The Magic World of Orson Welles by James Naremore Page A

foreshadow or confirm Bazin’s notions about realism. Toland has claimed that Welles’s idea was to shoot the picture in such a way that “the technique of filming should never be evident to the audience,” and in his well-known
American Cinematographer
article, we repeatedly encounter comments such as the following: “The attainment of approximate human-eye focus was one of our fundamental aims”; “The
Citizen Kane
sets have ceilings because we wanted reality, and we felt it would be easier to believe a room was a room if its ceiling could be seen”; “In my opinion, the day of highly stylized cinematography is passing, and being superseded by a candid, realistic technique.” The last statement finds an echo in Bazin’s notion that
Kane
is part of a general movement, a “vast stirring in the geological bed of cinema,” that will restore to the screen the “continuum of reality” and the “ambiguity of reality.” The same general argument can be heard in Welles’s own remarks. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles was asked why he used so much deep focus. “Well,” he replied, “in life you see everything at the same time, so why not in the movies?”
    One should remember that the term “realism” (often used in opposition to “tradition”) nearly always contains a hidden ideological appeal and that the word has been appropriated to justify nearly every variety of revolution in the arts. But if “realism” is intended simply to mean “verisimilitude,” then Welles, Toland, and Bazin are at best half right. It is true that deep focus can preserve what Bazin called the “continuum” of reality and that three-dimensional effects on the screen (which owe considerably to Welles’s blocking and Toland’s skillful lighting) can give the spectator the impression of looking into a “real” space. Nevertheless, Welles and Toland are inaccurate when they imply that the human eye sees everything in focus, and Bazin is wrong to suggest that either reality or human perception is somehow “ambiguous.” On the contrary, human vision is exactly the opposite of depth photography, because humans are incapable of keeping both the extreme foreground and the extreme distance in focus at the same time. The crucial difference between a camera and the human eye is that the camera is nonselective; even when we are watching the deep-focus composition in
Kane
, we do not see everything in the frame at once. We are aware of an overall composition that exists simultaneously, but,as Bazin has noted, the spectator is required to make certain choices, scanning the various objects in the picture selectively. Welles seems instinctively aware of this fact, because he has designed his images quite rigidly, sometimes blacking out whole sections of the composition or guiding our attention with movement and frames within the frame. Welles’s movies make relatively greater intellectual demands upon the audience, giving them more to look at, but the information that is crowded on the screen has been as carefully manipulated and controlled as in any montage.
    Still another and perhaps more important factor needs to be taken into account in any discussion of the phenomenal “realism” of Welles’s technique. Toland claimed that he was approximating the human eye when he stopped down his camera to increase the depth of field, but what he and most other commentators on the technique do not emphasize is that he also used a wide-angle lens to distort perspective.
Kane
was photographed chiefly with a 25mm lens, which means that figures in the extreme foreground are elongated or slightly ballooned out, while in the distance the lines formed by the edge of a room converge sharply toward the horizon. Thus if Toland gave the spectator more to see, he also gave the world a highly unnatural appearance. In