Sherman’s emphasis on how “everything had to mesh, go together” is an important key to the overall style of a movie like Citizen Kane, where so much depends on superimposition and simultaneity, one scene dissolving into the next, one account of Kane’s life slightly overlapping the succeeding account, one actor biting the other’s cue. In its first half the film is as rapidly paced as a Howard Hawks comedy, but not so much for the sake of realism as for the sheer thrill of the zesty atmosphere.
Furthermore, this sense of pace and energy depends more on cutting than is usually noted. Even Bazin, who was interested chiefly in the long take, recognized that “superimpositions” were characteristic of Welles’s work. What Bazin did not emphasize, as Brian Henderson has pointed out, is that “the long take rarely appears in its pure state.” In fact, Henderson notes, “the cut which ends a long take—how it ends and where—determines or affects the nature of the shot itself.” For example, toward the end of the scene in Mrs. Kane’s boardinghouse, Agnes Moorehead rises and walks back toward the window, the camera slowly following her. She pauses, and Welles cuts to a reverse angle, looking past her face toward the opposite side of the room. The scene as a whole is not a long take but a shot/reverse shot combination that is fundamental to narrative movies. There are, however, some interesting differences between this particular editing style and standard Hollywood practice: for one thing, the rhythm of the cutting is not keyed to the rhythm of the dialogue—instead it imposes a structure on the narrative, holding off the crucial close-up until the most effective moment. Equally important, the editing of shots such as this one, photographed with a wide-angle lens, creates a slightly more violent effect than the editing of normal perspectives and makes the audience more aware of the cutting process. The exaggeration of space gives the reverse angle an unusual force, as if we had been jerked into a radically different viewpoint. Thus Mrs. Kane’s face looms up in the foreground, and the impact of this image is reinforced by having her call loudly out the window to Charles. The cut emphasizes the mother’s pain and her pivotal role; behind her we can see the figures of the father and the banker standing awkwardly in the distance, dwarfed by the size of her head.
Figure 2.4: Mrs. Kane (Agnes Moorehead) near the end of the boardinghouse scene.
Because of the many wide-angle views in Kane, shot/reverse shot editing takes on new dramatic possibilities. Consider, for example, the scenes of Kane and Susan separated by the vast halls of Xanadu, where a simple over-the-shoulder editing style becomes a powerful and witty statement about alienation and loneliness. Earlier, in the newspaper office, a reverse angle is used to convey Kane’s anger at Leland: Leland emerges from a drunken stupor and stands at the door of his office, looking out toward where Kane is composing a review of Susan’s opera debut; we cut to a reverse shot composed in extreme depth (so deep, in fact, that it was created by the optical printing I have mentioned), showing Kane’s massive head at the left of the screen and Leland stepping out of the door in the far distance. Simultaneous with this violent change of perspective, Kane pushes back the typewriter carriage with a loud slam; the sound of the typewriter, which was tiny in the previous shot, suddenly becomes close up and frightening.
Elsewhere in the film, Welles avoids reverse views altogether, playing out whole scenes in one take and “editing” by revealing successive playing areas. In some of his more elaborate montages he throws a brief wide-angle shot on the screen with stunning effect, as in the Inquirer party, where a distorted close-up of a smiling black man coincides with a blast of music. In many other scenes, however, he uses an ordinary shot/reverse shot style and even an ordinary lens—consider the argument between the young Kane and Carter in the newspaper office, or the meeting between Kane and Susan in her apartment. Ultimately, therefore, it might be said that the chief difference between Kane and the standard film has less to do with an unusual editing style than with the size and relative perspective of the shots Welles puts on the screen, plus his tendency to animate the space around the actors. Generally he keeps the camera at a distance, using the wide-angle lens to increase the playing area so that he can draw out the individual shots and fill them with detail. Although there are far more close-ups in Kane than Welles himself remembered, we seldom see an actor’s face isolated on the screen. Welles wanted the audience to “read” a complex imagery, wanted them to appreciate his skill at rapid manipulation of the magic-show qualities of the medium. In other words, his work ran somewhat against the grain of classic studio movies, which encouraged the audience to forget technique and identify with the players.
