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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.

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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).

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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. But by using radio to make this point, he also underscores that neither the uses nor the outcomes of technology and media are predetermined. Rather, he suggests, they lie in our creative human hands and minds. Then, as now, our media future is up to us, and we need to educate ourselves so that we can exercise informed agency in this realm.

If the government and the mass media reacted strongly and negatively to this broadcast, it was not because people were duped, but because Welles was giving the general public an audio- visual media education, something we also hope to do here at Penn. 10

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War of the Worlds carried Welles to RKO pictures, where he made his first feature,

Citizen Kane. As he explores the nature of media-based knowledge, power, and belief, he foreshadows with an uncanny contemporaneity our own media narratives. For example, as

David Bordwell has pointed out, Welles pioneers the technique of artificially distressing staged scenes to make them match archival footage,” adding “scratches and light flares” and other glitches. Kane’s seeming appearance in newsreel footage next to Hitler and other historic figures preempts by decades related landmarks in media history, including Woody Allen’s 1983 film Zelig; the 1988 arrival of the transformative software “Photoshop,” which quickly became a household verb; and the digitally-enabled encounters found in Robert Zemeckis’s 1994 film,

Forrest Gump. Similarly, as Kane brags that he has been “kicked out of a lot of colleges,” including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (never heard of them), Welles perceptively flags the tendency to pit media innovation and higher education against each other, something we see repeatedly in the stories of people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. Money, power, and the accumulation of stuff are all certainly measures of success, and Welles shows us that. But after

Kane’s death, though his castle may be chock-a-block with the art objects he has manically collected, it is clear that he has had no idea about how to experience or unpack these cultural treasures—either figuratively or even literally.

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To end, I want to look closely with you at some of my favorite moments in the film, not to make them yours but to encourage you to think about which moments grabbed your attention and why, Citizen Kane Dance Sequence (Video). I love the explosive, charismatic energy of the handsome, brash young Kane’s musical number in this scene that celebrates The Inquirer’s poaching of its rival newspaper’s best journalists. When Kane throws his jacket toward the camera at his friends, its movement highlights the deep space across which the scene is staged, while diminishing the distance between Kane and the spectator, making viewers feel part of the company. Here Welles brilliantly combines musical theater with a metaphorical and visual strategy of elastic scale that is indebted to literary sources as diverse as Macbeth, who is dwarfed by his stolen kingly robes, and Sir John Tenniel’s strange framings of Alice in Lewis 13

Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The tight framing of Kane’s body within the distorted space of the room concisely and visually prefigure the dangerous expansion of his ego, even as we revel in his glory. He is a figure who grows and shrinks within the film.

Repeatedly, Welles visually communicates the changing interior states, relationships, and perceptions of his protagonists by altering a body’s relation to physical space and other objects. The strange mannequin in the lower left frame here invites us to think about how, if at all, Kane understood the difference between his wives and his statues, between people and things. When a weird cockatoo appears superimposed over the first seconds of the scene of

Susan’s flight from the marriage, the bird’s screech gives a surreal audio-flash of Kane’s subjective feelings before before the scene gives way to a visually distorted depiction of the 14 destruction of Susan’s bedroom. Though Welles can draw us into a character’s inner mind, he just as easily yanks us back from the action to give us a different perspective. The realism of

Mrs. Kane’s picnic in the Florida Everglades is disrupted, for example, by an extreme close-up of Blues drummer and singer Alton Redd. As Redd’s black face suddenly fills the screen, the line he sings—“It can’t be love”—functions like a Greek chorus’s commentary on the action; but his magnified visage also starkly reminds viewers of the otherwise marginalized presence of African-American actors throughout the film, and indeed the American film industry. This moment seems to yoke the gendered power disparity within the Kane marriage to other collective structural inequities, Alton Redd (Kane): “It can’t be love” (Video).

Welles tells the story of Kane’s struggle to turn his squeaky wife into a star not only through the actors’ performances, but also through the repetition of camera movements up and down the screen’s vertical axis, underscoring both Kane’s aspirations and Susan’s failures,

“Ropes” (Kane) (Video). Scenes with Susan also depend heavily on the use of special effects and models, underscoring the fabricated nature of her media identity, “Fabricated sets” (Kane)

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The film is impressive not only for its great variety of cinematic styles and techniques, but also for its sheer density of audio-visual meaning. The sequences in Mrs. Kane’s boarding house are often rightly given as a classic example of Gregg Toland’s fabulous deep-focus cinematography; but here Welles does so much more than show off a technique. He posits

Charles Foster Kane as the son of a female financial decider, complicating the film’s relationship to women from the start. Welles nudges us here to think about media in relation to both war and nationhood—if you listen carefully, you’ll see and hear how the young Kane’s game transforms a snowball into a Civil-War-era Ketchum grenade by crying “the Union forever” in the acoustic background as he hurls the snow; and finally, Welles reminds audiences in this sequence that the mass media’s ever-more virtual power, then as now, has roots in the 16 earth’s finite physical resources and the wealth extracted from the hard labor of mining. And with that, I’ll hand over to my esteemed colleague, Dean John Jackson Jr.