Citizen Kane contains an amazing potpourri of visual effects that enhance the viewer’s perception of the film, reflect the director’s (Orson Welles) and the cinematographer’s (Gregg Toland) extraordinarily effective collaboration, and pushed the technical limits of  filmmaking using a minuscule production budget (about $700,000) by today’s standards.

I first saw Citizen Kane years ago on the big screen at a movie revival house (Laemmle Monica 4-Plex, in Santa Monica, CA) on a Saturday morning. The big screen presentation made the deep focus shots far more impressive than is possible to fully appreciate on an average-sized TV set. What’s worse, the current US DVD version (released by Warner Home Video) is made from a digital restoration, and is overly bright (compared to the restored, nitrate fine-grain print created for the 50th Anniversary theatrical revival reissue in 1991.) The excessive brightness dilutes one of the film’s most unorthodox and prevalent special effects, depth perception, which depends on both telephoto lenses and set lighting. For example, one of the most spectacular deep focus shots in any film is in the scene where Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) stands next to a huge, long dining table around which newspaper industry professionals are seated. The focus reaches from some ice sculptures in the near foreground to the furniture stacked up behind the dining table in the background. In other words, the shot is completely in focus (no blurring) over the entire span of 40+ feet, an accomplishment that would be difficult today even with more advanced cameras than were in use when the film was made in 1941. In the US DVD version the effect’s impact is severely attenuated.

Another notable visual effect used successfully in Citizen Kane is the experimentation with compositional planes, which influence depth perception. Proximity and proportion are compositional planes that can be used to make objects, people, etc. appear large or small relative to each other. It is the visual effect of holding your finger close to your face and comparing it to the size of a building far in the background – your finger appears to be as large as the building. A great scene where Citizen Kane plays with proximity and proportion to create meaning is when Kane enters a room from the rear. In the midground, Kane’s wife is lying on a bed; in the foreground, a bottle of medicine has been placed strategically. The three (Kane à wife à bottle) are connected entirely by their placement in the frame, a chain of visual events that invests the scene with an important subtext – Kane is the cause of his wife’s abuse of the prescription medication. Reverse the order (bottle in back of frame, Kane in front of frame), and the medicine bottle would disappear into the background of the shot because of its relative size and the underlying meaning of the connection would be lost. Technically, the shot was an in-camera matte shot. The foreground was shot first, with the background dark. Then the background was lit, the foreground darkened, the film rewound, and the scene re-shot with the background action.

In addition to perception of depth, Citizen Kane employs the elements of form and line to counteract, reinforce, counterpoint or balance each other, so that the design of a shot can be as important as its content and action to the advancement of theme. Other visual effects such as multiple images (split screen) and superimpositions (double exposures) are used to add to the film’s visual complexity. For instance, in a scene where Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) appears superimposed against the front page of a newspaper that criticized her amateurish acting performance, the multiple exposure effect increases the sense of her universal condemnation.

Citizen Kane is widely considered to be the most important American movie ever made, not only for its creative and forceful account of the saga of Charles Foster Kane, media baron, politician, man of the people, but also for the gonzo and guerilla film making techniques used by Welles and Toland to sculpt some of the most visually innovative cinematography in the history of film.

By Darrell Woody

Gazette Staff Writer