A Few Words About A few words about...™ Citizen Kane -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

[Richard--W]

The Battle Over Citizen Kane is unreasonably judgmental of Orson Welles. The conclusion that after the battle with Hearst newspapers, "Welles became a vagabond," is wrong. He became a husband and father, raised a family, maintained a home for them while traveling the world to be a working, professional actor. He acted in dozens of major films and in television. The conclusion is simply not true. The judgmental tone is inappropriate and, I think, intended to provoke reactions. Aside from that, it's a compelling and extremely well-assembled documentary.
TNT produced a documentary in collaboration with the BBC -- I think it was the BBC, somebody check me on this -- in 1982 called Orson Welles: Memories From a Life In Film. I believe the extensive on-camera interviews with Welles were sourced from a BBC interview that was shown across the pond under a different title. By the end of this documentary, you come to know Welles and to understand him, and you also understand how the mis-information about his life balled things up. There are revealing interviews with many people in his life and career, including Charlton Heston and Jeanne Moreau. Personally, I enjoy spending the time with Orson Welles. He is many things all at once, but always self-effacing and he always speaks generously of his collaborators. Orson Welles: Memories From a Life In Film lasts about 2 hours 30 minutes, with commercials deleted. It screams out for a DVD / Blu-ray release.

 

[Hollowbrook Drive-In]

Crickets.

Odd: the whole point of Disney's using the Multiplane Technicolor camera in Pinocchio was to have the foregound elements out-of-focus...

 

[David_B_K]

Richard, I could be wrong, but I think the Welles interview you referenced was a British production that TNT merely edited and showed. I do not think TNT was involved in its production. I have the original British version which is longer than the TNT version. A portion of the interview was used on the Criterion SE laserdisc of The Magnificent Ambersons.
The doc that I mentioned in an earlier post was another British documentary that TNT showed called Hollywood-The Golden Years: The RKO Story. It covered everything about RKO, from Fred and Ginger, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to Welles to film noir to Hughes to the end of the studio. The one on the making of Kane and Ambersons was full of interesting info and interviews.
I posted this about The Battle over Citizen Kane back when the Warner DVD was first released. I let a co-worker borrow my DVD. He had never seen Kane. He watched the movie and the Hearst vs Welles documentary over the weekend. Come Monday, he hands me back my DVD and says "Wow, Orson Welles was really a jerk!"
Welles may (or may not) have been a jerk. But it just seems wrong to me that the documentary accompanying Citizen Kane should leave a viewer with such a narrow view of Welles. The doc may have a place. The problem is that it was produced for PBS (American Masters, I believe), and was not really made to accompany one of the great films of all time.

 

[Douglas Monce]

Exactly, one is
I do think one can make a very valid case for the use of more light than is necessitated by modern lenses, film stocks and digital cameras. All that light imbued films back then with a great richness of color, contrast and texture that modern technology cannot replicate (granted, the sort of theatrical look so common in films up to the late 1960's is something of a lost art, one that few directors or busybody studio executives wish to embrace). Much of that "Technicolor look" whose demise many of us lament is actually a result of these high-light photographic techniques, and not the Technicolor dye-transfer printing process (which continued to be used after Technicolor's proprietary three-strip cameras were retired in 1953).
Even when printed on Eastman stock from monopack negatives, one can tell the difference between images made using relatively slow stocks that required a lot of light, and those recorded when film stocks allowed 35mm photography under low light.

I absolutely agree with this. The art of classical "3 point" lighting seems to have been lost on modern cinematographers. Even when trying to emulate a vintage style, as in "Down With Love", they still didn't seem to get that the look of a mid 60's film is as much about the lighting, as it is the color and production design. That film is filled with soft non-directional lighting.
Doug

 

[Douglas Monce]

ABSOLUTELY!!! I'm really sick of this obsession with "shallow depth-of-field", specifically among so many DSLR users. I find deep-focus to be a hell of a lot more impressive and interesting.
Vincent

The problem is that most of the people who are obsessed with SDF are those who have been working in video, where deep focus is a snap achieve, but shallow is VERY hard. So they are all obsessed with something that they haven't been able to do before. Shallow depth of field is great, I happen to like the look, but what they don't seem to understand, is that its not the end all be all of cinematography. It has its its place and when used correctly can be very effective, just as deep focus can be.
Doug

