play a role in
our visual negotiation of the physical environment, for example by providing us
with cues of depth: cast shadows indicate the direction of light falling on
objects, as well as the fact that something is obstructing the light. Texture of
objects is also revealed by small shadows, and both the texture of the surface
and the direction of illumination are indicated by the form and direction of
shadows. This is particularly important in drawing and painting, in which
shading, or modeling, can create on a two-dimensional surface a compelling
illusion of volume and space, producing something surprisingly close to
binocular vision.[4] In studio photography and film the effect of shading is
achieved by the classic three-point lighting system adopted in Hollywood
around 1920, in which the key light from one side of the camera produces the
strongest shadow, mitigated by the less intense fill-light coming from the other
side of the camera, while the figure’s silhouette is highlighted by the back light
coming from behind and above the figure (Fig. 3).[5]

Fig. 3. The head of the actor Emil Jannings sculpted by

three-point lighting in Varieté,
(1925).
When shadows directly overlie the objects by whose shape, spatial orientation,
and distance from the light source they are created, we are talking about
attached shadows, or self-shadows. Attached shadows in photography are
usually formed by single-source side or back lighting which fails to illuminate
parts of an object on the opposite side of the light source, with no fill-light to
mitigate the sharp chiaroscuro effect. A self-shadow shows a figure as a dark
silhouette, without texture or surface detail, a living shadow that can be
menacing, mysterious and suggestive. Gregg Toland’s cinematography in
Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) provides classic examples. In the film a
frequent use of self-shadows conveys a range of (usually negative)
psychological effects: self-effacement, ignorance, insignificance, self-delusion,
or powerlessness, depending on the dramatic content of the scene. For
example, when Kane (Orson Welles) reads his “Declaration of Principles” to his
associates in the newspaper office his face remains in the dark compared with
the other, dramatically less important characters (Fig. 4). Here the attached
shadow betrays Kane’s self-delusion and possibly insincerity in announcing his
idealistic principles which he will later betray.

Fig. 4. , dir. Orson Welles (1941).

However, most fascinating as visual signs are the

cast shadows, visually probably the most
prominent because largely separated from their owners as stylistic and
dramatic elements in their own right. As independent visual motifs in pictorial
arts cast shadows naturally possess more symbolic significance than they
normally do in real life, if only because real-life shadows exist simply as
automatic by-products of light, whereas their representations in painting,
studio photography and film are always intentional and motivated. Natural
shadows also look insubstantial compared with the solid objects that cast
them, while an artistically represented shadow has the same physical quality as
the object—both are insubstantial and therefore potentially equivalent as
pictorial motifs.
Cast shadows inform us about the solid objects that produce them, even if we
do not see the objects themselves, as when the presence of a person hiding
behind the corner of a house is betrayed by their shadow cast on the
pavement. In this way shadows testify to the existence of spatially displaced
objects, just as footprints or photographs testify to the existence of objects
that are displaced both in space and time. A sign physically caused by an
object and referring to that object, now spatially and/or temporally removed,
is what semiotics describes as index.[6] Some indexical signs are more
removed from their referents than others. A fossilized footprint is an index of
an animal whose species has been extinct for millions of years, while an old
photograph shows an image of a person who died decades ago. One of the
most poignant indexes on record is a human “shadow” etched in stone, whose
photograph is displayed in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

The photograph shows a dark spot on the bright steps of the Sumitomo Bank,
about 260 meters from the hypocenter over which the atomic bomb went off
on August 6th, 1945. The “shadow” is what has remained of a person who sat
on the steps that fateful day waiting for the bank to open. The victim was
exposed to the flash from the atomic explosion and must have vaporized on
the spot. The surface of the surrounding stone steps was turned whitish by the
intense heat rays, while the dark patch, a “shadow,” corresponds with the
outline of the victim’s body which reduced the heat’s exposure in that spot,
making it darker.

