It is well to remember that Hollywood became Hollywood because of light. Early filmmakers' simple documentaries of everyday life were shot with natural light because as far as I know the early film cameras were developed only with natural light in mind. The early film industry which began on the east coast, with pictures such as the "western" The Great Train Robbery, had good light only during the summer months and with the ever hungry mouth of public desire for a new movie every week the producers looked for someplace that would allow them to shoot year round. Hollywood with its natural light, little rain, and varied terrain won out. The need for light helped defined the name that became synonymous with cinema.
Black and white film making began to take on depth as the effects of lighting were slowly discovered by early filmmakers. Light started out showing the basics such as the time of day, morning, noon, or evening. The hints of what light could do began to creep in and directors began to use them to show things that no words could convey. Anyone who has held a flashlight under his chin to look ghoulish has found out that light can turn a pleasant looking face into something horrific simply by changing the way shadows fall. The German expressionist films of the twenties used deep shadows that filled large sections of a scene to do to a city scape the same thing the flashlight under the chine did to a face. A whole city could be cast as good or evil by the way light was given or denied to streets or buildings.
The film Citizen Kane took this issue of lighting in film a step forward based on the expressionist work of the twenties and on the fact that they couldn't afford expensive props. Many of the scenes were cast in shadow to hide half empty sets. The unintended effect was to give the film a uniform dark feeling of constant foreboding that couldn't be conveyed in dialog or even music. With the use of camera angles that had never been used before such as in one memorable scene in which Charles Foster Kane is filmed from below but lit from the sides he is made to look not sinister as lighting from below would do but larger than life in a bloated over stuffed way, again making the character look too full of himself in a way no words could.
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