FTVMS 101 - Notes - Week 6

---

MAIN POINTS OF LECTURES ON CITIZEN KANE AND AUTEUR CRITICISM

Auteur Criticism

The auteur assumption is that films come from the consciousness and experience of a human subject, the film director, who is a unique personality who creates the film, which in turn reflects his or her own experiences or world view. Although the notion of the author seems to us commonsensical and natural it is not as straightforward nor to be taken for granted as it might first appear to be and there are a number of the important ways a film may not be the responsibility of its director:

1)  Often the finished product viewed is not the product intended by the director: it may have been cut by the censor or the distributor, or a director may even completely lose control of the final text of the film.

2)A film is something produced collectively: it has a producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor etc.

3)  It has also been argued that a film might have a message or content that is not overtly that of its director.

 

Given these problems or disadvantages, what are the advantages of thinking of the film director as an author? Why do we do it so easily? Why does it come so naturally?

1) One reason has to do with the establishment of cinema as a serious art form: the belief that cinema is an art of personal expression and that its great directors are to be valued as the creators of their work as any writer, composer or painter.

2) Secondly this approach allows us as critics to pick out and recognise motifs, themes and stylistic techniques, narrative structures that appear again and again in a director’s films, so that we can come to some conclusions about his or her visual style.

3)Thirdly this notion of the film director as author allows us to establish what is called a canon of films, that is by comparing directors you can obtain a criterion of value and select out various film directors for study etc.

4) The auteur approach also supports they way films are marketed commercially and the cult of personality that surrounds the film director.

 

The personality of the director and Citizen Kane

In much of the critical writing on Citizen Kane one issue seems to dominate, the issue of personalities — the personality of the director Orson Welles, of the supposed original and model of the central character of the film Charles Foster Kane based on the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, the personality of film critics and their own investment in critical positions. These personalities have all been extremely important in establishing the reputation of the film. Because of this focus on personality, Citizen Kane has been taken as a showpiece or testing ground for auteur theory.

 Welles’ creation of a public image or persona of himself as a director is turn linked to this cult of personality. Welles’ public persona has various forms: a rebel director, genius and child prodigy, witty late-night talk-show host, a director’s director.

If we start with the personality what are the significant influences from Welles’ biography?

1) Theatre. Welles started out his professional career as an actor and dramatist and this is reflected in the importance of theatre, Shakespeare and the use of theatrical effects in his films.

2) Radio work. The most well-known connection of Welles with radio where he worked extensively before coming to film is the notorious War of the Worlds broadcast. One of its effects on Welles was that it gave him an awareness of the manipulative effects of the media. Another device introduced to film by Welles and possibly derived from his radio background was the ovelapping of dialogue (overlapping sound montage).

If Citizen Kane seems so apt for an auteur approach it is not surprising that one of the big critical debates about the film has been:

Who is the true author of Citizen Kane?

This has centred around the question of whether the director or the screenwriter (Herman Mankiewicz) should be considered the creative source and core of the film. This debate was reactivated in 1971 by the critic Pauline Kael, who had a hidden agenda of debunking auteur theory which had come to dominate American film criticism. In a long book that contained the printed shooting script, Kael re-evaluated Mankiewicz’s contribution in an attempt to shift emphasis from Welles the director to Mankiewicz the screenwriter. Kael’s critique was then answered by critic and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich and the filmmaker Ken Russell who pushed the emphasis even further back in Welles’ direction.

                The problem of creative origin or who first came up with the idea of the film does not really affect our critical response to the text of the film. In fact using current critical notions of ‘intertextuality’, the fact that any text is composed in part at least with traces of other texts, shares a symbiotic relationship with other texts undoes this emphasis. From this point of view the notion of the director being an individual and sole creative source of the film is an unsatisfactory one. So we might want to ask the question:

In what ways is Citizen Kane not an auteur film?

