Yet the statements of both Welles and Toland, in other contexts, seem to foreshadow or confirm Bazin’s notions about realism. Toland has claimed that Welles’s idea was to shoot the picture in such a way that “the technique of filming should never be evident to the audience,” and in his well-known American Cinematographer article, we repeatedly encounter comments such as the following: “The attainment of approximate human-eye focus was one of our fundamental aims”; “The Citizen Kane sets have ceilings because we wanted reality, and we felt it would be easier to believe a room was a room if its ceiling could be seen”; “In my opinion, the day of highly stylized cinematography is passing, and being superseded by a candid, realistic technique.” The last statement finds an echo in Bazin’s notion that Kane is part of a general movement, a “vast stirring in the geological bed of cinema,” that will restore to the screen the “continuum of reality” and the “ambiguity of reality.” The same general argument can be heard in Welles’s own remarks. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles was asked why he used so much deep focus. “Well,” he replied, “in life you see everything at the same time, so why not in the movies?”
One should remember that the term “realism” (often used in opposition to “tradition”) nearly always contains a hidden ideological appeal and that the word has been appropriated to justify nearly every variety of revolution in the arts. But if “realism” is intended simply to mean “verisimilitude,” then Welles, Toland, and Bazin are at best half right. It is true that deep focus can preserve what Bazin called the “continuum” of reality and that three-dimensional effects on the screen (which owe considerably to Welles’s blocking and Toland’s skillful lighting) can give the spectator the impression of looking into a “real” space. Nevertheless, Welles and Toland are inaccurate when they imply that the human eye sees everything in focus, and Bazin is wrong to suggest that either reality or human perception is somehow “ambiguous.” On the contrary, human vision is exactly the opposite of depth photography, because humans are incapable of keeping both the extreme foreground and the extreme distance in focus at the same time. The crucial difference between a camera and the human eye is that the camera is nonselective; even when we are watching the deep-focus composition in Kane, we do not see everything in the frame at once. We are aware of an overall composition that exists simultaneously, but, as Bazin has noted, the spectator is required to make certain choices, scanning the various objects in the picture selectively. Welles seems instinctively aware of this fact, because he has designed his images quite rigidly, sometimes blacking out whole sections of the composition or guiding our attention with movement and frames within the frame. Welles’s movies make relatively greater intellectual demands upon the audience, giving them more to look at, but the information that is crowded on the screen has been as carefully manipulated and controlled as in any montage.
Still another and perhaps more important factor needs to be taken into account in any discussion of the phenomenal “realism” of Welles’s technique. Toland claimed that he was approximating the human eye when he stopped down his camera to increase the depth of field, but what he and most other commentators on the technique do not emphasize is that he also used a wide-angle lens to distort perspective. Kane was photographed chiefly with a 25mm lens, which means that figures in the extreme foreground are elongated or slightly ballooned out, while in the distance the lines formed by the edge of a room converge sharply toward the horizon. Thus if Toland gave the spectator more to see, he also gave the world a highly unnatural appearance. In fact Welles’s unusual images fundamentally alter the relationship between time and space, calling into question some aspects of Bazin’s arguments about duration. Here, for example, is an extract from an interview with the British cameraman/director C. M. Pennington-Richards:
Of course using wide angle lenses the time-space factor is different. If you’ve got a wide angle lens, for instance a 1" lens or an 18mm, you can walk from three-quarter length to a close-up in say four paces. If you put a 6” lens on [i.e., a telephoto], to walk from three-quarter length to close-up would take you twenty paces. This is the difference: During a scene if someone walks away and then comes back for drama, they come back fast, they become big fast. There is no substitute for this—you only can do it with the perspective of a wide-angle lens. It’s the same with painting; if you want to dramatize anything, you force the perspective, and using wide angle lenses is in fact forcing it.
These comments signal the direction that any discussion of photography in Kane should take. But while there has been a great deal of theoretical discussion about depth of field in the film, rather little has been said about forced depth of perspective, which is the sine qua non of Welles’s style, and which accounts for a great deal of the speed and energy of his work. And the technique is effective precisely because it lacks verisimilitude. Most directors operate on the principle that the motion picture image should approximate some kind of human perception; the virtue of Welles’s films, however, is that they work in a different direction, creating what the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky would call a poetic “defamiliarization.”