 

[BIANCO2NERO]

The BBC owns the TV rights to the RKO library in the UK and has made very good use of it over the years, including the 1987 series THE RKO STORY hosted by Ed Asner. The Orson Welles interview from 1982 was a two-part episode made for their ARENA documentary series and was titled: THE ORSON WELLES STORY. The BBC also produced a magnificent 90-minute documentary about KANE called THE COMPLETE CITIZEN KANE from 1991 which is too little known and is an exemplary film which includes interviews with everyone from William Alland, who acts as narrator as he did for the original film, to technicians, actors and critics - and even includes Pauline Kael basically apologising for her claims that Welles didn't deserve any real credit for co-writing the original Oscar-winning screenplay.
By comparison THE BATTLE OVER CITIZEN KANE comes across as a much more partisan documentary, more interested in muckraking that filmmaking.
If you can get access to the BBC documentaries I really recommend them - the KANE one begins in wonderful fashion with an approximation of what the proposed HEART OF DARKNESS film might have been like.

 

[davidmullen]

I used to think that shot from Citizen Kane with Kane in the foreground at the typewriter was all done with deep-focus (stopping down the lens), but looking at it again, the wall behind Orson Welles' head is not in sharp focus even though it is farther than Joseph Cotton is, so clearly the shot is some sort of composite (or split-diopter shot, though I can't recall seeing those in movies until the 1950's). It may even be an in-camera split-screen composite / double-exposure since there doesn't seem to be any dupiness to the shot.

 

As my love of Star Wars evolved into a love of cinema in general as my teenage years progressed, I had heard and read about how amazing this film Citizen Kane was. If memory serves I had only ever seen one clip - where elderly Kane smashes up the room - by the time I actually got to see it.
That opportunity finally came in 1989 when a tiny old revival cinema in Dublin re-opened with a one night only double feature of Citizen Kane and The Third Man. I had seen neither so was dead set on making it. So set was I that I actually turned down a girl who had asked me out on a date that night - jeez it would've been my first date! But no: Kane beaconed. I sat there with my cup of tea; a real cup of tea; in a porcelain cup; with a saucer.
I was stunned.
At first I was confused - what the hell is all this March of Time sequence? When the camera tracked back from Kane playing in the snow, through the window, ending on his mother talking to Mr. Bernstein...I looked around at the audience: did you see that?! My tea went cold. Shell-shocked, I still managed to make it to the lobby for a second cup. Of course, what followed was The Third Man. Don't even get me started...
That night changed me. In time I became a projectionist. A job I work at to this day at the Irish Film Institute. For that I always thank Mr. Welles.

 

So excited, I can't stand it!!!! I just get lost in the beauty of this production.

 

[Brianruns10]

I used to think that shot from Citizen Kane with Kane in the foreground at the typewriter was all done with deep-focus (stopping down the lens), but looking at it again, the wall behind Orson Welles' head is not in sharp focus even though it is farther than Joseph Cotton is, so clearly the shot is some sort of composite (or split-diopter shot, though I can't recall seeing those in movies until the 1950's). It may even be an in-camera split-screen composite / double-exposure since there doesn't seem to be any dupiness to the shot.

Hi David! Didn't know you were on this board too! We were actually talking about this shot, as well as the famous window scene with Kane, Thatcher and Bernstein.
According to the old commentary track on the now out of print DVD, this scene was shot twice, first Cotten's scene, then Welle's, and the two were married via optical printer. That's according to Roger Ebert, and given he's not a cinema technician per se, it could be possible he's mistaken. I wonder if, as an alternative explanation, they didn't simply mask off part of the screen, along the shadow lines, shoot one half, mask off the opposite frame, then run the film back and expose the other half?

 

[Robert Harris]

I used to think that shot from Citizen Kane with Kane in the foreground at the typewriter was all done with deep-focus (stopping down the lens), but looking at it again, the wall behind Orson Welles' head is not in sharp focus even though it is farther than Joseph Cotton is, so clearly the shot is some sort of composite (or split-diopter shot, though I can't recall seeing those in movies until the 1950's). It may even be an in-camera split-screen composite / double-exposure since there doesn't seem to be any dupiness to the shot.

