A Film Canon

Like The Birth Of A Nation or The Battleship Potemkin, Citizen Kane is a manifesto of film language, proposing a new aesthetic of disorientation that is narrativised in terms of the elusive life of media mogul John Foster Kane (Welles), and stylised in terms of a dislocating array of techniques. Most iconically, cinematographer Gregg Toland masters deep-focus  to an unprecedented extent, such that the prototypical shot consists of a face in extreme close-up, a figure in the middle distance, and a figure in the far distance, the latter tending to be emphasised by unrealistically - if subtly - large set pieces. Even when this shot doesn't occur, its logic pervades the organisation of the film, which frequently cuts between close-ups and long shots, as if to fuse internal and external montage, as well as relocating depth to both a diagonal and vertical register, through an exotic use of the mobile camera and low-angle shot respectively. Concomitantly, the entire space in which sound can echo is opened up to the viewer - most obviously in Kane's tympanal mansion, but more generally in a tendency to garble, overlap and distort speech, which finds its logical conclusion in the cacaphonous rehearsals for second wife Susan's (Dorothy Comingore) disastrous foray into opera. The result is a dislocation that extends to the fabric of cinema itself, whose basic syntactic unit - the cut - is either reduced to a non-sequitur, or choreographed around shadow and light in such a way as to make it unclear where one frame ends and the next begins. Even the distinction between cinema and other media is broken down, to the extent that it is questionable whether the work deserves the unqualified designation of 'film' at all. Not only are animation, still photography, painting and photomontage integrated into the cinematic image, but the entire distinction between cinema and newsreels - so crucial to the 1940s cinematic experience - is collapsed by the lack of credits, opening 'fictional' newsreel, and presentation of 'The End' ten minutes into what is, ostensibly, the narrative. Hence Welles' decision to refrain from showing anything other than the back of investigating journalist Thompson (William Alland), whose role as a potential object of identification is eclipsed by his usefulness in carrying the viewer from one proliferation of disorienting objects to another; an embodied, inquisitive tracking-shot.