The Magic World of Orson Welles

by James Naremore

  MY VOICE: Listen! Listen to this. (Effect) Hear that sound? The sound of ticking? (Pause—Effect very clear) That’s a time bomb. I don’t know just when it’s going to explode. But I think that before it does there’ll be just enough time for me to tell you about October first.—

  ITURBIDE: The date! That’s the date!

  ONE OF THE LATINS: Now everyone knows it! . . .

  MY VOICE: I want you to know all about October first before I die. You see, I’m going to die any minute now because I’m holding the time bomb in my hand.

  A moment’s pause filled with the sound of ticking. Then Mr. England starts away. . . . As he leaves, CAMERA starts slowly closing in on the RADIO.

  MY VOICE (during the above): I’m broadcasting from a munitions dump. This microphone is located over a warehouse containing over a thousand tons of high explosives . . .

  THE FACES OF THE CONSPIRATORS . . .

  MY VOICE: Maybe if you got here in time, and you’d have to come quick, you’d see a big steam yacht making out to sea. It might be interesting for you to know who’s on board.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  A BIG CHART—the Island of Santiago, almost filling the screen. A pencil in someone’s hand checks the location.

  CAMERA PULLS BACK TO REVEAL: INT. A GOVERNMENT OFFICE IN MEXICO CITY. My voice continues from a small radio in the office. Several officials are listening. . . .

  MY VOICE: I think you’d find big men in the Americas. The wrong kind . . .

  OFFICIAL (on the telephone): Larga distancia—Washington.

  DISSOLVE

  INT. LOWER MIDDLE CLASS AMERICAN HOME

  MY VOICE (on this): These, the ones that don’t belong-

  FATHER (at phone): Hello—is this the Inquirer?

  MY VOICE: They’re the real power in this revolution -

  FATHER (at phone): Say—there’s a fellow on the radio-

  DISSOLVE

  A BIG LOUDSPEAKER. CAMERA PULLS BACK TO SHOW: THE FACADE OF A MUSIC STORE IN A LARGE MEXICAN TOWN, a crowd of Mexicans of various classes gathered before the loudspeaker. . . . A Mexican is translating my words to the crowd. . . .

  DISSOLVE: THE PRESIDENTS PALACE—MEXICO CITY. . . .

  MY VOICE: On the sixteenth of September the people of Mexico celebrate their Independence Day. The president rings a bell and cries out in the square—“Viva Mexico! Viva La Republica!” Years ago, a priest named Hidalgo rang that bell and gave that cry for the first time in that country. They call it the Grito.—Well, here’s another Grito. I hope it’ll be heard.—I hope—

  SUDDEN SILENCE. The sound of ticking has stopped, too. Complete silence. . . .

  AN EXPENSIVE-LOOKING BAR IN RIO DE JANEIRO. Men, and women too, who have gotten up from their tables and are gathered by the radio at the bar . . .

  THE LOUDSPEAKER: IN FRONT OF THE MUSIC STORE. The Mexicans listening.

  THE GOVERNMENT OFFICE—MEXICO CITY. The officials listening. The one at the phone lowers the receiver.

  A GOVERNMENT OFFICE IN WASHINGTON—American officials. . . .

  THE AMERICAN HOME. The family listening.

  THE FATHER: That must have been an awful explosion.

  DISSOLVE: INT. THE WAREHOUSE. I am standing by the microphone. In one hand, I hold an alarm clock!

  For a time Welles has chosen to keep the movie audience deceived along with everyone else; happily, however, the radio broadcast is a reverse of War of the Worlds, a hoax that saves people instead of putting them in danger. The trick takes on added interest in the perspective of Welles’s whole career, because he was always preoccupied with the notion of art as a medium for lies. In this case the big lie of the fascists is exposed by another lie. “I’m telling the truth,” the Welles character insists at the beginning of his broadcast, and in a sense he is, but even in this relatively ordinary Wellesian effort, truth and deception are inextricably linked, the difference between demagoguery and benign illusionism growing very vague indeed.