There were, of course, several purely practical advantages to Toland’s use of this special lens. It increased the playing area not only in depth but in width as well, allowing the director to integrate characters and decor. Although it made panning movements somewhat ugly by Hollywood standards (there are relatively few in Kane), it greatly enhanced the dramatic power of tracking shots, giving impact to any movement forward or backward, whether by the camera or the players. Indeed the values of this technique were so many that a 35mm lens, once considered extreme, is now standard, and much shorter lenses are used regularly in horror films. (On television these lenses are used frequently, partly because they compensate for the small screen. One problem, however, is that TV directors use dual-purpose lenses; to save time and money, they zoom in on details instead of tracking, thereby losing the dramatic shearing away of space that is produced by wide-angle camera movement.)
In retrospect, what was really innovative about Toland and Welles was not their sharp focus but their in-the-camera treatment of perspective. Depth of field was less unusual than Toland and later historians have made it seem; like the photographing of ceilings, it was at least as old as D. W. Griffith and G. W. Bitzer—indeed there are beautiful examples of it in Charles Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. A certain “normality” of spatial relationships, however, had been adhered to throughout the studio years, with only an occasional photographer or director behaving differently; filmmakers used a variety of lenses, but they usually sought to conceal optical distortions by means of set design, camera placement, or compensatory blocking of actors. When Welles and Toland deliberately manipulated perspective, they foreshadowed the jazzy quirks of movement and space that were to become almost commonplace during the sixties and seventies.
Not that wide-angle perspectives were new when Citizen Kane was made. Welles’s favorite director, John Ford, had used them extensively in Young Mr. Lincoln and Stagecoach, and Toland had made some interesting experiments with them in The Long Voyage Home, sharing a title card with Ford. In 1941, the same year as Kane, Arthur Edeson photographed The Maltese Falcon at Warner Brothers using a 21mm lens, which, at least theoretically, distorted space even more than in Welles’s film. It is instructive, however, to contrast the effect of Falcon with that of Kane. The space in the John Huston film, far from seeming exaggerated, seems cramped; nearly the whole action is played out in a series of little rooms with the actors gathered in tight, three-figured compositions. Huston, like most other Hollywood directors, stayed within limits of studio conventions, underplaying Edeson’s offbeat photography. Welles, on the other hand, used the lens distortion openly, as an adjunct to the meaning of the story; in fact the peculiar exaggeration of perspective in Kane is equivalent to effects one sees everywhere in German expressionist cinema, where sets are usually built in tunnel-like designs. Toland’s wide-angle p
hotography is therefore made to contribute to the “horror movie” feeling of the film and is the perfect visual equivalent to Welles’s earlier theatrical productions. In Kane space becomes demonic, oppressive; ceilings are unnaturally low, as if they were about to squash the characters; or, conversely, at Xanadu rooms become so large that people shrink, comically yet terrifyingly dwarfed by their possessions. (This effect is enhanced by the set design. At one point Kane walks over to a huge fireplace and seems to become a doll, warming himself before logs as big as whole trees: “Our home is here, Susan,” he says, absurdly playing the role of paterfamilias.)
Again and again Welles uses deep focus not as a “realistic” mode of perception, but as a way of suggesting a conflict between the characters’ instinctual needs and the social or material world that determines their fate. He continued this practice, fantastically exaggerating space in his later films (Touch of Evil was shot largely with an 18.5mm lens), making exaggeration a key feature of his style. The short focal length of the lens enabled him to express the psychology of his characters, to comment upon the relation between character and environment, and to create a sense of barely contained, almost manic energy, as if the camera, like one of his heroes, were overreaching.
Figure 2.2: Leland and Bernstein debate about Kane’s character.
This highly charged, nervous dynamism of imagery and action can be found everywhere in Kane and is produced by other techniques besides photography. Fairly often Welles stages important moments of his story against some counterpointing piece of business, as if he were trying to energize the plot by throwing as much material as possible onto the screen. One of the most obvious examples is the party sequence in the Inquirer offices, where Leland and Bernstein debate about Kane’s character. Here again the shot establishes three planes that are set in conflict with one another (see fig. 2.2). To the left is Leland, a young, handsome, fastidious WASP a little like the “New England schoolmarm” Kane later calls him. To the right and slightly nearer is Bernstein—slight, ugly, Jewish, and as loyal as a puppy. Leland is bareheaded, but Bernstein wears a Rough Rider’s hat as a sign of his allegiance to Kane’s war in Cuba. The contrast is further emphasized by the dialogue: throughout the scene Leland refers to Kane as “Charlie,” implicitly recognizing that they belong to the same class, whereas Bernstein always refers to his boss as “Mr. Kane.” (Incidentally, we have just heard a song about Kane. Charles Bennett, the entertainer at the head of the chorus line, asks, “What is his name?” The chorus girls sing, “It’s Mr. Kane!” The whole crowd joins in, singing, “He doesn’t like that Mister / He likes good old Charlie Kane!”)
