CHAPT[R 30

The Technique of Citizen Kane

Well, then, let's talk once more about Citizen Kane (1941 ). 1 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 achievement. For the rest, the opinions range between these
two extremes: Orson Welles reinvents filmmaking, Citizen Kane is as
important as Greed (1925, dir. Erich von Stroheim), and Welles is a great
man; nonetheless, however talented he may be, his film is only an intelli-
gent bluff. Georges Sadoul, for example, talks about some monstrous
puffball that probably owes its existence to a deluge of dollars during one
of those long Hollywood nights. He can't see anything new in the style;
on the contrary, he finds
an excess of feebly assimilated reminiscences. The film is an ency-
clopedia 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 Lumiere's Arrival of a Train in the Station
at La Ciotat (1895); Melies' 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 193 5; the sets with ceilings taken over from
Greed . .. , the newsreel montage invented by Dziga Vertov ... One
senses that Welles is intoxicated with the apparent novelty of his
means and technique. 2

231
 All of Sadoul's comparisons are accurate except one, whose impor-
tance is in fact paramount: to equate Gregg Toland's special lenses with
Louis Lumiere'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 sim-
ple reduction of the size of the diaphragm. The interesting thing about
Welles's depth of field is that it is 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 conscious use of all the resources of filmmaking in order
to achieve a meaningful style. In this respect, the accusation 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 Welles's originality.
In an article published by L'Ecran Fran(ais long before the release of
Citizen Kane in France, Jean-Paul Sartre also disputes the technical orig-
inality of Welles's mise en scene, acknowledging its intelligence but regret-
ting its intellectualism. 3 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 gen-
eralization. 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 influ-
ence 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." (p. 4)
In any event, the true originality of the film doesn't derive from its
devices. For ten years now, the language of filmmaking has been fully
defined (at least until the advent of 3-D); the novelty of language, cine-
matic or otherwise, must be understood from the point of view of style,
not from the point of view of vocabulary or syntax. Flaubert did not
invent the imperfect tense, nor did Gide invent the simple past, or Camus
the present perfect: their use of these tenses is personal, and it is one com-
ponent of their prose styles. However, even if Welles did not invent the
cinematic devices employed in Citizen Kane, one should nevertheless
credit him with the invention of their meaning. His way of "writing" a
film is undeniably his own. I don't mean by this the mere architecture of
the story, altough the novelty of the ordering of the film's scenes is itself
worthy of our consideration. In this sense, the connection between
Citizen Kane and the novels ofDos Passos is obvious. The insertion of the
newsreel extracts probably has nothing tG do with Dziga Vertov, contrary
to what Sadoul writes, but it does owe quite a lot to the author of The
42nd Parallel (1930) and Big Money (1936). The substitution for the
chronological story of a kind of jigsaw puzzle, whose pieces are provided
by the memories of a series of witnesses, can hardly be traced, however,
to The Power and the Glory (1933) or even Marie-Martine (1943). 4
Still, in my opinion, this does not amount to "reinventing filmmak-
ing." It is fitting that, after having directly or indirectly influenced the
novel, the cinema should in tum be influenced by it. But what is even
more important is that the cinema not limit itself to the more or less skill-
ful imitation of fiction; it is to Welles's credit that he managed to accom-
plish a revolution in film language that was necessary to his thematic pur-
pose. All the effects of Citizen Kane's mise en scene, whether borrowed from
the past or created from scratch, are now material for a new conception
of filmmaking.
Most of the critics have pointed out the use oflenses with great depth
of field in this film, and Roger Leenhardt has explained the main conse-
quence of such use: "The acting takes place in depth [from the fore-
ground to the background], so tracking and editing become unneces-
sary."5 This simple sentence requires some elaboration once one recalls
that the cinema has been based for the last thirty years or so on the idea
of the edited or reassembled scene. The mise en scene has consisted of
decomposing the action into fragments (the shots), whose arrangement
or sequence is meant to be grasped by the viewer's mind as the story itself.
This cutting, which I would call analytical, tends never to show two
things on screen at the same time. The dialogue becomes a succession of
shot-countershot in favor of one or the other speaker. The camera cuts
according to the dramatic center of gravity of the scene, choosing for us
what we must see at the moment when it must be seen. The cutting of
the camera can be compared to the compulsory movement of one's head,
 and the change of shot to the refocusing of one's crystalline lens, as if it
were inescapably coupled to the lens of the camera. Leenhardt also
observed that the apparent wholeness of the action in such a sequence
corresponded less to the physical proximity of people and things to one
another than to the degree of our attentiveness or absorption (which
explains why we don't react to the material impossibility of the shot
changes). The story is thus reconstituted on the screen along a melodic
visual line that closely follows all the sinuosities of the action. Oh,
Minotaur, here you will find Ariadne's thread: it is the editor's scissors. 6
Welles builds most of his sequences in a completely different way.
Let's take Susan Alexander Kane's suicide attempt as an example: we get it
in a single shot on a level with the bed. In the left-hand corner, on the
night table, are the enormous glass and the teaspoon. A little farther back,
in shadow, we sense rather than see the woman's face. The presence of
drama and its nature, already suggested by the glass, are revealed to us on
the soundtrack: by a raspy groan and the snore of a drugged sleeper.
Beyond the bed: the empty room, and completely in the background, even
farther away because of the receding perspective created by the wide-angle
lens: the locked door. Behind the door, we hear on the soundtrack Kane's
calls and his shoulder bumping against the wood. This single shot, then, is
built in depth around two dramatic centers of gravity, each consisting of
sonorous and visual elements. One sees immediately the use Welles has
made of his lens by putting the desert of the bedroom between the bed and
the door. It is difficult, if one hasn't seen the film, to imagine the internal
dynamism of this image, stretched between two poles, with its monstrous
foreground pressed against the viewer's face and this little rectangle of
sound far away in which one can divine Kane's fear and anger. But let's
continue: the door gives way and Kane appears and rushes to the bed.
Along with him, it's the whole dramatic background that comes toward us.
The two nuclei of the action, which were irresistibly attracting each other,
are coming together. The tension that was dividing the image, and dou-
bling the action of the story with its own plastic drama, dissolves; it broke
with the door from the force of Kane's shoulder. Then the dramatic over-
load of the image suddenly dissipates as Welles changes shots.
One can easily imagine what classical or analytical cutting would
have made of this scene: four or five different shots would have been nec-
essary to relate to us the same event. Clearly, we would not have been
spared the parallel montage of shots taken inside and outside the room