1. We need to consider the following elements in the collaborative process of making Citizen Kane:

— Cinematographer. The effect of deep focus, often attributed to Welles, was achieved by the cinematographer Gregg Toland who shot with a wide-angle lens and narrowed the aperture thus reducing the light entering the camera. To resolve the problem of the reduction in light Toland used newly developed arc lamps and new ways of coating the lenses he employed, together with new black and white film just developed by Kodak; long takes; avoidance of intercutting; elaborate camera choreography; high contrast tonal lighting; low angle camera set ups and dissolves all techniques counter to studio cinematography of the time. These are all elements of what has long been taken as Welles’ individual signature style.

                One should not give all the credit to Toland either, for to some extent deep focus photography had already been pioneered in France in the 1930s by Jean Renoir and its use on Citizen Kane was the reason for one of the major and influential critical responses to Welles work, that of the French critic André Bazin. Bazin saw Citizen Kane as crucial film in the unfolding of what he thought was the true direction of cinema: realism.

— Acting. In many respects Citizen Kane follows anti-Hollywood norms of acting. It is also unusual for its time in that its director is also its major actor. Faced with the figure of Kane the audience wants to be able to assess the credibility of those who retell his story in an attempt to understand whether he was a hero or a villan, a victim or an oppressor, but the film constantly frustrates such identification. It is as if Welles the director in fragmenting his points of view is working against the effects of Welles the actor who is trying to create a coherent believable personality.

— Editing. The film was largely pre-edited and many of the basic editing concepts are to be found in Welles’ script so the role of film editor not as crucial as that of cinematographer, however, other important input came from the art director, composer and make-up department.

2. We need to consider the use of genre(s):

The bio-pic genre. The film is a disguised version of the life of the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, cf the ‘March on Time’ sequence.

The newspaper reporter genre. The action depends on a reporter’s dogged pursuit of a story against great odds.

The detective story genre. The classical detective story format often uses a flashback structure like that of Citizen Kane. Every detective story is two stories: the story of a crime and the story of an investigation, the crime story revolves around a mystery and the investigation story ends with the revelation of the secret. The secret at the heart of Citizen Kane is Rosebud.

American gothic. A literary genre which uses the figure of the outsider on the edge of society, terrible surges of power, breaking the constrictions of law, alternate force almost mythical - the original Biblical Cain as a model.

 Citizen Kane’s use of genre structures is peculiar and equivocal and although the film relies on genre conventions in many respects it also actively undoes them.

3. We could examine the narrative structure of the film:

 The narrative of Citizen Kane functions by splitting the spectator’s identification with the screen, as spectators we cannot identify with the witnesses, we are not sure that we can believe them, since they all tell conflicting stories. The overt solution to the enigma of Rosebud seems to be in the film’s closing images of the burning sled, but there are many important clues and signs that may have gone unnoticed on first viewing before this.Citizen Kane has built into its structure the need to think back and reflect on what has taken place, the need to view the film again as if to uncover the layers of meaning. Now the auteur approach presupposes a ‘suturing’ of the spectator into the director’s eye or point of view and the director in control of that process. Citizen Kane provides an investigative role for the spectator that is the opposite of this structure — a displacement paralleled by the shift from the author to the spectator. The film provides us with a way of seeing that is based on being satisfied by understanding and this can only be achieved by offering the audience a point of entry into the textual dynamics of the film, by involving the audience actively in the construction of the film text. We can uncover an investigative camera at work in sequences like the opening sequence, the sequence of Thompson’s first interview with Suzan Alexander, Kane and Suzan’s first encounter in her apartment, and the closing sequence of the film which symmetrically returns the audience back to the beginning.

The details of this narrative structure may not have originated with Welles as we know that long before work on the Citizen Kane script Mankiewicz had been interested in using what he called a ‘prismatic narrative’ in which the story of a central character would be told through the eyes of various people who knew him well, but that these multiple viewpoints would contradict and be at variance with each other. This prismatic, fragmented narrative structure is presented in such a way as to highlight the partial and incomplete nature of human understanding of events in general. It leads to the creation of false trails which lure the spectator into thinking that multiple viewpoints offer the key to the Kane enigma. As such this is a further manifestation of the film’s anti-auteur, anti-Hollywood realist narrative core. It defies the notion of an author/director in total control of the spectator response and it defies the normal processes of identification with a Hollywood hero and the traditional moral judgments of binary oppositions such as that between good/bad, villan/victim.

Conclusion

- We work readily with a notion of the director or auteur as the creative and potent source of the film from which its meaning flows spontaneously. This figure is often both constructed by the filmmaker him or herself and supported by a system of criticism.

- However by questioning and breaking with the idea that the form of a text is guaranteed by the form in which its author envisions it, it becomes possible to ask questions about the representational techniques and frameworks a text employs and about the social relations of which the text is a bearer.

- Citizen Kane is interesting because it has been used by critics as a successful example of the auteur approach and it uses itself the auteur model in many direct ways, but it may also be used against the auteur approach, and through its narrative approach and structure it works to destablise and shift emphasis from the control of the director to the importance of each spectator’s response.
 

ORSON WELLES AS AUTEUR

Auteur Criticism

Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” from Image, Music, Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath, (Glasgow, Fontana, 1977).

J. Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship (London, 1981).

Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in his Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by D. Bouchard, (Ithaca, 1977).

David Gerstner and Janet Staiger (eds), Authorship and Film (New York and London, 2003).

Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism. Introductory Readings, Section VI “The Film Artist” (New York, 1985): 521-668.

Virginia Wright Wexman (ed.), Film and Authorship (New Brunswick, 2002).

Orson Welles and Citizen Kane

André Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View (London, 1978) (An early but still influential reading of Welles’ work).

David Bordwell, “Citizen Kane” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods (Berkeley, 1976).

Frank Brady, Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles (London, 1990).

Robert Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane (Berkeley, 1985). (Important for background details and production information).

Peter Cowie, The Cinema of Orson Welles (New York, 1983).

Mark Estrin (ed.), Orson Welles: Interviews (Jackson, 2002).

Pauline Kael, The Citizen Kane Book (New York, 1974). (Contains Pauline Kael’s essay “Raising Kane” and the shooting script).

Ronald Gottesman, Focus on Orson Welles (Englewood Cliffs, 1976).

Charles Higham, Orson Welles. The Rise and Fall of an American Genius (New York, 1985). (Early biography).

Harland Lebo, Citizen Kane (New York, 1990).

David LeBoeuf, “Citizen Kant: Themes of Consciousness and Cognition in Citizen Kane.” In Film and Knowledge: Essays on the Integration of Images and Ideas, edited by Kevin L. Stoehr (London, 2002).

Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane (London: BFI Publications, 1992). (Excellent short monograph on the film).

James Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles (New York, 1978).

Patrick Ogle, “The Aesthetic and Technological Influences on the Development of Deep Focus Cinematography in the United States,” in Bill Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods II (Berkeley, 1986).

Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed.), This Is Orson Welles: Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich (New York, 1992). (Important interviews by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich).

David Thompson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (New York, 1996). (Recent biography).

Peter Wollen, “Introduction to Citizen Kane” in his Readings and Writings (London, 1982). (A structuralist approach).

Films Directed by Orson Welles                                              

The Hearts of Age (1934)                                                          
Othello (1952)   DV 94-94
Citizen Kane (1941)       5221 (AV Library)                                 
Mr Arkadin (1955)          4176
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)   1577 or 3716                    
Touch of Evil (1958)  1116
It’s All True (1942)        5226
Journey into Fear (1943) with Norman Foster 4177                     
The Trial (1962)  1858
The Stranger (1946)    1184                                          
Chimes at Midnight (1966)    4928
The Lady from Shanghai (1946)    238                           
The Immortal Story (1968)
Macbeth (1948)                         DV  86-29                                
F is for Fake (1973)

Documentaries on Welles and Citizen Kane

Hollywood the Golden Years: Tape 4 Orson Welles and the Making of Citizen Kane  5224
Reflections on Kane                   5222
The Orson Welles Story               5223
Orson Welles: What went wrong? with a Welles interview  5225
See also Visions of Light (for a segment on Gregg Toland)            4386
Working with Orson Welles (Dir. Gary Graver, 1995)                    LV03-132