Citizen Kane Experimented With Technique

On top of that, this meant that these actors didn’t have a loyalty to the RKO studio which helped because this was Welles’ producing/directing debut and he needed people who were willing to try some groundbreaking ways to achieve his desired goal. The contract that Welles had with RKO meant that he had to answer only to one person who was George Schaefer, the President and this made it much easier for Welles to hire his own actors and even to call the shots on things such as the way that lighting was done, shots were taken or how sets were prepared.

All of these elements of filmmaking were typically very pre-determined by the studio.  Welles’ contract meant that he was free to experiment with techniques to achieve the end result that he envisioned for his film and this led to the extensive use of many of the technological innovations seen in the film which have become common practice in movies today.

Gregg Toland, the cinematographer for Citizen Kane noted in a 1941 article written in the magazine, “American Cinematographer” that in previous projects he had been given the ability to test out some new techniques such as coated lenses, super-fast film, and the use of some partially ceilinged sets however he “wished that instead of using them conservatively for a scene here or a sequence there, they could experience them throughout an entire production”.  Toland states that he was given that opportunity during the filming of Citizen Kane and in fact, he felt that he basically had no choice to film in a conventional manner because in order to fulfill the wishes of Welles, they had to come up with some innovative ideas to achieve the aspects of realism that Welles wanted for the film.

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According to Toland’s article, the focus of Welles for the filming of Citizen Kane was to film as realistically as possible and this was achieved in many different ways using techniques that had been used before but had not been used as extensively as they were in this film. Those techniques included deep-focus photography, the use of extreme camera angles, extensive use of flashbacks, and elaborate set designs. There were two very important elements that Toland states Welles focused on in the making of the film. First, the sets had to play a role in the story, they weren’t just a backdrop to a scene; the sets needed to help to tell the story of the main characters. Second, Welles wanted the scenes to flow smoothly so that the audience wouldn’t be aware that they were watching a movie.  These demands by Welles meant that conventional sets and camera movements and angles had to be replaced with something more state-of-the-art and that is exactly what happened and why the film is considered to be so ahead of its time.

A very important aspect of Welles’ idea for the film was to depict it as realistically as possible and a very groundbreaking way of obtaining this realism during filming was to actually have ceilings in all of the rooms. This idea was not only innovative but it also presented a problem because traditionally, the lighting and sound needed for filming were placed above the actor’s heads and if there was a ceiling, there would be no way to light a scene nor was there anywhere for the microphone to be placed. This problem was solved in terms of sound by using muslin sheets painted to look like ceilings so the microphones could still pick up the sound. The problem with lighting was solved because everything would be lit from the floor except in certain situations where a small spotlight would be used overhead through a portion of the ceiling that was removed.  The first scene of the movie where ceilings are visible is the scene when Kane and Leland enter the offices of the Inquirer Newspaper and the effect of seeing the ceilings gives the space the realism that Welles was looking for by giving the viewer a sense that they truly are within a room because the ceiling is actually visible.

Toland notes that often the ceilings were actually lower than a real ceiling would be and one method that was used to help with this situation of the ceiling being so low was to remove part of the floor of the set and film the scene angling the camera up from beneath floor level. Toland also notes in his article that because the lighting was no longer coming from above it meant there were no more problems with the microphones casting shadows on the set so this actually made it easier to film the scenes.  Another advantage of using lighting from below meant that more powerful lighting had to be used than what was typically used and this meant that there was less of a difference in the strength of lighting from the foreground to the background of a scene. This worked to Welles’ advantage because another very innovative aspect of filming that he used to help to promote realism was the use of a technique referred to as deep focus. Deep focus means that everything within a scene from the very front to the very back is incomplete focus which gives the viewer more of a sense of a three-dimensional world and heightens the feeling of realism that Welles was trying to achieve. The typical filming of a movie during this time was to have the foreground of a scene where the action is taking place to be in sharp focus while the background was left slightly out of focus or even completely unfocused.