234 BAZIN ON INDIVIDUAL FILMS

until the inevitable reverse-angle shot of the room at the moment the
door breaks open. I won't insist on giving twenty more examples of this
kind from the film. I'll recall only the scene of Kane's falling out with Jed
Leland and the banquet celebrating the hiring of the Chronicle's staff as
well as the declaration of war against Spain, during which the director
makes sure that we don't lose sight of Kane by keeping his reflection in a
windowpane when the camera has to make a cut. Talking about montage
and cutting in relation to these dramatic blocks has little meaning other
than a metaphoric one; what matters is less a succession of images and
their relationship to each other than the interior structure of the image,
the attractions or currents that are created within the dramatic space,
which is at last used in its three dimensions. It is not the lens that makes
the arrangements for our eye, it's our mind that is compelled to follow the
dramatic spectrum in its entirety within this uniformly visible space.
The extraordinary richness of the acting in Welles's films is a natur-
al consequence of this technique. When a character becomes secondary
in the course of a scene, classical cutting automatically takes him off the
screen. While keeping him there, Welles makes sure that his acting
doesn't stop being as precise as if he were still the center of attention, thus
always running the risk of splitting the viewer's focus. We must constant-
ly be attentive in order to avoid having the main event take place behind
our backs, as it were. The deliberate aim here is complete realism, a way
of considering reality as if it were homogeneous and indivisible, as if it
had the same density at all coordinates on the screen. The whole set and
all the actors are, in the totality of the image, offered up equally to our
eyes; if something remains off screen, it's simply a coincidence that is as
unpredictable as an exception to the rule of great numbers.
The leitmotif of the jigsaw puzzle that dominates the end of the film
is also the symbol of its aesthetics, whether we are referring to the rough
fragments of the newsreels, where by definition an event is cut up at ran-
dom by the editor's hand, or to the more sophisticated dramatic segments,
in which the frame of the screen is used as an open window ideally situat-
ed for the action to develop plastically all of its elements. But, just as a
jigsaw puzzle cuts up a picture that has previously been whole, Welles's
cutting fragments reality along selected lines instead of analyzing it into
its component parts, as cinema usually does according to a completely
conventional mechanism. Thus Welles sometimes comes back twice to
the same scene-that of opening night at the Chicago Opera House, for