The brief conversation in this scene is important because it underlines Leland’s growing disillusionment and Kane’s increasing ambitions. In the original Mankiewicz-Welles script, the dialogue was played at an interlude in the party while various members of the newspaper staff danced with the chorus girls. By the time of the actual filming, however, Welles had decided to stage the conversation simultaneously with Kane’s dance. Leland and Bernstein literally have to shout to be heard over the raucous sounds of the orchestra and chorus, and our eyes are continually pulled away from them toward the antics in the background. Even when Welles cuts to a reverse angle, we can still see Kane and one of the girls reflected in the glass of a window.
This shot contains an echo of the composition in the boardinghouse; once again Kane is supposed to be at play, and once again a window frame seems to mock his apparent freedom. The violent overlappings and baroque contrasts of space are used here not only on the visual level but also on the soundtrack. Welles did not invent overlapping dialogue any more than he and Toland invented deep focus, but the complex, hurried speech in Kane and the various levels of sound within a scene are especially effective corollaries of the complex photographic style. To complement what Toland had publicized as “pan focus,” Welles devised a sort of “pan sound,” drawing on his years in radio, where he had gained a reputation as an experimenter. Indeed this reputation is alluded to in a biographical profile for the Saturday Evening Post, written before the idea of Kane was conceived, when Alva Johnson and Fred Smith comment on the powers of Welles’s “auditory nerve”:
Figure 2.3: Kane’s reflection in the window glass.
Recently he was in a restaurant with some people who became interested in the dialogue at the table on the left; they eavesdropped eagerly, but without catching more than an occasional word. Welles then gave a full account of the discussion at the table on the left and threw in for good measure the substance of the discussion at the table on the right. . . . Welles insisted that the triple-eavesdropping faculty could be acquired by anyone who practiced earnestly.
Welles probably believed that a complex soundtrack like the one at the Inquirer party is more “real,” more true to the welter of conversations in life; we know from testimony of people like John Houseman that Welles’s radio dramas had gone to extraordinary lengths to achieve documentary-like speech or sound effects. Here again, however, the technique is in fact an expressive device. Despite Welles’s demonstration in the restaurant, the listening ear doesn’t make sense of overlapping speech or the chaos of sounds in the environment. Like the eye, it is highly selective and needs to screen out unwanted noises. The microphone, on the other hand, is as nonselective as the camera; that is why the sounds in Kane, like the images, have been carefully orchestrated to blot out unwanted distractions and to serve symbolic functions, even while they overheat the spectacle and make the spectator work to decipher it.
Critics have often pointed to the “radio” sound in Citizen Kane. (In fact the first words that Welles speaks in the film, after the whispered “Rosebud,” are a reference to his Mars broadcast: “Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio,” he chuckles.) As evidence of Welles’s expertise with sound, commentators always mention the “lightning mixes”—scenes in which one character’s speech is cut off abruptly, only to be completed by another character in another time and place. These charming tricks, however, are a logical extension of the Vorkapitch montages Hollywood used so often in the thirties, and there is nothing especially original about them; one finds similar transitions in Trouble in Paradise and Gold Diggers of 1935. What is more interesting and perhaps more “radio-like” is the degree to which music and sound in Welles’s films become natural adjuncts to the “layered” principles of deep focus. The best example of the technique, it seems to me, is not in Kane but in the snow scene in The Magnificent Ambersons, where jingling sleigh music is first alternated and then intertwined with the dissonant squeaking of an automobile hand crank. These sounds are subtly combined with the excited chatter of six characters (all of them, as in the earlier ballroom sequence in the same film, post-synchronized by RKO technicians), creating a true montage of conflicts and reinforcing a major theme. Similar effects are at work in a modest way in the boardinghouse episode and the Inquirer party in Kane, where the sound in the background is meant to contrast with the sound in the foreground. In the climactic moments of Touch of Evil, the technique can be seen in its most radically expressive form, as if Welles’s work were evolving toward greater, not less, stylization.
There are, of course, other moments in Welles’s movies when the dialogue and incidental sound have been made deliberately and “realistically” chaotic, because the director has been willing to sacrifice clarity for pure speed. By the middle thirties, a fast-talking, breezy manner had become virtually the norm for American movies, and Hiram Sherman, one of the stars of the 1938 Mercury stage production of Shoemaker’s Holiday, recalls that Welles was particularly fond of the technique:
He loved you to bite the cue. Everything had to mesh, go together. You didn’t finish a speech that someone else wasn’t on top of you. All the time. This kind of repartee was very effective in Shoemaker. It was going lickety-split all the time. We didn’t even have an intermission. We tried it for one preview, but Orson decided to cut that out and plow right on.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 8