In continuing our film club we have decided between the viewing of
Stanley Kubrick and the following director, Martin Scorsese, we will do a
one-off film and watch
Citizen Kane.
Mostly this is because Orson Welles’
directorial debut film is considered the greatest of all time and through the
years I have gotten into several discussions/arguments with the casual
moviegoer about the validity of this claim.
I decided it is time to put down on paper, like many movie reviewers and
film aficionados, why
Citizen Kane
garners the attention it does.
I will admit, having to defend this movie as the greatest of all time
is a bit of an annoyance, especially since the conversation started up just the
other night at a card game, because most of the people who disagree with the
claim of Citizen Kane being the best
haven’t seen a movie ever made prior to Star
Wars, which was released in 1977. Maybe
semantics is the root of the problem when trying to understand how important of
a film Citizen Kane truly is. It certainly isn’t the most entertaining in
the history of cinema. Maybe when people
call it the greatest of all time, really they should be stating it was the most
important, most innovative and most progressive of all time. Without Kane,
movies as we see them today wouldn’t exist.
Welles and his team of filmmakers put in place several of the modern-day
conventions that we take for granted in movies.
This includes visual trickery and non-linear storytelling.
The most groundbreaking achievement of Citizen Kane was the development of “deep focus.” Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland came
up with the ability to keep the entire image onscreen in focus, from the
foreground all the way to the background.
Experimentation was done in order to allow the viewer to watch, like a human
eye does, action in the foreground, background, and everything in between at leisure. Prior to this, the camera would focus on one
spot and anything too close or too far away from the lens was blurred out.
When deep focus was not available to use, Toland would trick the viewer
with matte shots and images seen through optical printers, or layering one
piece of film onto another. Matte shots
were utilized by shooting the foreground with the background darkened and then
rewinding the film and shoot the background action with the foreground
blackened.
Another forward-thinking advancement was in how Welles framed the shot. Prior to Citizen
Kane, most American directors and cinematographers were utilizing the “proscenium
arch” method, which, like with a theatre stage the proscenium arch being the
arch over the stage in the theater, all action was presented like on a stage. While the practice was common in German
Expressionist films, in America low- and high-angle camera shots were not used,
however, Welles and Toland placed the camera in different locations to
emphasize the dramatic toll of a scene.
This technique resulted in allowing ceilings to be shown. As films primarily shot on sound stages at
the time and location filming was not as common as today, it was not possible
to use a low-angle shot as the lack of a ceiling would be realized. Welles used a muslin drape above the set and hid
the boom microphones above the cloth. He
would even dig trenches into the floor in order to exaggerate the effect of his
low-angle shot.
Part special effects, part impressive camerawork is the scene where the
camera in the opera house rises dramatically to the rafters. This was achieved by craning the camera
upward over the performance scene, inserting a camera wipe to a miniature of
the upper regions of the house, and then inserting another camera wipe matching
the first one to bring in the scene of the workmen. That sort of cinematography was not
commonplace at the time Welles and Toland executed it. Yet, today’s audience would laugh at the idea
of attempting this sort of trickery since executing this type of shot would
simply be pulled off with computer imagery.
The story-telling practices of Citizen
Kane were unique. While not
completely pioneering the use of flashback, Welles and screenwriter Herman J.
Mankiewicz enhanced the practice and masterfully spun a tale that allowed numerous
characters to divulge the plot through conflicting, and sometimes murky, points
of view. The idea of this type of
storytelling was felt to be too complicated for moviegoers and studio chiefs
were afraid to allow it. The idea to use
multiple narrators with their versions of events partly overlapping was unheard
of at the time in Hollywood.
Another storytelling technique Welles and Mankiewicz utilized was
montage, by collapsing time and space into a short block of images. The most prominent of these is the two-minute
mealtime montage that spans 16-years of a crumbling marriage.
Welles was not only a pioneer in what was seen on the screen, but what
was being heard as well. The rain
falling against a window outside the cabaret, echoes in a marble-lined library,
and overlapping voices and dialogue gave the scenes an additional breath of
life that visuals alone could not do. According
to French filmmaker Francois Truffaut, “Before Kane, nobody in Hollywood knew
how to set music properly in movies. Kane was the first, in fact the only,
great film that uses radio techniques.”
It was these radio techniques that accentuated the drama of each scene. Welles also believed the overlapping of
dialogue was more realistic than what the conventional stage and film
traditions of the time were, which believed characters shouldn’t step on one
another’s lines.
Welles also pioneered an aural skill known as “lightning-mix,” which is
used to link montage sequences with a specific sound or phrase. By utilizing the lightning-mix, Welles was
able to connect what would have been random rough cuts into a smooth narrative
storyline. And yet another innovation of
the legendary filmmaker was the J-cut, which would put the audio ahead of the
visual in scene transitions resulting in a scene coming to a close and the
audio transitioning the viewer to the next scene prior to any visuals being perceived.
The final bit of improvement cinema has experienced thanks to Citizen Kane is the use of what Bernard
Herrmann described as “radio scoring.”
At the time, Hollywood movies were scored with a non-stop musical
soundtrack. Herman avoided this practice
by inserting musical cues lasting between five and 15 seconds to bridge a scene
or elicit an emotional response. Again,
this is something modern-day viewers take for granted because they know nothing
different.
It is for all of these reasons Citizen
Kane repeatedly tops lists regarding the greatest films of all time. I propose to you that if you watch a handful
of movies made prior to Citizen Kane
and then view Welles’ masterpiece, an understanding will be gained of why it amasses
the praise it does. You may not fall in
love with its story, which if you study the behind-the-scenes making of it and
how it relates to real-life media mogul William Randolph Hearst you would not
be quite so jaded, but you will have to appreciate what it did to progress
cinema as an art form and as a visual storytelling medium.