THE TECHNIQUE OF CITIZEN KANE 235

 example, as remembered initially by Jed Leland and then by Susan
Alexander Kane herself. The first time, we see the heroine from the front
of the house; the second time, from the back of the stage. These two
points of view on the same event fit together as closely as two contiguous
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, even though the second has not been placed
immediately after the first. The same holds true for the scene of Susan's
departure: it is resumed during Raymond the butler's testimony exactly at
the point where the camera had left it in Susan's story.
Necessarily, I have given only a few, representative examples in this
brief analysis. Citizm Kane is not entirely built according to these principles;
often, even within the most characteristically photographed segments,
Welles does not hesitate to employ classical cutting. It remains to be seen
why this return to a traditional method of storytelling does not destroy the
overall style of the film. Doesn't Welles in fact manage to incorporate, even
into his quick cuts, the essence of the realistic technique found in his long
takes? Even supposing that we could draw this conclusion, there would
probably remain a significant portion of the film unexplained-a portion
that the less friendly critics would ascribe to a deliberate taste for paradox,
to the compulsion for being nonconformist at all costs. Whether we put
into this category the sets with ceilings or the sets that were built instead
of using more economical transparencies, is in the end not very important.
I'd only observe that these little by-products are far from being negligible
and that the artistic mileage we could get from them would be enough to
make the reputation of many a film. The systematic use of techniques
other than the accepted ones, when it's done with talent, always has the
effect of revealing forgotten truths. We had come to believe that the faces
of beautiful women, when we look at them from up close, are naturally lit
by various, judiciously arranged sources; we had come to believe that peo-
ple don't turn their backs when saying important things, and that ceilings
never confine our existence. By reminding us of all this, Welles has given
the cinema a theoretical restoration. He has enriched his filmic repertory
with new or forgotten effects that, in today's artistic context, take on a sig-
nificance we didn't know they could have.
I'll leave to more philosophical minds the task of defining the meta-
physics, to use Sartre's word,? of Welles's technique. I'd simply like to
remark, in conclusion, that the mutual influence that literature and cine-
ma have on each other, which seems obvious, does not diminish the
uniqueness of their respective means of expression. We persist in France

236 BAZIN ON INDIVIDUAL FILMS

in "adapting" to the screen the novels ofDostoyevsky, Gide, and Balzac in
a quasi-uniform language that tries in vain to respect the original prose
style through childish artifices of set or lighting design. However, men like
Orson Welles, William Wyler, and Preston Sturges don't adapt: they write
or rewrite their story in film language and never doubt thereby to achieve,
each in his own way, the artistic revolution required, just as James Joyce,
for instance, managed to do it in literature. Although the connections
between American fiction and American cinema appear to be more and
more numerous, far from leading to a literary kind of filmmaking, they
have instead reaffirmed each of these arts in its own technique. Fiction and
filmmaking do not engage in mutual imitation; they only adopt common
purposes, they fulfill the same aims, without copying each other.
To detail, as Sadoul does, the previous use of certain devices in order
to deny their appropriation by Welles, is to forget that the invention
belongs to the man who can master it. D. W Griffith himself did not
invent the close-up, which you can find here and there years before he
used it, but he did invent analytical cutting-i.e., the last thirty years of
filmmaking-by systematically changing shots for the sake of clarifying
his narrative. Even if Citizen Kane had merely been one of the most bril-
liant examples of the alchemy of modem cinematic language, Welles
would deserve more than just the attention of film snobs. If he doesn't
"reinvent filmmaking," at least he reinvents his own cinema, just as
Malraux, Hemingway, and Dos Passos reinvent language for their own
purposes. Perhaps Welles's endeavor was fully possible only beyond the
standardized, transparent cinema of the studio system, in an arena where
no more resistance is offered to the artist's intention than to the novelist's
pen. What is significant is that we owe the most audacious film in the last
ten years to a young man of twenty-five who had nothing to recommend
him except his ideas.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 30

