At the same time, the camera places us sufficiently close to the actors in the foreground of the image that we can read their expressions with much greater clarity than would be possible in the theatre. We can look for clues in the frozen but somehow anguished expression of Mrs. Kane for why she is so determined to separate herself from her son. We can wonder in observing the slightly exasperated and nervous expression on Thatcher’s face what kind of guardian he will make for a young boy. Or we can observe the father’s angry, worried expression and wonder why he backs down. The father’s position further back in the screen space makes him seem smaller than his wife and Mr. Thatcher, his diminished size somehow appropriate to his lack of power to influence his son’s fate (Cook 1996, p. 78).
The brilliance of the scene is the tiny image of Charles Kane far in the depth of the screen space. Although the film is about him and in later scenes he will loom large indeed, here he is a tiny speck. On first viewing the film, some may not even notice him. But his understated presence playing outside the window, shouting “Union forever” as his mother is about to send him off into the world without her, is one of the most dramatic moments in film. Welles used similar deep-focus long-take techniques in numerous other scenes in the film, such as Thompson’s first meeting with Kane’s second wife Susan at the bar where she works as a singer, the scene in which Kane fires Jed Leland in the newspaper office, the scene in which Thatcher takes control of Kane’s newspapers when Kane goes bust during the depression, and the scenes of Kane and Susan sitting in empty splendour in the halls of Xanadu. In a way unique to each of these scenes, their dramatic power is enhanced by the deep-focus techniques (Cook 1996, p. 82-83).
Formal qualities in conjunction with cinema techniques in Citizen Kane
Welles does not confine himself to a realist style in Citizen Kane. In one notable instance, he adds dramatic power to a scene by using a standard Hollywood shot/reverse shot technique. In the scene in which Susan Alexander and Charles Kane first meet, Welles moves between long takes of Kane and Susan talking together in a medium two shot and a series of alternating, soft-focus, reverse-angle close-ups. Because Welles avoids such shots throughout most of the film, when he does use them, they are all the more effective. While the couple clearly seems to be falling in love, their being so emphatically framed in separate shots as they speak to each other (not sharing the screen space as they would if they were photographed together in the frame in a long take), suggests that each is off in a separate fantasy world, cut off from the other person mentally. Here Welles, by using a standard Hollywood technique sparingly, revitalizes its psychological expressiveness (Bazin 1990, p. 56).
