The Magic World of Orson Welles by James Naremore Page B

fact Welles’s unusual images fundamentally alter the relationship between time and space, calling into question some aspects of Bazin’s arguments about duration. Here, for example, is an extract from an interview with the British cameraman/director C. M. Pennington-Richards:
    Of course using wide angle lenses the time-space factor is different. If you’ve got a wide angle lens, for instance a 1" lens or an 18mm, you can walk from three-quarter length to a close-up in say four paces. If you put a 6” lens on [i.e., a telephoto], to walk from three-quarter length to close-up would take you twenty paces. This is the difference: During a scene if someone walks away and then comes back for drama, they come back fast, they become big fast. There is no substitute for this—you only can do it with the perspective of a wide-angle lens. It’s the same with painting; if you want to dramatize anything, you force the perspective, and using wide angle lenses is in fact forcing it.
    These comments signal the direction that any discussion of photography in
Kane
should take. But while there has been a great deal of theoretical discussion about depth of field in the film, rather little has been said about forced depth of perspective, which is the sine qua non of Welles’s style, and which accounts for a great deal of the speed and energy of his work. And the technique is effective precisely because it lacks verisimilitude. Most directors operate on the principle that the motion picture image should approximate some kind of human perception; the virtue of Welles’s films, however, is thatthey work in a different direction, creating what the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky would call a poetic “defamiliarization.”
    There were, of course, several purely practical advantages to Toland’s use of this special lens. It increased the playing area not only in depth but in width as well, allowing the director to integrate characters and decor. Although it made panning movements somewhat ugly by Hollywood standards (there are relatively few in
Kane
), it greatly enhanced the dramatic power of tracking shots, giving impact to any movement forward or backward, whether by the camera or the players. Indeed the values of this technique were so many that a 35mm lens, once considered extreme, is now standard, and much shorter lenses are used regularly in horror films. (On television these lenses are used frequently, partly because they compensate for the small screen. One problem, however, is that TV directors use dual-purpose lenses; to save time and money, they zoom in on details instead of tracking, thereby losing the dramatic shearing away of space that is produced by wide-angle camera movement.)
    In retrospect, what was really innovative about Toland and Welles was not their sharp focus but their in-the-camera treatment of perspective. Depth of field was less unusual than Toland and later historians have made it seem; like the photographing of ceilings, it was at least as old as D. W. Griffith and G. W. Bitzer—indeed there are beautiful examples of it in Charles Chaplin’s
The Gold Rush
. A certain “normality” of spatial relationships, however, had been adhered to throughout the studio years, with only an occasional photographer or director behaving differently; filmmakers used a variety of lenses, but they usually sought to conceal optical distortions by means of set design, camera placement, or compensatory blocking of actors. When Welles and Toland deliberately manipulated perspective, they foreshadowed the jazzy quirks of movement and space that were to become almost commonplace during the sixties and seventies.
    Not that wide-angle perspectives were new when
Citizen Kane
was made. Welles’s favorite director, John Ford, had used them extensively in
Young Mr. Lincoln
and
Stagecoach
, and Toland had made some interesting experiments with them in
The Long Voyage Home
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