1 Is Disappointment Inevitable When Dealing with a Work Repeatedly

1 Is disappointment inevitable when dealing with a work repeatedly described as the greatest film of all time; a filmmaker—Orson Welles—about whom Herman J. Mankiewicz, one of Citizen Kane’s screenwriters, said “There but for the grace of God goes God”; and a cultural experience that the Provost’s office has made mandatory?! If you struggle to know how to speak fluently in the face of this cultural milestone, be assured that you are not alone: The Sopranos, Season 5, “Rat Pack” 29.28-31:59 (Video). Orson Welles, who was born in 1915 and died in 1985, had a gigantic personality, gigantic ambitions, gigantic influence, and more ideas and projects than he could wrestle to completion in a single lifetime. Though we too could regurgitate what Leonard Maltin or Wikipedia says about Citizen Kane, such an approach leaves us dependent on the experiences and ideas of others. And for me at least, the whole point of higher education is to learn to think for yourself about the things that matter in the world that you inhabit and co-create. There can be no doubt that today, if anything matters, media do. Indeed, our political agency and freedom depend in part upon our ability to understand how media- generated sounds and images operate on and in our lives. As participants in a democracy, we are obliged to be able to ask informed questions about the authorship, interpretation and data-source 2 of media transmissions, especially when they are used to justify life-changing or life-taking actions. Orson Welles struggled for aesthetic, financial, and political freedom within his media landscape, and he was often punished for this. He sought both to understand and to explain to others the sometimes hidden powers and potentials of the audio-visual media of his day. His aesthetically innovative films entertained mass audiences, but they simultaneously functioned as media teaching machines. He explored and stretched the specific potential of a wide variety of media, including illustration, theater, magic, radio, television, and film, and he embraced the failures that are an inevitable part of taking risks. As he declared to the French film critic André Bazin in 1958, “Experimenting is the only thing that excites me... It is the act that interests me, not the result, and I am not impressed by the result unless the odor of human sweat or thought emanates from it” (Naremore 17). I dare you to approach your Penn education with Welles’ spirit of curiosity and fearlessness, to make your papers stink of your own ideas and effort. Like his high school principal and acting mentor, Roger Hill, with whom he coauthored a volume for young people entitled Everyone’s Shakespeare at the age of 18—he set the bar high for your age group—Welles was opposed to any kind of education that killed the pleasure of an aesthetic experience; he might have raised an eyebrow about our assignment today. As 3 Hill wrote in the book’s introduction, “[Shakespeare] would be greatly surprised...to know that [his plays] are studied (by compulsion) in the classroom; that they are conned by scholars, dissected by pedants, and fed in synthetic and quite distasteful doses... Don’t do it!’” And Welles said of the Shakespeare book, “This is a book of ideas and whenever it inspires other ideas it will have value. Your idea is as worth trying as anyone’s.” In your discussion groups, forget what you think you should say and begin instead with your own closely-observed experiences of the film. For Welles, ideas are individual and imaginative responses to others and to the world— and at times, this becomes complicated in his career. In 1971, thirty years after Citizen Kane’s release, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael published her now famous essay, “Raising Kane,” in which she challenged Welles’s authorship of the film’s Academy Award-winning script, asserting his collaborator, Herman J. Mankiewicz, as the real author instead. It is easy to get lost 4 in the polemic debates over who did what for the film, and also to forget how much our culture enjoys dismissing outspoken, intelligent women like Kael—and so I won’t do either of these things today. But for forty-five years now, Kael’s essay on Citizen Kane has catalyzed energetic debate about how authorship happens, and how media creativity is measured, attributed, and valued—these remain important intellectual property questions for us today. Kael also highlights the thrilling modernity of Citizen Kane’s subject—media control in general, and more specifically, the power of media tycoons like William Randolph Hearst, on whom Charles Foster Kane is based. Hearst, it’s worth noting, retaliated against the young Welles, blocking the film’s distribution and fanning political paranoia about the filmmaker, who was a public spokesman for the political Left as well as an advocate for equality for African-Americans and Latinos. In 1945, the FBI designated Welles a Communist as well as “a threat to the internal security of the nation,” and he spent much of his postwar life in Europe. 