The important thing about the way we register and interpret indexical signs
such as footprints or shadows is that we are making inferences about objects
implied by their indexes, especially when we do not perceive the objects
themselves. We infer someone’s presence in the dark by their voice; we smell
a person’s odor and realize that the person is near us even with our eyes
closed; and we are making a reasonable deduction that a cracking sound of a
broken twig in the forest may be a sign of an approaching large animal or
human. An interesting thing about indexical signs is that they tend to
stimulate the imagination more when they appear on their own than when
they are accompanied by their referents. In the latter case what we see is
what we get, so there is little else left to the imagination. The uniformly lit
religious paintings of the Renaissance, like the high-key lighting of Hollywood
musicals and comedies, provide us with full visual information of the scene to
contemplate and interpret. On the other hand the chiaroscuro of a Caravaggio
painting or Rembrandt’s tenebroso (“darkness”) hide more than they reveal,
provoking the viewer to infer the invisible but implied elements of the scene
from suggestive patches of darkness

A figure casting a shadow, whether in painting or in life, forms a perceptual

whole in which the indexical shadow is for the most part ignored, our attention
being concentrated on the figure as the main subject. This is probably why
cast shadows are relatively rare in painting, just as in photography or film they
are often only accidental and dramatically irrelevant; in other words, non-
semiotic. But if we are not missing a shadow of a painted or photographed
figure, we are certainly missing a figure if all we see is the shadow. The
eeriness of the Surrealist painting Melancholy and mystery of a street (1914)
by Giorgio de Chirico is in no small measure due to a threatening human
shadow emerging from behind a building, opposite a dark silhouette of a girl
rolling the hoop and obliviously heading towards possible danger (Fig. 7).

Similarly at the beginning of Fritz Lang’s cinematic crime thriller M (1931) little
Elsie Beckmann innocently bounces a ball against a police poster that bears an
inscription “Wer ist der Mörder?” (Who is the murderer?), across which a
shadow of a man wearing a hat moves ominously, the
outline of his head projected accusingly on the word
“Mörder” (Fig. 8).

The man’s voice (Peter Lorre’s) forms an additional

auditory index of a suspected child murderer, his
identity still unknown (in the children’s song that opens the film the murderer
is simply referred to as “the man in black,” that is, an elusive shadow).
The effectiveness of shadow images from de Chirico’s painting and Lang’s film
is based on our unconscious fears provoked by indexical signs. An index
implies a missing original and ultimately it is the original that matters, because
it can be a person whose intentions towards us we are not sure of, or an
animal out to attack us. For evolutionary reasons therefore our senses are
instantly alerted by detached shadows whose mystery is precisely about the
yet unknown and potentially dangerous identity and intentions of their
bearers. The mixture of uncertainty, curiosity, and fear that indexes such as
detached shadows provoke in us appears to be instinctive and automatic: in
our history as a species it probably paid in survival terms to be keenly
attentive, rather than indifferent, to indexical signs of movement of large
objects such as fellow human beings or animals in one’s proximity.[7] This is
why an unexpected large shadow emerging from behind a tree, rock, or wall, in
a film as well as in life, instantly catches our attention, triggering curiosity
mixed with fear. One of the clichés of animated cartoons is a shadow quickly
expanding around some hapless figure about to be crushed by a falling rock or
some other large and heavy object (plenty of examples in the Looney Tunes,
especially those involving Wile E. Coyote and his futile attempts to catch the
Road Runner in the Grand Canyon). Our brains appear to be hard-wired for
cues of danger coming from large objects, human, animal, or inanimate,
especially when these cues are, as is the case with indexes, literally “indicative”
of physically real rather than just imagined objects.

While natural indexes appeal to our senses, primal emotions and imagination
because of their direct, physical connection with their referents, human
communication also appears to be based to a large extent on signs that are not
physically caused by their referents but only resemble them to some extent. A
person’s shadow is caused by and therefore physically inseparable from that
person, but a painted portrait only resembles the person it is referring to. The
sitter has not inadvertently caused her image to be imprinted on a painting,
the way one automatically creates one’s shadow or produces one’s reflection
in the mirror, but has allowed the imagination and skill of the painter to create
the visual resemblance on the canvass. Apart from the similarity between the
painted portrait and the sitter, which is formed in the minds of those
contemplating the picture, there exists no direct, physical connection between
the two. In semiotics a sign whose form resembles its referent is called an
icon, or an iconic sign.[8]
In analyzing the stylistic, dramatic, and symbolic function of cast shadows in
artistic representations the iconic dimension is important, because shadows
are not only physical extensions of their objects, but they can also resemble
them in varying degrees. For example, when the light falls on an object from
an angle of forty-five degrees it produces on even ground an accurate dark
silhouette of that object. When falling from other angles light creates shadows
that distort the shape of the object: a low-angle light, such as produced by the
sun at dawn or sunset, casts shadows that are grotesquely elongated (Fig. 9),
while a high-angle, mid-day light produces a shortened, squat version of the
object.