  Despite such ironies, Welles’s Mexican film was fairly direct propaganda for the war, its more pessimistic qualities suggested only in the bizarre, film noir treatment of some scenes. It was a likely project partly because it would have made an exciting melodrama and partly because it was well suited to the politics of RKO. Throughout the thirties and early forties, that studio had undertaken a kind of “good neighbor” policy, staging everything from Fred Astaire musicals to Disney cartoons in a Latin American setting. One of the underlying motives for these films was Rockefeller oil holdings in Latin America and the concern to keep those holdings within the orbit of the United States. (Welles’s script actually refers to an oil industry in Mexico that is being threatened by the Germans; it does not, however, suggest that the Americans themselves might have been guilty of economic imperialism—a far cry from the way American oil would be depicted in Touch of Evil.) As it happened, however, the script encountered objections from the Mexican government itself, and because RKO was sensitive to the Latin American market, the project was shelved.

  Thus both Heart of Darkness and the “Mexican Melodrama” remain sketches for possible films. Perhaps it is just as well that they were not produced—Welles was able to employ their themes and style in other works (in place of a Kurtz discovered at the heart of darkness, he gave us a Kane discovered in the center of a labyrinth), and by any standard his first two films represent a more impressive debut.

  But in advance of any direct discussion of these films, it will be helpful to pause and consider the typical qualities of Welles’s staging of a story for the camera—his work as a director rather than as a scriptwriter.

  2

  The Magician

  According to John Houseman, Welles was “at heart a magician whose particular talent lies not so much in his creative imagination (which is considerable) as in his proven ability to stretch the familiar elements of theatrical effect far beyond their normal point of tension.” Left-handed as the compliment may seem, Welles was in fact a magician, and watching his movies is sometimes like attending a performance by Blackstone or Sorcar. In Citizen Kane, for example, there is a famous shot where the camera moves in to a close-up of a group photograph of the Chronicle staff while Kane talks about what good men they are; suddenly Kane walks right into the photo, and as the camera pulls back from the assembled journalists we find ourselves at an Inquirer party six years later. Near the beginning of The Magnificent Ambersons Welles reads Booth Tarkington offscreen while the house across the street from the Amberson mansion is shown in long shot; slowly the sky darkens, a moon appears, and the house is festooned with lanterns—as if by magic, a winter day is transformed into a summer night. Moments like these are not merely functional; they also draw upon a cinema of illusionism as old as Georges Méliès. Even if we were to disregard such obvious showpieces of movie trickery, Welles’s films would still seem flamboyant, filled with magic and “theatrical effect.”

  Most people are attracted to Welles’s work because of this spectacular quality, despite the fact that he liked to think of himself as a man of ideas. Before considering any of his films as narratives or philosophic statements, therefore, let us look at their surfaces—not so much the elaborate special effects as the typical dramatic scenes within a given film. For at this level Welles’s handling of the medium constitutes an idiolect, a personal style with as many historical, cultural, and psychological implications as his more public ideas or themes.

  The obvious place to begin is with Citizen Kane, and within that film a logical starting point is the wide-angle, deep-focus photography that became one of the most distinctive features of Welles’s style. As we shall see in later chapters, his methods were to change somewhat, growing more fluid, various, and in some ways more daring as he gained experience and encountered other cameramen after Toland; in fact he seldom returned to a really elaborate depth of field—as in those grotesque shots where a giant head only a few inches from the screen is in equally sharp focus with a figure that seems to be standing a mil
e away. Nevertheless, the principle of exaggerated perspective was suited to his temperament and remained an essential quality of his work until very late. Like much of the acting in his films, it creates a slightly hallucinatory effect, marking him from the beginning of his career as anything but a purely representational or conventional artist. Indeed in every feature of his early work—from the photography, to the sound, to the acting—Welles’s style is mildly unorthodox, implicitly rebellious against the norm. These points will become clearer, however, after we have examined a few scenes.

  I

  One of the best-known and most written about moments in Welles’s first full-length movie is the boardinghouse segment, where we meet Kane in his youth. The camera pans slowly across a handwritten line of Walter Parks Thatcher’s memoirs—“I first met Charles Foster Kane in 1871”—and then, accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s lilting “Rosebud” theme, the image dissolves from the white margin of the page into an unreal land of snow where Charlie frolics with his sled. At first the black dot against pure white echoes the manuscript we have been looking at, but it swoops across the screen counter to the direction the camera has been moving, in conflict with the stiff, prissy banker’s handwriting, suggesting the conflict between Kane and Thatcher that runs through the early parts of the movie. The camera moves in closer, and an insert establishes the setting when one of the boy’s snowballs strikes the sign over Mrs. Kane’s boardinghouse. Following this shot is a long take. The camera retreats from the boy and moves through the window where his mother stands admonishing him not to catch cold; she turns, accompanied first by Thatcher and then her husband, walking the full length of the parlor, the camera tracking with her until it frames the whole room. She and Thatcher sit at a table in the foreground, and the camera holds relatively stationary for the rest of the scene. By this means Welles deliberately avoids conventional editing techniques and lets each element—the actors and the decor of the home—reveal itself successively, until everything is placed in a highly symbolic composition.