The acting in Welles’s early films is determined by similar principles, being slightly overwrought and at times self-consciously inflated. George Coulouris, who played Thatcher in Kane, has remarked on this quality:
I made many films after Kane and one thing I’ve noticed is its intensity and power—more than would be tolerable in many films. The scene in which we argue back and forth in the newspaper office is not conventional movie acting. With other actors or another director, it would have been “brought down” a lot and lost a good deal.
In fact the argument between Kane and Thatcher—and virtually the entire Thatcher section of the film—is a foreshadowing of a technique that would become increasingly evident in Welles’s later work; the players “project” their lines to a greater degree than in the ordinary movie, as if they were oblivious to the idea that acting for a camera ought to be low-key and naturalistic. The Thatcher section is a subtle, deliberate echo of Victorian melodramatics, but even the later episodes are particularly high-pitched, creating a sort of repressed hysteria. Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, and Dorothy Comingore are a bit more wide-eyed and loud than they need to be; Collins, for example, underplays the villainy of Jim Gettys, but he stays in one’s mind as a vivid portrait largely because he handles the quieter lines of dialogue almost like a stage actor, preserving the illusion of calm while he speaks at a high volume. Later, in the scene where Susan attacks Kane for allowing Leland to write a negative review of her singing, the sound technicians seem to have added an extra decibel to her already piercing voice: “What’s that?” she shouts as Kane opens a letter from Leland. “A declaration of principles,” he says, almost to himself. “What?” she screams, the sound cutting at the audience’s ears and making Kane flinch as if from a whiplash.
Welles’s own remarkable performance in the central role is in keeping with this stylized quality. The resonant, declamatory voice speaks its lines very rapidly, almost throwing away whole phrases but then pausing to linger over a word, like a pastiche of ordinary excited speech. A masterful stealer of scenes, Welles also knows that if he glances away from the person to whom he is speaking he will capture the audience’s attention. His slightly distracted look, plus the gauzy photography he prefers for his own close-ups, gives his acting what François Truffaut calls a “softly hallucinated” tone, something of a counterpoint to the more nightmarish mood of the rest of the movie. (At this point, however, one should note that Welles’s screen persona and some of his directorial mannerisms may have developed less out of taste or theory than out of necessity, because he always disliked his own body. A massive, fascinating presence, he was nevertheless somewhat flat-footed and graceless in movement, and his best performances were in the roles of very old men. As the young Kane he is usually photographed sitting down; when he does move—as in the dance at the Inquirer party or in the scene where he destroys Susan Alexander’s room—his stilted, robot-like behavior is acceptable because it is in keeping with the highly deterministic quality of the script and the visuals.)
Keenly aware of his acting range, Welles has designed every shot in Kane to accommodate his physical limitations; partly as a result of this habit, he has also been very fussy about the choreography of the other actors, who, as we have seen, are locked into rigidly structured patterns. Unlike Hawks, Ford, or any of the “action” directors of the time, he gives us very few moments when the camera sits passively
by and allows an actor’s body its own natural freedom. Yet in Welles’s first two films there are individual scenes that go beyond artifice and bring an extraordinarily truthful, unmannered quality to the acting. In both cases—Kane’s rage in Susan’s bedroom and Aunt Fanny’s hysterical outburst near the end of Ambersons—the emotions seem to arise from a sexual frustration that has been building throughout the plot, and in both cases the actors are no longer quite pretending. (After filming the bedroom scenes, Welles is rumored to have remarked, “I really felt it.” Aunt Fanny’s collapse, on the other hand, was reshot dozens of times, until Agnes Moorehead was literally shedding tears of exhaustion.) On the screen these moments feel so authentic that they almost break through the fictional context, but in their own way they are as unconventional as the otherwise slightly exaggerated, artful playacting. By the early forties American movies had developed a slick, understated acting style that avoided behavioral extremes; when characters cried, their tears seemed real but never really disturbing. Among the chief performers of the decade, only James Stewart was able to convey psychic breakdowns with an intensity comparable to the ones in Kane and Ambersons, but his anguish was usually softened by Frank Capra’s sentimental, optimistic stories. Welles’s films were slightly different; they made the audience conscious of psychological pain—and also of the art of acting—in a way that was more common to the theater. Hence a movie like Citizen Kane may have been a dreamworld, a wonder show, but it was also capable of touching upon important emotional realities.