The Technique of Citizen Kane

"The Technique of Citizen Kane" was first published in French in Les Temps Modernes, II,
no. 17 (1947), pp. 943-949. See also the following:
(All notes have been provided by the Editor.)
1. Andre Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View, trans. Jonathan Rosenbaum (New York:
Harper and Row, 1978): "Citizen Kane," pp. 53-59; "The Technique of Wide Angles,"
pp. 74-75; "Construction in Depth," pp. 75-80; and "A Style That Creates Meaning,"
pp. 81-82.

THE TECHNIQUE OF CITIZEN KANE 237

 Andre Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," in What is Cinema?, I,
trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1967), pp. 23-40, where Bazin dis-
cusses depth-of-field shooting versus montage in Citizm Kane on pp. 33-37.
Andre Bazin, "An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism," in What is Cinema? II, trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley: Univ. of Cali Press, 1971), pp. 16-40, which has a section
entitled "From Citizm Kane to Farrebique" on pp. 27-30.
*Andre Bazin and Jean-Charles Tacchella, "Les Secrets d'Orson Welles"
(Interview), L'Ecran Franfais, no. 169 (21 Sept. 1948), pp. 3-4.
*Andre Bazin, "IJApport d'Orson Welles," Cine-Club, no. 7 (May 1948).
Andre Bazin and Charles Bitsch, "Entretien avec Orson Welles," Cahiers du
Cinema, no. 84 Q'une 1958).
*Andre Bazin, Charles Bitsch, and Jean Domarchi, "Nouvel Entretien avec Orson
Welles," Cahiers du Cinema, no. 87 (Sept. 1958), pp. 2-27.
*Andre Bazin, "Orson Welles, Ia television et le magnetophone," France-
Observateur, 12June 1958.
Andre Bazin, "Orson Welles chez les Jivaros," Cahiers du Cinema, no. 88 (Oct.
1958).
Andre Bazin, 'Le Pour et le Contre (Orson Welles)," Cahiers du Cinema, no. 4
Q'uly-Aug. 1951), pp. 46-51.
*Andre Bazin, "Buiiuel et Orson Welles justifient le (Cannes) Festival officieux,"
Le Parisim libiri, 5 May 1956.
*Andre Bazin, "Citizm Kane," Le Parisim libire,July 5, 1946.
2. Georges Sadoul, "Le Cinema: Hypertrophie du cerveau" (Review of Citizm Kane), Les
Lettresfranfaises, no. 115 (5 July 1946), p. 9. Sadoul (1904-1967) was a French film
critic and historian. In 1945 he became general secretary of the Federation Fran~aise
de Cine-Clubs and began his weekly film review in Les Lettres franfaises, which he con-
tinued until his death. He also contributed to L'Ecran Franfais. From 1945 until the
mid-1950s, Sadoul stood with Andre Bazin as the main figure and inspiration of
French film criticism; his chief contribution in later years was calling attention to the
newly emerging cinema of Third-World countries. He wrote the first large-scale his-
tory of film, Histoire generate du cinema in six volumes (1946-1952), left unfinished at
his death, together with a number of other books such as Dictionary ofFilms and
Dictionary of Film Makers (both published in French in .1965 and translated in 1972),
French Film (published first in English in 1953, then in French in 1962), Georges Melies
(1961), and Louis Lumiere (1964).
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Quand Hollywood veut faire penser ... Citizen Kane, Film d'Orson
Welles," L'Ecran Franfais, no. 5 (1 August 1945), pp. 3-5, 15. Hereafter cited by page
number. Citizm Kane opened in Paris in July 1946.
4. Sartre claims the opposite in his article on Citizm Kane, that "[The narrative structure
of Citizm Kane] is not unfamiliar to us: recall Thomas Garner and Marie-Martine" (p.
4). Keep in mind that even though Marie-Martine was made after Citizm Kane, it was
released in France before Welles's film.
The Prrwer and the Glory was known as Thomas Garner in France and tells the flash-
back story of a tycoon who rose from nothing, only to be corrupted by power.
William K Howard directed the film, which starred Spencer Tracy, Colleen Moore,
Ralph Morgan, and Helen Vinson. Marie-Martine is a comedy-drama about a young
woman with a turbulent past, which a writer wants to exploit in his new novel. The
film was directed by Albert Valentin and starred Renee Saint-Cyr, Jules Berry,
Bernard Blier, Marguerite Deval, Saturnin Fabre, and Jean Dubucourt.

