The cinematic style of Citizen Kane, especially its use of extreme deep-focus photography in many crucial scenes, was as innovative and groundbreaking as the film’s narrative technique. Working in collaboration with his cinematographer Gregg Toland, Welles shot scenes in which we can see objects a few inches from the lens just as clearly and sharply as objects 200 feet away (Toland 1996, pp. 73-77). This practice was counter to the prevailing Hollywood style in 1941, which was characterized by diffuse lighting and images with a shallow depth of field, in which objects in the foreground are clear but the background appears blurry or out of focus. Andre Bazin was especially impressed with Welles’s use of deep focus. “Depth of focus reintroduced ambiguity into the structure of the image,” he writes. “Hence it is no exaggeration to say that Citizen Kane is unthinkable shot in any other way but in depth. The uncertainty in which we find ourselves as to the spiritual key or the interpretation we should put on the film is built into the very design of the image” (Bazin 1990, p. 36).
It is clear that Welles’s choice to shoot many of his scenes in deep focus and in long takes had their origin in his past as a stage director: he was trying to preserve the integrity of theatrical space on the screen. In numerous sequences in Citizen Kane, because of the use of deep-focus photography in conjunction with long takes, our eyes have the same freedom to wander around the screen image as we have in the theatre. We can focus on the actor who is speaking or instead watch the actor who is listening. Our eyes can move around the frame, focusing on whatever we choose. The realist director may design the mice-en-scene artfully, thereby guiding our attention to significant actions, but he or she does not have autocratic control over what we see, as happens when the action is broken down into short shots by editing or photographed in soft focus so that we can see only images in the foreground (Carroll 1996, pp. 45-48).
Chaplin favoured the use of realist techniques because they were best suited to capturing on film the intricacies and subtle timing effects of his comic choreography, but Welles’s deep focus was much deeper than Chaplin’s and his long takes much longer and more intricately structured, to create dramatic (as opposed to comic) effects. The following analysis of just one shot in Citizen Kane demonstrates the subtle dramatic effects Welles’s innovative cinematographic style enabled him to achieve (Mulvey 1992, pp. 67-69).
Citizen Kane’s creative merit analysis