II
Welles was slightly unorthodox and special, but of course he had been assisted by the RKO staff and learned most of what he knew from watching the films of his Hollywood predecessors, including John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, and F. W. Murnau. In fact Murnau’s Sunrise contains nearly all the essential ingredients of Welles’s visuals, down to a sharply focused shot that modestly prefigures the famous attempted suicide in Kane: in the foreground is a glass containing a spoon; in the middle distance a woman reclines on a bed; in the far distance we can see activity outside a window. In turn, Welles’s own work would influence American cinema throughout the forties: stylish melodramas such as Edgar Ulmer’s Ruthless and John Farrow’s The Big Clock, to cite only two examples, are filled with flashbacks, elaborate tracking shots, long takes, compositions in depth, and even set designs that are vaguely reminiscent of Kane.
Nevertheless, if the “classic” studio cinema ever existed (and by “classic” I mean movies that used chronological narrative, invisible editing, minimal acting, and a muted photographic expressionism—everything designed to immerse the audience in “content” and make them forget the manipulations of style), then Welles’s individualism was a challenge to the system. Furthermore, whatever the derivation or influence of Welles’s techniques, the peculiarities of his cinema seem to me to consist of different elements from the ones emphasized by Bazin. Citizen Kane has a crisp, three-dimensional photography, an accurate sense of period manners and decor, and a depiction of social caste almost as vivid as Eisenstein’s. To these ostensibly “realistic” qualities it adds an almost shrill acting style and a mise-en-scène that is distinguished not so much by its ambiguity as by its density and multiplicity. Thus Welles’s movies contrast with others of the period because they contain such a fine frenzy of performance and information; the overriding quality of his work is not its phenomenal realism, but its distortion and excess. And the progress of his American films would be a fairly steady movement away from the conventions of cinematic reality toward the bizarre and surreal.
Most of Welles’s later pictures, made under severe contractual restraints and without the Mercury company, are characterized by a sort of dazzling aesthetic unrestraint and are contemptuous of naturalism, reason, and decorum. The images he projects on the screen are ostentatious distortions of the natural world, lacking the orderly planes of classical expression, as if he were trying to break down a visual frontier by dramatically emphasizing any movement forward or backward along the tunnel of space in front of the camera. In this regard he becomes the exact opposite of an equally ostentatious but popular director like Hitchcock, whose films have several parallels with Welles’s own, but whose imagery is always lucid and orderly. (Interestingly, Hitchcock once told students at the American Film Institute that he disliked deep-focus compositions as a rule and that he thought the wide-angle lens caused too much exaggeration.) Like Hitchcock, Welles inherited certain mannerisms from the Germans: an authoritarian blocking of actors; heavy, dramatic lighting; and a fondness for shooting from radical angles. But when these attributes are added to the forced perspective of his imagery and the unusually crowded, intense effect of his action and dialogue, the result is an impression of a romantic temperament gone unchecked. In fact the very density and bravado of this style may have helped RKO executives to fuel the myth of extravagance that still surrounds Welles’s life and work. Welles never went drastically over budget and was never responsible for a true financial disaster; nonetheless, the idea persisted that he was a waster of studio money. This, together with his satiric vision of America and his lack of box office success, severely limited his ability to work in Hollywood.
Welles’s artistic flamboyance and unrestrained power also had a somewhat paradoxical effect on the films themselves, because from the beginning of his career his leading themes were the dangers of radical individualism and unlimited power. As we shall see, most of his films are about tyrannical egotists, men who try to imitate God. His major characters usually try to live above the law, in contempt of ordinary human restraint, and as a result they cut themselves off from their community, becoming prisoners of guilt, self-delusion, and old age. Nevertheless, Welles’s own public philosophy was consistently humanistic and liberal, and nearly all of his Hollywood films were grounded in social commentary. The question naturally arises, then, whether there was a tension or contradiction between Welles’s philosophic stance and the personality that is implicit in his style.