  Figure 2.1: Thatcher and Mrs. Kane in the boardinghouse.

  Toland’s photography is of course much sharper than this reproduction of a frame can indicate. The deep focus enables us to see everything at once, and the wide-angle lens slightly enlarges the foreground, giving it dramatic impact. As is typical in Kane, the camera views the action in terms of three planes of interest: in the foreground at the lower right, Mrs. Kane and the banker sit negotiating the child’s future; in the middle distance, Mr. Kane makes agitated pacing movements back and forth, whining and complaining to his wife; far away, framed in the square of the window as if in the light at the end of a tunnel, Charlie plays in the snow. While the parents and banker converse inside, the sound of the boy’s play can be heard through the window, which Mrs. Kane has insisted must be left open. According to the RKO cutting continuity, the boy’s shouts are “indistinct,” but if you listen closely you will hear some of his lines. As his mother prepares to sign him over to a guardian and thus dissolve her family, the boy shouts, “The Union forever! The Union forever!”

  Undoubtedly Welles’s theatrical experience led him to conceive movie images in this way; the Julius Caesar sets, as we have seen, had been designed to allow for just this sort of in-depth composition. Actually, however, Welles’s long takes are in some way less conventionally theatrical than the typical dialogue scene in a Hollywood feature, which does nothing more than establish a setting and cut back and forth between close-ups of the actors. Hollywood cinema was basically a “star” medium, designed to highlight faces and words, whereas Welles tried to introduce a sense of visual conflict and directorial presence, even in the absence of cutting. In the scene at hand, the three planes of interest have been as carefully “reconstructed” as any montage, and they function in a roughly similar way. One important difference is that the spectator has an immediate impression of the whole, of several conflicting elements presented not in sequential fashion, but simultaneously. The movies, after all, are not an exclusively linear medium; if the director wishes to preserve the temporal continuity, he has a second dimension—depth—along which the fragments of an idea can coexist. Thus while the story of Kane moves briskly forward on the reel, we occasionally have the sense of slicing through a cross-section of a moment, looking down a corridor of images and overlapping events.

  Welles designs the boardinghouse scene in such a way that we cannot help looking down Mrs. Kane’s parlor to the window that neatly frames and encloses the boy’s play, seeming to trap him at the very moment when he feels most free. At virtually the same time we are aware of Mrs. Kane seated with the banker in the foreground, her face the image of stern puritanical sacrifice; Thatcher hovers over officiously, while in the middle distance, caught between son and mother, the weak, irresponsible Mr. Kane keeps saying he doesn’t like turning the boy over to a “gardeen.” The faces, clothing, and postures of the actors contrast with one another, just as the slightly blurred, limitless world of snow outside the window contrasts with the sharply focused, gray interior. Clearly the shot was meticulously organized in order to stress these conflicts; in fact it took Welles and Toland four days to complete the sequence, because everything had to be timed with clockwork precision. As a result, Kane has a somewhat authoritarian effect; Welles may not be so Pavlovian a director as Eisenstein, but neither is he quite willing to let the spectator choose what he will see. He keeps the actors and the audience under fairly rigid control, just as the characters in this scene seem under the control of fate.

  Abetted by Toland’s extreme-depth photography, Welles uses the long takes in Citizen Kane in highly expressive ways. As in the shot described above, the actors often take unnatural positions, their figures arrayed in a slanting line that runs out in front of the camera so that characters in the extreme foreground or in the distance become subjects for the director’s visual commentary. Actors seldom confront one another face-to-face as they do in the shot/reverse shot editing of the ordinary film. The communications scientists would say that the positions of figures on the screen are “sociofugal,” or not conducive to direct human interaction, and this slight physical suggestion of an inability to communicate is fully appropriate to the theme of social alienation that is implicit in the film.

