324 Chapter 14 Lighting and exposure: Beyond the Basics women. These are the central narrative elements driving the story. Throughout the film, Dickerson delineates these competing strands of Bleek's life by using cool or warm light sources in various scenes (Figure 14-26). In several scenes he even mixes cool light sources with warm light sources in the same frame to create a stylized, thematic point. As Dickerson expresses it: Hot against cool I felt was the best way to exemplify the music--jazz. It also symbolizes the life of the main character, Bleek, and relationships with ladies and his fellow musicians... . Whenever you play warm against cool light, these opposite wavelengths seem to vibrate against each other creating a visual tension. They pull against each other, just as Bleek was being emotionally pulled between two ladies. Figure 14-26 Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson lights Bleek (Denzel Washington) using colors that stand for his two main interests, jazz (blue) and women (red), in Lee's Mo' Better Blues (1990). See the color insert. Given the way Dickerson speaks about light and mixing colors to represent emotions, it comes as no surprise that he has often cited Jack Cardiff (and films like Black Narcissus) as a major influence on his work. Visual research