Clearly there was such a tension, and it is echoed in other aspects of Welles’s work, especially in the nest of conflicts and oppositions in Citizen Kane, which are discussed in the next chapter. For example, Welles’s typical way of dealing with a film story was to begin at the level of social satire and then to become preoccupied with “tragic” issues so that he seemed to be responding to two distinct urges. His preference for the gothic or “expressionist” mode is a further sign of an emotional dualism: gothic writers have typically been political rebels of a sort, trying to depict the corruption and degeneracy of an entrenched order. Even so, as Leslie Fiedler has noted, there is a contradiction between the “liberal uses and demonic implications, the enlightened principles and reactionary nostalgia of the tale of terror.” Thus the tyrants at the center of Welles’s films are usually more fascinating and sympathetic than the naïve, commonplace figures around them—this in spite of the fact that Welles puts many of his own political sentiments into the mouths of “starry-eyed idealists” like Jed Leland, Michael O’Hara, and Mike Vargas. Actually, the demonic, obsessive drives of the tyrant begin to take on a sort of moral purity, as if egomania and self-delusion were partly a reaction against a sickness in the society at large.
Welles never attributed the sickness to any clear systemic causes; in fact, he was more given to explaining his sympathetic tyrants in terms of neurotic sexual obsessions, or to contrasting the madness of America with momentary glimpses of preindustrial “innocence.” But the stylistic quality I have been describing above—the density and manic extremism of Welles’s typical scenes—is perfectly expressive of the displaced libidinal urges that lead his protagonists to launch their frustrated drives for power. And even though Welles was critical of these Faustian types, they had something deeply in common with the personality of the director himself, as is suggested in the gorgeous excess of his style. According to his friend Maurice Bessy, Welles lamented the fact that he was “made to follow in the footsteps of
the Byronic adventurer, even though I detest this sort of man and everything he stands for.” Such a remark suggests an extraordinary division in Welles’s own character and may help explain why he often portrayed the romantic egotist as a driven and deeply interesting person; certainly his ironic treatment of Kane or the Ambersons did not conceal his fascination with their absurd grandeur. His overreachers tend to be tyrants in spite of themselves, pathetically trying to determine their own fate even while they are doomed by their childhood and victimized by a society beyond their control. As Bessy has pointed out, the Wellesian tyrant, for all of his destructiveness, is a wielder of sham power: Kane tries to construct his own world at Xanadu; George Minafer thinks he can become a “yachtsman”; Macbeth believes he is a king; Mr. Arkadin imagines he can eradicate his past; Mr. Clay attempts to gain immortality. The ambitions of these men are at once awesome and laughable, much like those of the young Welles himself. None of them is really in control, and most of them are naïvely, ludicrously out of touch with reality, motivated by psychological urges they never fully understand. Therefore the Faustian proto-fascist in a Welles movie usually turns into a sort of perverse Don Quixote, a man in tragicomic rebellion against a world that conspires to inhibit his dream of autonomy and control.
When Welles’s films are viewed in this way, the connection between his heated, sometimes outrageous style and his rather philosophic subject matter becomes more apparent. In one sense Welles was critical of romantic egotism—that is why he often combined German expressionism with the sort of absurdist comedy that has always been at the heart of the American gothic. At the same time, however, the Orson Welles who tried to master Hollywood was himself a victim of his childhood and his romantic character. While intellectually Welles may have been a liberal, emotionally he was something of a radical; as we shall see, his fascination with passing time and human mortality, his preoccupation with characters who are slightly out of step, his interest in a past when everything was somehow better than it is now—all of these things indicate that at one level he was both a rebel and, in one sense, a reactionary. Thus John Houseman was right to say that Welles pushed “theatrical effect” far beyond its “normal point of tension.” In this way Welles’s films suggest how much he had in common with his characters, to say nothing of what he had in common with the romantic agony that runs throughout American literature. It is precisely this quality of his style that made his career in American movies so difficult and that made his own life seem to imitate that of one of the protagonists of his stories.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 9