5 Citizen Kane is often reduced to a somewhat inaccurate list of technical “firsts,” such as deep focus cinematography, and this approach isn’t that helpful. In fact, many of the techniques invoked had been developed earlier. Welles’s great contribution to the radical evolution of the language of cinema, developed in close collaboration with his gifted cinematographer Gregg Toland and with many others, is rooted in his ability to combine very disparate traditions, including theatrical comedy, American screwball, the musical, avant-garde film, and Shakespearean theater. Shakespeare remains a red thread throughout Welles career, and some of his most interesting films are adaptations in which he plays the leading role, including Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), which was shot in Italy and Morocco, and Chimes at Midnight (1966), a 6 compilation of Sir John Falstaff’s roles from the Henry plays. As in Citizen Kane, Welles was drawn to stories of men who stumble between power and impotence, who play with the truth and are in turn tricked by false or complicated versions of it. If Shakespeare explores the question of truth and belief through regal, military, and supernatural stories, Welles does so through modern stories about the control and effect of technology, sound and images. His films collude with spectators to explore what and why modern subjects are willing to believe, who controls the truth, and how we establish what we think we know in the media age. Here’s an example of him doing this from his 1973 experimental documentary about art forgers and experts, entitled F for Fake. Welles was always a practicing magician and conman. He tricked his way into his first professional roles in Ireland’s Gate Theatre, claiming acting experience he didn’t have, and this allowed him to return to New York, where he helped to found the socially-conscious Mercury 7 Theater. Many of Mercury’s members went on to participate in Citizen Kane, including the film composer Bernard Herrmann, best known for his work on Hitchcock’s Psycho; and the fabulous Agnes Moorehead, who plays the role of Mrs. Kane [you may know her better as Endora in the TV series Bewitched]. But how did Welles go from a rather experimental theater troop to being a fully autonomous Hollywood director of one the most important films ever made at the age of 26? The answer? Radio plays. In addition to their stage work, Mercury Theater regularly performed Sunday night radio plays for CBS, and on October 30, 1938 one of these productions became a media event on a national scale and had an extraordinary impact. Howard Koch scripted Mercury’s adaptation of H. G. Wells’s (no relative, no second e) 1897 novella about an alien invasion, The War of the Worlds. But it was Orson Welles, in the role of “orchestrator,” who came up with the brilliant idea of structuring the adaptation as a series of realistic emergency radio broadcasts. Anticipating World War II’s unprecedented use of mass media propaganda to generate fear as a tool for manipulating populations, Welles invented an aesthetic form that entertained 8 while simultaneously dramatizing the techniques and potential dangers of what I’ll crisis media. In War of the Worlds, Welles systematized the reality effects used by media broadcasters to produce emergencies, to create the illusion that audience members are under threat simply by listening to the radio or watching images stream before their eyes, collapsing the distance between a real event and its mediation. War of the Worlds sonically responds to the question not of what we would do if aliens attacked the earth, but rather which aesthetic strategies make people want to believe the mass media, even, and perhaps especially when the content is utterly improbable? This question of reality effects is something you might want to discuss in relation to Citizen Kane’s “News on the March” sequence, which was based on the actual newsreel “The March of Time”; but for now, let me give you a sample of this historically important radio event (Audio). 9 Eye-witness testimony, expert interviews, hushed authoritative commentary in a faux British accent, background noise, panic, and distorted sound combine to create a credible climate of fear. This encourages listeners to feel relief rather than the consternation that they should when they hear that the state militia has taken over New Jersey. Welles dramatizes how mass media like radio, television and film can frighten people into voluntarily and uncritically handing over their freedom.

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