LEADING LIGHT

It has been stirring things up since the primordial stew, but does light trigger the same emotions in you as the person next to you?

It was very late arriving.  Not Pep Guardiola’s response to the Manchester City judgement or Trump’s capitulation to Putin as mid-terms loom and gas prices geyser.*  I am of course referring to the 2026 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine being awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their work on Optogenetics.  For two decades the international scientific community have anticipated the ultimate recognition for this revolutionary technique that ‘has transformed how neuroscientists the brain, offering them a way to study test cause and effect. ’ **

The impact of light on the mental states of audiences has to be one of the longest-established weapons in The Business of Pleasure arsenal… from bison flickering in the firelight in the caves of Lascaux to the sun cresting the Heel Stone at a Stonehenge Solstice, from the portraits of Rembrandt to the Parisian street scenes of Renoir, from the rising of the humblest, most threadbare stage curtain, anywhere in the world, to the Xenon lamp in an IMAX projector.  And of course, the flow of information and insights flows back and for the between the various Chapters and disciplines, sometimes with Industry-changing consequences…

In 1969 a 29-year-old Cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, was visiting the church of San Luigi de Francesi in Rome and happened upon Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew (painted 1599-1600). In The Bible, Matthew, a taxman, received his calling direct from JC who walked past the future saint’s collection booth and told him “follow me.”  Two millennia later, Vittorio, the future triple-Oscar-Winner, received a similar summons from MC (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio) as recalled in a 2007 interview with MovieMaker:

‘Since the day that I went into that church and saw that painting, I have been trying to understand what it told us about the meaning of light and darkness.’

The following year, Storaro was Director of Cinematography on Bernard Bertolucci’s film ‘Il Conformista ’ which won several international awards and was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign-Language Film and an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. But it is the film’s influence on moviemaking that stands it apart:

As Bertolucci reflects in a 2008 Guardian interview:

“What always made me proud -almost blushing with pride- is that Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg all told me that The Conformist is their first modern influence.’

With Paul Schrader going even further:

“To my mind, you can speak of pre-Conformist and post-Conformist design.”

Perhaps the film’s most obvious influence is on The Godfather,  directed by Coppola, for whom Storaro would later light Apocalypse Now  Joe Sommerlad’s 2018 Independent article ‘How The Conformist inspired The Godfather and The Sopranos recalls:

“He (Copola) also admired the chilly style of Bertolucci’s director of photography, Vittorio Storaro, and asked his own cinematographer, Gordon Willis, affectionately known as ‘the Prince of Darkness’ for his bold use of shadow, to recreate the haunted atmosphere Storaro had conjured.” 

Storaro’s own introduction to the 1992 documentary about his work, Writing With Light, filmed against a stunning North African sunset, goes as follows:

“All my life, I have followed the sun. Just as the moon does in the sky.  The moon chases the sun through the day until this incredible moment of equilibrium between the sun setting and the moon rising.  These points on the chromatic spectrum really encompass what is my life. The passion of red, and the reason of blue.”

Now some might argue that the linkage between colours and emotions is not universal, but refracted through individual personal and cultural lenses.  However a 2020 study across 4,598 participants from 30 nations on 6 continents and 22 languages strongly suggests a distinct universality.***

‘...Our results suggest there is a universal basis for color-emotion associations, shared by all. Numerous other human universals exist (Brown, 1991). In the domains of colour and affect, such universals include but are not limited to the shared understanding of facial emotion expressions (Ekman et al., 1969, but see Gendron et al., 2014), of emotions perceived in music (Cowen et al., 2020), of emotions expressed in human songs (Mehr et al., 2019) and shared loci of focal colours (Regier et al., 2005, but see Uuskula & Bimler, 2016). This universal foundation of colour-emotion association is further modulated by language, geography and culture. Some might understand the modulation as evidence against universality, because color-emotion associations were not shared at 100%.  Yet, no human psychological universal is shared 100% (Mehr et al., 2019; Norenzayan & Heine, 2005; Regier et al., 2005.  Gladly, they are not. Scope for dissimilarities seems essential for dynamic adaptations to immediate and lasting changes in one's environment (Lupyan and Dale, 2016). Others might interpret our overall conclusions of a globalized world. This concern might be justified, because we mainly tested computer-literate participants who completed the survey online. Potentially, our color-motion associations become increasingly similar as we share more and more information globally via the Internet and other communication channels. To test the generalizability of our results, we would need further data from small- scale societies (e.g., Davidoff et al., 1999; Groyecka et al., 2019). With our current knowledge at hand, we suggest color-emotion associations represent a human psychological universal that likely contributes to shared communication and comprehension. Thus, next time you feel blue or see red, know the world is with you.’

Perhaps such uniformity is not surprising. Hegemann and Nagel’s original work in the early 2000s centred on the discovery of a light-sensitive protein called channelrhodopsin, present in the equally catchily-named alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, which can swim towards or away from a light source. At one time, hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of these algae may well have shared the same tidal waters as our very earliest invertebrate ancestors, who, given the chance, and a voice, and the sensibilities of a poet, might well have echoed Storaro's credo: “All my life, I have followed the sun.  Just as the moon does in the sky.

DT 15 October 2026

*At time of writing we still do not know the level of sanctions against City or the commission per-barrel Trump that has negotiated

**Nature 5 October 2026

***Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity Domicele Jonauskaite, Ahmed Ab Akel, Nele Dael, Daniel Oberfeld, Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek, Abdulrahman S. Al-Rasheed, Jean-Philippe Antonietti, Victoria Bogushevskaya, Amer Chamseddine, Eka Chkonia, Violeta Corona, Eduardo Honseca-Pederero, Yulia A. Griber, Gina Grimshaw, Aya Ahmed Hasan, Jalena Havelka, Marco Hirnstein, Bodil S.A. Karlsson, Eric Laurent, Marjaana Lindeman et al, Psychological Science, Volume 31, 10 October 2020