The Magic World of Orson Welles (11 page)

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 photography 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.

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.