Regardless of the degree of distortion, as long as the shadow silhouette

resembles an outline of the object and thereby defines its character to some
degree, we are talking about the iconic quality of the shadow. In Friedrich W.
Murnau’s horror film Nosferatu (1922) the vampire approaches his victim’s
bedroom in the form of a disembodied shadow in profile—its hunched,
crooked-nosed and clawed-fingered silhouette capturing the distorted, hybrid,
human-animal essence of its owner
But the iconicity of indexes such as natural shadows is of course not of the
same kind as the iconicity of figurative arts. In the case of natural indexes their
occasional iconic character is still a function of the sign’s indexical origin,
whereas the iconicity of figurative arts has entirely to do with the artists’
intention and skill. Insofar as an index resembles its object in a perceptual
(mostly visual) sense, it can be called an iconic index.[9] Iconic indexicality
covers a fascinating area of visual culture, including some of the most
perceptually and cognitively powerful media and art forms such as the shadow
theater, magic lantern shows, silhouette portraits, the camera obscura,
photography, film, and television.

What these visual media have in common, and what distinguishes them from
purely iconic art forms such as drawing, painting, and sculpting, is that they
combine the effects of both iconicity and indexicality to stimulate our senses,
emotions and imagination all the more effectively. The reliance on an
indexical, physical extension of the represented object makes the shadow
theater, an image created by the camera obscura, a photograph or a film clip
so much more efficacious in reflecting the outside world, and consequently so
much more powerful in their emotive effect on viewers than purely iconic
media, with their imagined rather than real connection with the world. The
iconic indexicality of a shadow or a photograph means that the images created
by these media not only resemble their objects (with a resemblance often
much higher than in most realistic painting), but that they are also physically
consubstantial with the objects they represent in a way never attained by
painting.

Shadows and photographs depend on the visible properties of the objects they
represent, whereas paintings depend not so much on the objects themselves
as on the painters’ beliefs about these objects. Even in painting from life, the
painted scene reflects only the painter’s belief of what is there, whereas a
photograph or an iconic shadow (whether natural or as part of an artistic
installation), captures an object or a scene in a way not affected by the artist’s
beliefs. In other words, iconic indexical media depict realities that already exist
(although of course only the artist’s choice can disclose them), whereas iconic
media create physically often non-existent (even if plausible) realities. It is
thus the combined emotive power of indexicality and iconicity that accounts
for a truly “magical,” compelling effect of immediacy, curiosity, fear and
urgency produced by cast shadows, either natural or contrived in the studio
and incorporated into the dramatic structures of shadow plays and films.
German cinema from the Weimar period (1919–1933), especially in the films
inspired for their horror plots by Gothic fiction and indebted for their visual
style to contemporary Expressionist art, offers classic examples of cinematic
appropriation of older indexical-iconic media such as cast shadows.

It is interesting for example to see that in the artistically ground-breaking The

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920) painted shadows and shafts of
light are part of the highly stylized Expressionist décor for which the film has
become so famous. The few real and no less intentional cast shadows in the
film belong to the inadvertent villain of the piece, the sleep-walking murderer
Cesare, the symbolic emanation of Caligari’s deranged mind
After Dr. Caligari cast shadows often accompany screen madmen, criminals,
and supernaturals, in keeping with age-old beliefs that a person’s shadow
represents their hidden, often evil, nature, their normally invisible inner self.
In Paul Wegener’s Der Golem (1920) for example the shadow of Rabbi Löw
blends with the life-size outline of the titular clay figure on the wall, implying a
spiritual affinity between the human maker and his magically animated
humanoid creature
Unique in the Weimar film canon is Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923),
a film conceived entirely around cast shadows (Fig. 14). Here they represent
the characters’ repressed desires—sexual lust, jealousy, and violence—which
are allowed free play in a hallucinatory film-within-a-film designed to cure the
characters of their potentially self-destructive urges, and generally to bring
them to their senses.
Fritz Lang’s two-part mythical epic Die Nibelungen (1924), a stylistic
accomplishment of the highest order, provides superb examples of contrasts
between light and shadow to separate good guys from the bad, and on the
esthetic level to differentiate between grounds of action and enhance a sense
of dramatic space

