CHAPTER 9

ORSON WELLES [1915–85]

The Technique of Citizen Kane

Figure 48. Citizen Kane (1941); director: Orson Welles

Well, then, let’s talk yet again about Citizen Kane [1941]. Today, as the last echoes from the critics seem to have faded away, we can take stock of their judgments. I’ll leave aside those who have understood nothing, and I’ll challenge the testimony of the film’s assistant directors, cameramen, and designers, who could barely contain themselves in the face of such a provocative cinematic achievement. For the rest, the opinions range between these two extremes: Orson Welles reinvents filmmaking, Citizen Kane is as important as Greed [Erich von Stroheim, 1924], and Welles is a great man; nonetheless, however talented he may be, his film is only an intelligent bluff.

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Georges Sadoul, for instance, writes about some monstrous puffball that probably owes its existence to a deluge of dollars that came during one of those long Hollywood nights. He can’t see anything new in Kane’s style; on the contrary, Sadoul finds an excess of freely assimilated reminiscences. The film is an encyclopedia of old techniques. One can find in it all of the following: the simultaneous clarity of the foregrounds and the most distant backgrounds, as in Louis Lumière’s Arrival of a Train in the Station at La Ciotat [1895]; Méliès’s taste for special effects and cardboard sets; the mixing of accelerated montage and superimposition, which was the latest fashion in 1920; the acrobatics of the traveling shot, which goes back to 1935; the sets with ceilings taken over from Greed [Erich von Stroheim, 1924] …, the newsreel montage invented by Dziga Vertov … One senses that Welles is intoxicated with the apparent novelty of his means and technique. (Les Lettres françaises, July 5, 1946) All of Sadoul’s comparisons are accurate except one, whose importance is indeed paramount: to equate Gregg Toland’s special lenses with Louis Lumière’s fixed lenses seems wrong to me. The depth of field in the shot of the train’s arrival could easily be obtained in full sunlight by a simple reduction of the size of the diaphragm. The interesting aspect of Welles’s depth of field, by contrast, is that it was created in the studio, where lighting can vary tremendously depending on the scene. And it is the very sharpness of the deep-focus shots that contributes to Citizen Kane’s significance, provided one sees in this work not only a series of recipes and effects, but also the perfectly conscientious use of all the resources of filmmaking in order to achieve a meaningful style. In this respect, the accusations of plagiarism could very well be extended to the film’s use of panchromatic film or its exploitation of the properties of gelatinous silver halide without taking anything away from Orson Welles’s originality. In an article published long before the release of Citizen Kane in France, Jean-Paul Sartre also disputes the technical originality of Welles’s mise en scène, acknowledging its intelligence but regretting its intellectualism. In addition, he makes an ingenious analysis of time in the film’s narrative—an analysis that has hardly been taken up by other critics: There is a strange effect that gives certain images a quality of generalization. In fact even in prose fiction we say, “He was forcing his wife to sing on all the stages in America,” which condenses into a single sentence a great number of events … [In Citizen Kane] Welles excels at this kind of generalizing shortcut … This device is well known, but up to now it has been used as a footnote to the action in order to inject a political opinion or to reveal the influence of some course of events on the narrative as a whole, or to supply a simple transition. In Citizen Kane, it is a part of the action, it is the action itself, it provides the foundation of the plot, and the scenes with dates are for once the exceptions. It is as if the narrator were saying, “He forced her to sing everywhere; she had had enough of it; one time she tried to tell him, etc.” (L’Écran français, August 1, 1945)

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