Discuss A Hard Day's Night
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First deliberate lens flare in movie history
posted by rooprectSTAFFMOD on July 5, 2025 at 9:19 AM
I'm revisiting this movie which I had initially hated (after watching twice even!). A Hard Day's Night is one of those Citizen Kane type films that doesn't seem to pack much entertainment value on the surface, but the magic is in the astounding new techniques & innovations that were introduced, making it rightly an important film in history.
One bit that's really mind blowing when you think about it is that this film incorporates the first deliberate lens flare in cinema history. A lens flare happens when the camera catches a bright object like a spotlight or the sun, and it results in a disruptive visual splotch across the screen. Today it's a really common dramatic effect (to the point that Adobe will sell you expensive software to add fake lens flares on your video), but we have to remember that for the first 60+ years of cinema, a lens flare was considered to be an ugly flaw, the mark of an amateur camera operator who botched the shot.
Well, right here, in the segment for "And I Love Her" right around the 3 min mark we get the world's first deliberate lens flare where the camera circles around Paul catching the spotlight to his right and resulting in a very "ugly" flare lasting a full 10 sec before it's eclipsed by Paul's profile. It's really poetically used, especially when you listen to the lyrics being sung ("Bright are the stars that shine / Dark is the sky...")
Hard Day's Night - "And I Love Her"
It's little stuff like this that we may overlook today because it's so unremarkable & common, but it's common because of this film!
Reply by rooprect
on July 5, 2025 at 10:27 AM
P.S. smh @ wikipedia for saying JJ Abrams was the first to use deliberate lens flares in Star Trek (2009) 🤦♂️
Reply by bratface
on July 5, 2025 at 11:33 AM
Unless I'm losing my mind, it doesn't say that Abrams was the first?
Funny story about this movie, 'my sister's mother' took me to see this in the theater when I was 10. The theater was filled with mostly young girls who were screaming their heads off (so ridiculous). I was upset because I couldn't hear the dialogue, so I told 'my sister's mother' to ask the manager to make them stop. Didn't work.
Reply by rooprect
on July 5, 2025 at 11:44 AM
It doesn't specifically call him "the first" but it deceptively mentions Hollywood avoiding lens flares & JJ Abrams's use in the same sentence, clearly trying to imply that he was integral in breaking the tradition...
"Lens flare was typically avoided by Hollywood cinematographers, but the director J. J. Abrams deliberately added numerous lens flares to his films Star Trek (2009) and Super 8 (2011)"
Kinda like saying "Nobody could figure out who used the first lens flare, but rooprect figured it out in 2025!" deceptively implying that I'm the first to notice lol
Good thing the manager didn't make them stop or it could've ended Beatlemania right then & there! 😬