Friedrich W. Murnau’s rococo chamber drama Herr Tartüff (1924) takes us into
the semi-darkness of candlelit interiors, where shadows flitting across the walls
project the characters’ folly, gullibility, and hypocrisy, as devised in Molière’s
satirical play. The smoke-filled and doom-laden chiaroscuro style of Murnau’s
Faust (1926) elevates the play of light and shadow onto a metaphysical plane
as a struggle between the cosmic forces of good and evil. Towards the end of
the Weimar period folk supernaturalism and the occult return to the screen in
Carl Th. Dreyer’s avant-garde, dream-like Vampyr (1932) with its “white”
esthetics, in which an abandoned country windmill, an ice-house, and a plaster
factory provide eerie settings for encounters with disembodied shadows of
ghosts and vampires.

Intentional shadows, suggestive darkness, atmospheric or symbolic

chiaroscuro lighting as part of the visual semiotics of film continue to be
employed in Weimar cinema from mid-1920s onward in the urban dramas
conceived in a more realistic style of the New Objectivity.
Beginning with Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) and culminating in Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis (1927) the contrasting visual styles of Expressionism and the New
Objectivity help differentiate between urban socio-economic milieus, whereby
cheerless tenement dwellings tend to be illuminated by shadowy, depressed,
low-key lighting, while downtown hotels, night clubs, and stylish apartments
enjoy the high-key electric brilliance as a sign of the modern age. Typically in
the German urban films of the late 1920s light tends to be associated with
modernity, wealth and success, and darkness with backwardness, poverty and
failure. As in the Hollywood film noir decades later, in Weimar cinema the
symbolic cast shadow always remains an esthetic choice as part of the
Expressionist repertoire of visual tricks to provoke symbolic meanings, create
poetic mood and heighten emotion. It is also tempting, after the horror of
World War II, to interpret retrospectively the dark shadows that scared the
cinema audiences during the Weimar period as intimations of the disastrous
consequences of Germany’s fateful turn towards Nazi dictatorship in 1933.
Back in 1926 in Friedrich W. Murnau’s Faust a gigantic figure of Satan (Fig. 15)
extends its dark wings over a small town, blowing black pestilential wind
towards its unsuspecting inhabitants . . .

[1] Colin Harding, Simon Popple, In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to

Early Cinema (London/Madison & Teaneck: Cygnus Arts/Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1996), 8.

[2] Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative
Eye (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), 252.

[3] Stoichita, Victor Ieronim, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion,
1997), 150–1.

[4] Richard L. Gregory, Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing, 5th edn (1966;
Oxford-Tokyo: Oxford University Press, 1998), 189.
[5] David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 7th edn
(Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 191, 194;.

[6] Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul
Weiss (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998), vol. II, 143, 161–5; Tony Jappy,
Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics (London-New York: Bloomsbury,
2013), 84–90; Piotr Sadowski, From Interaction to Symbol: A Systems View of
the Evolution of Signs and Communication (Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John
Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009), 34–6.

[7] Henry Plotkin, The Nature of Knowledge: Concerning Adaptations, Instinct

and the Evolution of Intelligence (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 103.

[8] Jappy, Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics, 79–84; Sadowski, From

Interaction to Symbol, 36–8.

[9] Piotr Sadowski, ‘Between Index and Icon: Towards the Semiotics of the Cast
Shadow’, in From Variation to Iconicity: Festschrift for Olga Fischer, ed. Anne
Bannink and Wim Honselaar (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Pegasus, 2016), 331–46.