Hi David! Didn't know you were on this board too! We were actually talking about this shot, as well as the famous window scene with Kane, Thatcher and Bernstein.
According to the old commentary track on the now out of print DVD, this scene was shot twice, first Cotten's scene, then Welle's, and the two were married via optical printer. That's according to Roger Ebert, and given he's not a cinema technician per se, it could be possible he's mistaken. I wonder if, as an alternative explanation, they didn't simply mask off part of the screen, along the shadow lines, shoot one half, mask off the opposite frame, then run the film back and expose the other half?

Same church,, different pew. One in prod, the other post

 

[Brianruns10]

But David makes a good point about the apparent quality of the shot. If it were an optical printer job, wouldn't the dupiness be more apparent? Or is the apparent sheen due to the digital scrubbing (given that this screengrab David posted looks to be from the much debated 2002 DVD restoration)?

 

[Paul Penna]

Note the point at which the horizontal ceiling beam meets the pillar over Welles's shoulder. Unless that's some kind of video anomaly, it looks like a multiple-exposure mismatch artifact.

 

[Brianruns10]

Looking at this scene, I can imagine how today's "directors" would have shot that scene...racking focus back and forth between the two, and everything else being a soft focus mess.

 

[Douglas Monce]

Looking at this scene, I can imagine how today's "directors" would have shot that scene...racking focus back and forth between the two, and everything else being a soft focus mess.

No it wouldn't have been shot that way at all.....it would have been two huge close ups cut back and forth on every line!
Dou

 

[Brianruns10]

No it wouldn't have been shot that way at all.....it would have been two huge close ups cut back and forth on every line!
Dou

Too true, too true. You know today's filmmakers...they can't have an ASL of more than five seconds

 

[Robert Harris]

Originally Posted by Paul Penna /t/314260/a-few-words-about-citizen-kane-in-blu-ray/60#post_3847703
Note the point at which the horizontal ceiling beam meets the pillar over Welles's shoulder. Unless that's some kind of video anomaly, it looks like a multiple-exposure mismatch artifact.

Very interesting comment.

 

[Jim*Tod]

Back in the 70's Pauline Kael wrote a long piece about CITIZEN KANE for the New Yorker which was later used in THE CITIZEN KANE BOOK. Essentially her thoughts were that although Welles was the major force behind CITIZEN KANE, he took more credit than he deserved for some of its innovations, specifically in terms of Toland's photography and Herman J. Mankiewicz' contributions to the screenplay. Not long after this Peter Bogdanovich printed a long article in Esquire refuting many of Kael's assertions and laying out several shots and explaining how they were created. The shot that has been discussed in this thread with Welles in the foreground and Cotton in the background was indeed two shots married together in the lab. If you can find this article, Bogdanovich actually marks where the line is between the two images. It is worth noting that while yes many shots were truly deep focus, many were created this way. Someone once called CITIZEN KANE the greatest special effects movie ever made and lots of tricks were pulled off out of necessity to get the shots Welles wanted.
Can't wait to see this on blu ray and while I am excited about the AMBERSONS dvd, I wish that too would have been on blu ray.

 

[Doug Otte]

I've been thoroughly enjoying this discussion, and am eagerly awaiting the BD next week.
Instead of offering anything substantive, I'll just nitpick:
It's Cotten...CottEn...not Cotton.
As you were...
Doug

 

[Hollowbrook Drive-In]

The BBC owns the TV rights to the RKO library in the UK and has made very good use of it over the years, including the 1987 series THE RKO STORY hosted by Ed Asner. .

I seriously doubt that the BBC owns them. Rather it's more likely that they hold a long-term least from the real owners (of everything but the underlying intellectual property rights), Time Warner.

I've been thoroughly enjoying this discussion, and am eagerly awaiting the BD next week.
Instead of offering anything substantive, I'll just nitpick:
It's Cotten...CottEn...not Cotton.
As you were...
Doug

And you assert this with every fibre of your being...