A steady light for reading in bed and keeping moving shadows at bay. Neons and LEDs fused with the city landscape. Candles on table-tops beside theaters. This is life after sunset. For many people growing up today, it is hard to grasp what it is like living without lightbulbs. The major impact of lighting technologies is directly addressed on their way and their quality of life. Besides enabling basic tasks, these technologies afford people the mere aesthetic pleasure of being surrounded by a particular play of light, one that they can design and control. In order to celebrate the ability to shape atmospheres with light, let's bring up the eloquence of three famous light-shaped scenes.

Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944) – life before electricity. London, late 1800s. Paula Alquist, a young woman recently married, starts to believe that she is losing her mind. Missing objects, fading lights, a number of minute details around her start changing, apparently unnoticed by others. After a bright night at the theater, Paula arrives home reassured. She's undressing when one of the gaslights in the room starts fading again. Her face turns from liveliness to suspicion and then panic. As the lights fade, and amidst the increasing shadows, she seems to bid farewell to the lights of her own sanity.

Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955) – the lightbulb. The whole movie looks like a tribute to optics. The hero of the story, J. B. Jeffries, is a photojournalist, with the walls of his austere apartment in the Village covered with many of his award-winning photographs. His telephoto lens got him into the drama and the lights of his flash gave him a way out, blinding the murderer he helped to unveil. But it was a lightbulb (three, to be precise) that brought us here. While sleeping by the rear window, in almost complete darkness, a shadow approaches Jeff's face.