Regular readers of this blog will now that photography is one of my favourite facets of movie-making. Were you to ask me about my favourite cinematographers of all time, I'd probably rifle off a list including the likes of Roger Deakins, Robert Richardson, Conrad L. Hall, Freddie Young, among many others. But if you asked me for the greatest photographic achievement in film history, I'd cite one title and one title only: Orsen Welles' influential masterpiece Citizen Kane is the behemoth that sits atop the apex of cinematic form and style.
Believe it or not, director of photography Gregg Toland was criticized upon
Citizen Kane's release because his cinematography drew too much attention to itself – the ideology of the time being that good photography was supposed to be “invisible”. He didn't win the Oscar that year – ironic, given that nowadays, flashy cinematography is the
only type that can win. Hindsight, of course, is 20/20, and today it's almost too easy to praise Toland's work on the film, which stands far above its peers in terms of visual signature. Something that's less easy to do is to actually rank the brilliance of
Citizen Kane's dozens of fascinating shots in a succinct top ten list. Here goes nothing:
10.
This slow pull-out near the end of the film, in tandem with the immediately preceding shots, effectively communicates how our dogged journalist is even more lost now than he was at the start of the picture, stranded in an unnavigable maze of meaningless relics, no closer to knowing who Kane really was and what really made him tick.
9.
Not long after we see the previous shot, we finally get the big revelatory moment that explains the significance of Kane's enigmatic final words, only to see the evidence set ablaze, unbeknownst to those who sought it. The truth literally goes up in smoke, big black billows of it, in this final shot that echoes the film's bravura opening sequence.
8.
The metaphor in this shot may come across as a tad blunt when compared to some of
Citizen Kane's more thematically subtle images, but it is an evocative and purposeful one nevertheless, the point obviously being that Kane's second wife, Susan Alexander, is little more than a china doll to him, one he wishes he could lock away in his mausoleum of luxury, but can't.
7.
I've always enjoyed the way Toland plays with shafts of light and dark, possibly to signify illumination and mystery. In this beautiful composition, the journals of Kane's first mentor and financial custodian glow like a beacon of truth just waiting to be deciphered, and yet William Alland's inquisitive reporter, often shot from the back as he is here, remains in the dark.
6.
I can't concoct a legitimate rationale for including this particularly showy shot beyond its sheer aesthetic flare. The intricacy of the image, with its multiple concave reflections and refractions, is indeed a lensing marvel, encapsulating Kane's lifeless hand, the intruding nurse, the window, and the miniature snow globe house that recalls Kane's childhood home all within frame.
5.
A low-angled push-in on Kane at his rally for the office of governor dramatically delivers one of the film's messages about media and politics: image is everything. Here we see Kane is actually dwarfed by his own gargantuan image, looming large in the background, threatening to bring him wrack and ruin just as swiftly and easily as it brought him glory and renown.
4.
Upon desertion by his wife, Kane finally accepts that he is what we always knew him to be: alone. He grimly stalks the corridors of his self-made tomb a broken man, literally fragmented into infinite pieces by parallel mirrors in this optically tricky shot. He'll never be whole again. But then, he hadn't been whole for a long time. He's only just now discovered the futility of his efforts to recapture what he lost.
3.
One of Toland and Welles' most important innovations on this film was the development of an extreme deep focus technique that captures foreground, middleground, and background objects with pristine clarity all at once. It's employed to great effect in this striking visual. Kane's would-be-opera-singer of a wife belts a power aria under the spotlight, but it's Kane, sitting still in a darkened theatre, who draws our gaze. Which one has the real power?
2.
The motif of light and shadow discussed in shot #7 actually goes back to this magnificently photographed scene that occurs earlier in the narrative. Intrepid newsmen, most of them virtually faceless from where we stand, sit in a darkened screening room, silhouetted against elusive beams of light, naive in their determination to uncover the secret of Kane's last utterance. Even if all this light/dark mumbo jumbo wasn't Toland's intention, it still makes for a dazzling shot.
1.
I'm cheating a fair bit on this shot, which is actually a series of shots that begin the movie, but it's hard to come up with a more definitive exemplar of
Citizen Kane's masterful cinematographic identity. A succession of eerie tableaux depict the crumbling edifice of the once mighty Xanadu, a stately pleasure dome no more, devoid of vitality except for a single spec of light (brilliantly held in the same position of the frame for all the shots) that indicates a solitary presence. There's something inherently fascinating about this glowing focal point. Right away, our intrigue is piqued, and by no more than a handful of carefully designed pictures and a single word; “Rosebud”. This haunting opening sequence is probably the best ever committed to film.
For the hell of it, here are some more shots that just missed my top ten:
