Editor’s note: Hear the Register’s film critic on today’s Register Radio episode.
Everyone knows that Citizen Kane — celebrating its 70th anniversary with this week’s three-disc Blu-ray debut — enjoys a bulletproof reputation as “The Greatest Movie Ever Made.” It’s probably topped more all-time-greatest films lists than any other film in history, including the British magazine Sight & Sound’s decennial critics’ polls for the last five decades, among many others. Regular readers may know that the 1995 Vatican film list included Citizen Kane among the 15 unranked titles noted for outstanding artistic significance.
It’s also well known that the movie’s initial reception wasn’t quite so rapturous. Although it opened to universal critical acclaim in the American press, it was hurt at the box office by newspaperman William Randolph Hearst’s war against the film, based on the evident and unflattering parallels between himself and Orson Welles’ protagonist, Charles Foster Kane. Nominated for nine Academy Awards, it won only a single award for its screenplay.
Not infrequently, when people actually see it for the first time, the film is overshadowed by its own legend. “Why is Citizen Kane considered so great?” someone asked me not long ago. It’s a question that has been asked in countless film classes.
What isn’t so generally known is that the film’s prominent place in so many film classes — and for that matter, the fact that there are film classes in the first place — has a lot to do with the work of a revolutionary Catholic film critic and theorist, André Bazin, whose critical theories were shaped by the same tradition of Christian personalist philosophy that informed the writings of Pope John Paul II.
More than anyone else, Bazin, writing from the 1930s to the 1950s, made it possible to take movies seriously as an art form and a field of academic study. It wouldn’t be going too far to call him the “father of film studies.”
Bazin had many influences, but arguably the most potent was that of the Catholic personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, founder of the journal Esprit, for which Bazin wrote as a critic. In 1951 Bazin co-founded the celebrated film journal Cahiers du cinéma and gathered a stable of more or less like-minded critics (including Catholics, Protestants and at least one nonbeliever) who became famous for the auteur theory of cinema.
This view, first expressly formulated by Bazin’s protégé François Truffaut, emphasized the creative vision of the director, who is ideally the primary author (auteur) of a film. A gifted director, the auteurists felt, uses the camera as a writer uses a pen to express his personal vision through his unique style. To ring a slight change on this metaphor, a real director uses the camera as a painter uses a brush. This view of cinema made the director more important than the writer, say, who was only doing what writers had done for millennia — a provocative idea at the time.
Bazin and the Cahiers critics championed the artistic achievements of Hollywood directors like Welles, John Ford, Howard Hawks and William Wyler at a time when Hollywood movies weren’t widely regarded as real art, even in Hollywood. (Ford said emphatically that, to him, directing was “always a job of work … and that’s it,” and seemed bewildered and even irritated that anyone considered him a great artist.)
In a way, Citizen Kane was the auteurists’ Hollywood dream movie, given the unparalleled freedom Welles and his colleagues were given by the studio. At the height of the studio system, producers called the shots, and directors, writers and actors (often under long-term contracts) were considered work for hire. Welles, though, was a wunderkind who was wooed to Hollywood with an extraordinary deal offering him total control of his picture. Thus, the constraints under which other Hollywood directors adored by the Cahiers critics labored didn’t apply to Citizen Kane.
At the same time, Bazin was most interested in how a camera was different from a pen or a brush. In his view, all representative art reflects a basic human need to capture and preserve reality — to nail down moments and events in time and space before they slip away from us. Art seeks to rescue the world from transience and corruption — to counter the flow of time. Still, painting and other visual arts preserve only a symbolic impression of the world filtered through the subjectivity and talent of an artist.
The camera, on the other hand, has the power to actually record and preserve real events in time and space by a photographic process independent of human interpretation. Other visual arts only suggest reality; a photograph is reality. Going a step further, motion pictures capture the continuous passage of time itself, redeeming even time from transience.
Bazin believed that the glory of the cinema lay in its power for realism. He was certainly aware that all filmmakers depend on some level of artifice and illusion, but he preferred such techniques to be limited and subtle, even if they could never be eliminated. In a word, he believed that cinema ought to express and communicate faith in the world, rather than distracting from the world with showy tricks.
Techniques Bazin distrusted included montage (rapid cuts between short takes) and the use of shallow focus to direct the viewer’s attention here or there. Such techniques, he believed, weaken the cinema’s witness to the integrity of continuous time and space. Somewhat paradoxically, Bazin believed that the more faithfully a film presents the real world, the more room is left for ambiguity and freedom, since the viewer is left to decide for himself what is important and where to look, rather than being led by the nose.
Bazin wasn’t against creativity. On the contrary, he believed that the realism of cinema gives it greater creative power because it taps directly into the power of creation itself, to the creative power of God. Bazin’s realism was ultimately personalist, rooted in a belief in the world as revelatory and sacramental, the work of God, the Supreme Person. At its best, film can capture transcendence amid transience and make us aware of sacredness in the midst of fleeting reality: a “Holy Moment,” to cite a catchphrase that is not Bazin’s but has become associated with him.
In Citizen Kane, Bazin saw a “revolution in the language of the screen” — one that blew away the conventions of standard Hollywood storytelling at that time through techniques like deep focus, prolonged takes, chiaroscuro lighting and unusual camera angles and movements. Although Citizen Kane didn’t pioneer these techniques, Bazin argued that it invested them with new meaning and power.
By using deep focus or large depth of field (keeping objects in the foreground and background sharp at the same time) and prolonged takes, Citizen Kane was able to use a single shot where another film might have needed four or five, thus maintaining a “unity of image in space and time.” One of the most obvious examples is the key scene in which young Charles is seen through the window of his mother’s boarding house playing in the snow, unaware that the rest of his life is being decided by three adults inside.
Bazin even found a bracing challenge to Hollywood artifice in some of the film’s more artificial techniques, such as its dramatic use of highlight and shadow (chiaroscuro) and unusual camera angles revealing the ceilings of sets. (Most Hollywood sets didn’t have ceilings because sound-recording equipment and lighting were suspended overhead. Kane overcame this difficulty in some scenes by stretching fabric over sets, creating “ceilings” that were translucent and sound-permeable.)
Thanks to conventional Hollywood techniques, Bazin wrote,
We had come to believe that the faces of beautiful women, when we look at them from up close, are naturally lit by various, judiciously arranged sources; we had come to believe that people don’t turn their backs when saying important things and that ceilings never confine our existence. (“The Technique of Citizen Kane”)
Citizen Kane overturned all those expectations — and in doing so, for all its artifice, it realized Bazin’s hopes for cinematic realism to an extraordinary degree.
Bazin was only 40 when he died in 1958 of leukemia. Had he lived another 40 years, he would have been deeply disappointed at Hollywood’s evolution in latter decades. Rather than progressing toward Bazin’s admittedly unattainable ideal of “pure cinema,” mainstream movies have fled in the opposite direction, increasingly slicing, dicing, mashing and manipulating whatever reality is left to them.
Not that great movies aren’t still being made, even in Hollywood. And, of course, junk was always being made, even in the Golden Age. Still, it’s fair to say that the junk today is, well, junkier — and more movies today work harder to be successful junk than ever before. Seventy years from now, how many contemporary Hollywood movies will merit even a fraction of the attention that Citizen Kane does today — or will then?
Register film critic Steven D. Greydanus blogs at NCRegister.com.
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If Bazin were to return, would he find cinematic artistry on earth?
I am currently taking a film music course at my college, and Citizen Kane is one of the films that we will watch during the course. Also, the final paper will be on Citizen Kane.
Thanks for the informative essay; it will give me more to consider and to appreciate when I view the film again next month.
The stuff that got churned out quickly and with little budget once upon a time was better than the big budget stuff today that takes much longer!
@Larry: Nice!
@Evan: Thank you, and you’re welcome!
@Elise: True, although Citizen Kane only fits half of that definition: It was made comparatively inexpensively—it’s amazing how Welles creates the illusion of a lavish epic with various techniques including stock footage and special effects—but Kane was a carefully made film, not something “churned out quickly.”
The archetypal example of a great studio film that was churned out quickly is Casablanca. One could argue that Casablanca is the apotheosis of the studio assembly-line film, while Citizen Kane is the apotheosis of auteur filmmaking under the Hollywood studio system.
Thanks for the fascinating article. I’d like to see you write more on the history of film criticism.
A couple questions, if I may:
First, it seems obvious that exchanging soft, “judiciously arranged” lighting for chiaroscuro, open-topped sets for unusual camera angles that reveal ceilings, or cuts for camera movement, is simply trading one unrealism for another. The sentence you quote from Bazin suggests that this is acceptable because the result is a denial of the Hollywood fantasy where anything is possible, the arrangement of life is always aesthetically optimal, and important conversations are always held in Shakespearean oratory. That may be true, but doesn’t it come at the risk of an equally false fantasy: that the impossibilities in life are not only ineluctable but symbolically visible in the sharply defined light and shadows around us, the arrangement of life is always as dramatic as possible, and important conversations are held in whispers with people delivering devastating closing lines on their way out the door? And if this is the case, what makes Citizen Kane extraordinarily realistic?
Second, it’s never made sense to me that longer shots equals greater realism or greater truth. My visual experience of life, except for reading and other very specialized purposes, rarely involves staring at the same area for a long time. My eyes move around the room from face to face and object to object in a manner similar to the cuts in a typical movie scene. Long shots are useful for creating stillness and tranquility, just as rapid cutting is useful for creating excitement and alertness. Since both stillness and excitement occur in life, neither one is intrinsically more realistic than the other.
@Pachyderminator: Excellent, thoughtful questions. Thank you!
First, let’s nail down some ambiguous terminology: A take or shot that goes a long time without cutting can be called a long take, a prolonged shot, or an extended take or shot, but “long shot” in film discussion means something else: A long shot (also often called a “wide shot”) is a shot that is neither a close-up nor a medium shot, but a shot at a sufficient distance from its subject to see the whole of whatever the main subject is, e.g., whole human figures.
As it happens, Bazin liked both long takes and long shots! He believed cinema should respect the ambiguity of the world and the viewer’s interpretive freedom, rather than giving excessive privilege to the director (who is already choosing where to point the camera, how to shoot the subject, what lenses and filters to use, etc.) Too many close-ups, or heavy use of shallow focus, too forcefully impose the filmmaker’s point of view on the viewer and detract from truthful ambiguity.
Bazin didn’t think that the function of film was to capture or imitate the experience of a person looking at the world (eyes moving from faces to face, etc.). He believed it was to capture the world. Viewers already have eyes that they can move around on the screen; there is no need to do that for them, to take it away from them by doing it with the camera. Or at least, to do it by default, instead of doing it occasionally, for special purposes.
I agree that occasional rapid cutting is a tool that can be used effectively. But in the first place, it is much overused today, even in static scenes where people are simply talking. Sometimes it seems a film can’t go more than a few seconds without cutting whether anything is happening or not. It’s like we have such short attention spans that we get bored if we aren’t constantly being stimulated with novelty. I think of Chesterton:
In the second place, even in action scenes, overuse of fast cutting (and closeups) detracts from a real sense of excitement rather than adding to it, simply by preventing the viewer from seeing what is happening, and often creating real doubts whether the seeming action is happening at all, or whether it is simply being stitched together from various disparate bits of motion. Sometimes tricks like these are necessary, but more often it’s just laziness. It robbed me of any possibility of even dumb mechanical enjoyment in Prince of Persia. And don’t get me started on how Brett Ratner shot Jackie Chan in the first two Rush Hour movies.
On the other question you raise, I’m not sure what Bazin would say (I know a Bazin enthusiast who might be able to shed more light on it), but my guess is that at least part of the answer is that Bazin wouldn’t want every movie to do exactly what Citizen Kane does. That would quickly become a new form of unreality. Bazin regarded Kane as the most audacious film of its time (and of several years afterward), but audacity doesn’t remain audacious if you keep doing it over and over.
Kane‘s achievement can’t be viewed in a vacuum, in isolation of its place in film history. The film came along at just the right moment to pull together all the innovations and advancements that had been made since the dawn of the sound era and put it all together with extraordinary creative power and authority. Kane made a profound contribution to the film grammar of the day, but it would be up to later filmmakers to appropriate those contributions in their own ways as well as making new contributions of their own.
Thanks for the terminology correction (I wasn’t thinking about that, but I should have been). Long shots (using the term correctly) can certainly be a good way to present the world impartially, as it were. It says something about the state of filmmaking that most people today would see this as a special, unusual technique. Most viewers, I think, have trouble dealing with such shots. For example, at such times I’m always tempted to think everything on the screen is equally important, and somehow feel obliged to spend as much time looking at the tree branches outside the window as at the actors’ faces. The question is, is this simply a mistake on my part caused by my cinematic illiteracy, or is it inevitable? No matter how perfectly a film succeeds in capturing the world, the knowledge and expectations a viewer brings in with him will prevent him from looking at it the same way he would look at the world. In other words, no matter how perfectly art imitates nature, the mere fact that it is art creates a gulf around it.
Rapid cutting is certainly overused today. You’re right about many action scenes being so chopped up they seem unreal and wooden. On second thought, I don’t think creating excitement is really its primary use. It should be used to encourage a certain kind of thoughtfulness: the kind that tries to embrace all possible points of view at once, and never stays with one very long for fear of developing a prejudice. I’ve been thinking this lately mostly because of The Tree of Life, which is certainly a product of its time in that the shots are no more prolonged than average today (I think), but is very contemplative. It encourage us to make our compassion somewhat detached and take a cosmic view of the situation.
Prolonged shots, of course, can do this too. Sometimes, it seems to me, prolonged shots and brief ones are simply two means to the same end, and a film is free to simply use the style of its time. But within limits. If we’re not careful, we may find ourselves in a world where most movies are an endless series of subliminal images. Chesterton, as usual, is right on the money. Have you ever really looked at a colored cloud (or heck, even a white one)? They’re amazing.
Great article Steven. The Pachyderminator is right indeed, it´d be very informative and stimulating if you reward us with more writings on film criticism.
On the topic of our current style of filmmaking and it’s frantic, almost neurotic way of cutting every couple of seconds even if there’s nothing new to add in terms of visual information, i believe it could be very useful to revisit David Bordwell’s term of “intensified continuity”, i.e., the filmmaking style dating from the 60´s which preserves the narrative convention of spatial-temporal unity from Old Hollywood, but keeps the camera moving all the time (Bordwell calls it the “prowling camera”) and speeds up the cuts in MTV fashion.
Though personally i prefer the old, more relaxed style of narration, nevertheless i disagree with Bazin’s view of shorter takes equaling a less truthful representation of the world. Any artistic work will use a number of strategies to guide it´s presumed audience attention so that it appreciates the work as intended by the creator. In other words, there is not such a thing as an arbitrary staging of events in any movie. Even if the artist’s intention is to convey a sense of ambiguity and randomness to it’s subject matter, nevertheless there remains the unavoidable fact of his choosing what he places on the screen (or whatever physical medium) and where he puts it.
You might argue the same is true in real life, given that we are in a way God’s artistic creation, but taking the analogy to it’s ultimate consequences, we are different to any art work produced by man in that we posses freedom, something which no doubt some eccentric writers might claim of their characters, but which any person with a modicum of common sense can see as an uniquely human quality.
Having said that, Citizen Kane might be a good example of a movie where the audience has a fair chance to decide where to look, but even there the choices are delimited by lightning, camera angle, and perhaps most important of all, character’s actions, which in Kane as in any other Hollywood movie, are driven by thematic and narrative needs, so that everything that happens on screen helps develop the story one way or the other. So again, Bazin’s conception of film (or a photograph for that matter) as an artistic expression somehow more close to real life, than say, a novel, might be debatable.
Ultimately, it is a question of truth as represented by art. In my opinion truth is the ultimate reference in art, even though there may be very artificial ways of pointing to it, and what is truthful isn´t necessarily a fact of the physical world (e.g. a flying man). But that is subject for a philosophical dissertation so I may well leave at that.
can anyone explain how anyone knew that Kane’s dying words were “rosebud”?
he whispers “rosebud”, dies, drops the snowglobe which shatters, prompting the nurse to burst into the room to find him dead and she covers him with a sheet. since the whole story is propelled by the need to find the meaning behind his dying words, how did ANYONE know what they were?
I never realized that until you pointed it out! Great catch ;)
@Pachyderminator & Tony Diaz,
A belated postscript to this combox, with apologies (if I could I would have spent a lot more time here!). I thought you might both appreciate comments from a cinephile friend of mine who is more of a Bazin aficionado than I. He writes:
For what it’s worth.
@Mike & Claudia: The “Rosebud” conundrum (who heard Kane’s dying word?) is a well-known puzzle with no answer, except to say that the close-up shots in that scene would permit someone to be standing nearby unseen to the camera. It does seem to be a question that nobody raised until afterwards, though, not something Welles thought of at the time.
SDG, your friend’s comments, whoever he is, are very helpful.
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