The Magic World of Orson Welles by James Naremore

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 onetake. . . . 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 axiomone 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.’”
    Yet the statements of both Welles and Toland, in other contexts, seem to