  Space in the conventional Hollywood film—especially in action genres like the gangster movie or the western, which used a sharp, relatively “deep” photography—had been freer, more mobile, and certainly less symbolic than this. Oddly, however, Welles’s long takes have frequently been praised for their heightened “realism.” For example, in the course of his fine early essay on Kane, David Bordwell has written that the boardinghouse scene demonstrates the self-effacing quality of Welles’s direction: “despite the complexity of the set-ups, we gain a sense of a reality—actual, unmanipulated, all of a piece.” Elsewhere he remarks that key features of Welles’s technique are designed to create the illusion of a “real world”: “The spatial and temporal unity of the deep-focus, the simultaneous dialogue, the reflections and chiaroscuro, the detached use of the moving camera, the intrusion of sounds from outside the frame—all increase the objectively realistic effect.”

  Bordwell’s notions about technique seem to derive, with some modification, from André Bazin, whose famous essay “The Evolution of Film Language” has been a major influence on Welles’s critics. Indeed Bazin’s commentary on Kane raises so many interesting questions that no study of Welles’s deep-focus compositions can afford not to give it a brief review. Summarized, Bazin’s argument runs as follows: between 1920 and 1940 there had been two kinds of filmmakers—“those who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality.” By the “image” Bazin meant “very broadly speaking, everything that the representation on the screen adds to the object there represented”; by “reality” he was referring to an unmanipulated phenomenal world spread out in front of the camera, a world he believed could leave its essential imprint on the film emulsion. Accor
ding to Bazin, a director had two ways of adding to the object represented, thereby diluting the “reality”: he could manipulate the “plastics” of the medium—the lighting, the sets, the makeup, the framing of a shot, and so forth—or he could employ montage, which would create “a meaning not proper to the images themselves but derived exclusively from their juxtaposition.” Around 1940, according to Bazin, the principle of “adding” to the reality was challenged by directors like Jean Renoir, William Wyler, and Orson Welles. Thanks to the depth of field in Kane, Bazin wrote, “whole scenes are covered in one take. . . . Dramatic effects for which we had formerly relied on montage were created out of the movements of the actors within a fixed framework.” In Welles and in his predecessor Renoir, Bazin saw “a respect for the continuity of dramatic space and, of course, its duration.” Indeed, he said, the alternation of expressive montage and long takes in Kane was like a shifting back and forth between two tenses or between two modes of telling a story.

  Because the many deep-focus shots in Kane eliminated the need for excessive cutting within a scene, and because they theoretically acted as a window upon what Bazin regarded as the ambiguous phenomenal world, he praised the film as a step forward in movie “realism.” Furthermore, he argued, the deep-focus style was appropriate to ideas expressed in the script. “Montage by its very nature rules out ambiguity of expression,” he wrote, and therefore “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 was certainly correct in describing Kane as an ambiguous film and as a departure from Hollywood convention; nevertheless, in his arguments about “realism” he underemphasized several important facts. For example, if in some scenes Welles avoided using montage to “add to the object represented,” this left him all the more free to add in another way—through what Bazin had called “plastics.” Interestingly, some of the deep-focus shots in the film were made not by simple photography, but by a literal montage, an overlaying of images in a complicated optical printing process that created the impression of a single shot. Citizen Kane is one of the most obviously stylized movies ever made; the RKO art department’s contribution is so great, Welles’s design of every image so constricting, that at times the picture looks like an animated cartoon. Indeed this very artificiality is part of the meaning—especially in sequences like the election rally and the surreal picnic in the Xanadu swamplands. Technically speaking, Welles has made the ultimate studio film; there is hardly a sequence that does not make us aware of the cleverness of various workmen—makeup artists, set designers, lighting crews, and perhaps most of all Orson Welles. Critics as diverse as Otis Ferguson, Paul Rotha, and Charles Higham have complained that Kane calls attention to its style, making the audience aware that they are watching a movie. Even François Truffaut and Joseph McBride, who are strongly influenced by Bazin’s aesthetics, seem to prefer Welles’s less obtrusive films—The Magnificent Ambersons, say, or Chimes at Midnight (Falstaff). “When a director matures,” McBride says, “his work becomes more lucid, more direct, allowing room for deeper audience response; as Truffaut has put it, what is in front of the camera is more important.” Behind this axiom one can feel the whole weight of Bazin’s theories, although to McBride’s credit he acknowledges a flaw in the argument. When he met Welles, he asked about the relative simplicity of the later European films: “I asked him why, in recent years, his movies have had less and less of the razzle-dazzle of his youth. Could it be a kind of growing serenity? ‘No, the explanation is simple,’ he said. ‘All the great technicians are dead or dying.’”