238 BAZIN ON INDIVIDUAL FILMS

5. Roger Leenhardt, "Le genie d'Orson Weles, dans un pamphlet social d'une audace
inconnue: Citoyen Kane," L'Ecran Franrais, no. 53 (3 July 1946), p. 7. Leenhardt (1903-
1985) was a French director and film critic. He began to write film criticism in 1933
and from 1936 to 1939 contributed an extremely influential column to the review
Esprit. The most eminent of his disciples was Andre Bazin, who regarded Leenhardt
as the first serious film critic and as the subtlest of them all. He was described in
Bazin's magazine Cahiers du Cinema as the "spiritual father of the New Wave" and the
formulator of its principles.
Leenhardt was the first serious European critic to champion the American cinema;
Bazin shared Leenhardt's admiration for some Hollywood directors and joined him in
his advocacy of deep-focus cinematography and the moving camera. After the war,
when Bazin succeeded his master as Esprit's regular film columnist, Leenhardt said
that Bazin's work "was a continuation of what I was doing and he took it beyond what
I was trying to do." Leenhardt wrote regularly on film for Les Lettres franraises from
1944 to 1946, and also contributed to Fontaine, Cahiers du Cinema, and L'Ecran
Franrais. His criticism was collected after his death in Chroniques de Cinema, ed. Jean
Narboni and Alain Bergala (Paris: Editions de I'Etoile, 1986).
The strength of Leenhardt's criticism derives partly from the fact that he knew the
problems and possibilities of filmmaking at first hand. He began making documentary
shorts in the mid-1930s and, as a documentarist, is best known for his perceptive
biographies of writers and artists, including Victor Hugo (1951); Franrois Mauriac
(1954);Jean-Jacques (1957), about Rousseau; Daumier (1958); Paul Valery (1959);
L'Homme aIa pipe (1962), about Gustave Courbet; and Corot (1965). In addition to
over fifty shorts, Leenhardt directed two feature films of some quality: Les Dernieres
Vacances (The Last Vacation, 1947), his most famous work, and Le Rendez-vous de minuit
(Rendezvous at Midnight, 1962). See Bazin's review of The Last Vacation, translated in
this volume.
6. Greek mythology: Ariadne, King Minos's daughter, gave Theseus the thread by which
he found his way out of the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur, a monster with the
body of a man and the head of a bull.
7. Sartre had written in reference to Faulkner and Dos Passos that every novelistic tech-
nique necessarily relates back to a metaphysics. See Jean-Paul Sartre, "American
Novelists in French Eyes," trans. Evelyn de Solis, Atlantic Monthly, 178, no. 2 (Aug.
1946), pp. 114-18; "Sartoris par William Faulkner," La Nouvelle Revue franraise, no.
293 (Feb. 1938), pp. 323-28; and "A propos de John Dos Passos et de 1919," La
Nouvelle Revue Franraise, no. 299 (Aug. 1938), pp. 292-301. The last two articles are
collected in Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette
Michelson (London: Rider, 19 55; New York: Criterion, 1966).

THE TECHNIQUE OF CITIZEN KAN 239