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A famous counterpoint to your statement that eighties film stocks would not be able to capture that kind of low-light high-contrast scene: Barry Lyndon (released in 1975).

However, it's pretty much guaranteed that both the old and new scenes mentioned in TFA have a _ton_ of extra lights and flags just out of camera. If anything, the article is pretty naive in assuming that they just walked up to some diner and started filming using available daylight.

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Yeah, the difference is just that the first movie’s DP was aiming for a naturalistic shot, whereas the second DP wasn’t. Tons of 80s and 90s movies have heavily-stylised non-naturalistic lighting (e.g Tim Burton’s Batman)

Exactly.

Going further back in history there's also this thing called Film Noir that further disproves the argument that digital cameras (or, more narrowly, Netflix) is the origin of the high-contrast look.

I mean, even the most celebrated film of all time, Citizen Kane, is celebrated among other things for its stark contrast and that was shot in 1941 or thereabouts.

For Barry Lyndon, Kubrick had Zeiss build ridiculously fast f/0.7 lenses for him that was previously only used by NASA. That’s how he was able to capture these low-light high-contrast scenes that look so gorgeous.

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