Having skirted around its making in my Welles "research" for
Love Goddess, I decided today to actually rewatch "Citizen Kane" which happily appears
to be available on iplayer forever. The film seems timely now in a way it probably hasn't since it first came out... initally I wrote "frighteningly timely", but if I'm honest, also quite pleasingly timely...
And timely not just in its depiction of one of the richest men in the world
maniacally throwing money away trying to buy the love of "The People" and calling it Democracy, but also in the depiction of an attempt to use that money, and the media it buys, to remake reality itself and of the suicide-attempt-inducing nightmare of having to live inside that lie, which is the fate of Kane's second wife.
Susan Alexander's story probably stands up best as a metaphor though. In reality, billionaires' wives seem to be managing okay. But as the opening of the film makes clear, "Citizen Kane" doesn't take place in reality. I was wildly wrong before
when I said it began with a news reel. Of course it begins with this:
In the ruins of the fairy tale that Kane retreated into – to the sound of the same sleepily growling horns that composer Bernard Herrmann would later use to accompany Jason and the Argonauts disturbing Talos' gigantic jewellery box: lost monkeys, abandoned gondolas, an absurdly convex golf course, and the suggestion – confirmed in the film's closing shots – that this is just a taste of Xanadu, that you'll never be able to see the whole thing. Immediately I was reminded of scrolling through my photos after a night walk, deciding what images to use, and how many, and what order to put them in on the blog. So actually this opening does remind me of the real world, or whatever you want to call what we're living in until the lights go out. That's what makes it the greatest.
This is probably the shallowest possible comment to make on this masterpiece, but I have just been struck by how strongly the opening tableaux resemble establishing shots in Hammer horrors (which I've always found dead impressive) and the queue sets/vignettes at Disneyland (some of which are better than the rides, IMO). I'm sure they all had Citizen Kane in mind, or at least at the back of their mind; it's just remarkable how well they manage to pull it off. Or perhaps more remarkable that the beautiful image, employing the finer touch of the illustrator's art, has gone so out of fashion in modern cinema. There are nice shots, but rarely do you see anything that's so gratuitously satisfying to stare at.
ReplyDeleteThe fact these are such appealing compositions in 4:3 is even more remarkable, as I swear that's the hardest aspect ratio to make look good ... You can be stylish in a square, and widescreen gives you a lot more opportunity for contrast, but 4:3 is neither fish nor fowl and so easy to make foolishly flat-footed!
But does ANYTHING compare to these specific shots? I think nowadays just as much care can go into a world, but the camera's always swooping. I remember when I first saw "Fellowship of the Ring" wishing for some reason the camera was more static, maybe, as you say, so that I could stare. It felt less immersive to be swooping. It felt less like there was stuff I might be missing. Wes Anderson gives great composition, but again, not immersively like this.
ReplyDeleteI think fashion in cinematography changes as with anything else ... There are beautiful shots in a lot of more modern films, but they are beautiful in a different way than this almost Victorian-storybook level of illustrative perfection. A lot of the time, the intent in composing a shot is to give an illusion of depth; when 3D became all the rage, it was almost as though cinematographers felt they could throw all those tools away because they got depth for real, and shot composition (and to some extent film grammar) fell out the window. Appalling filmmaking for years. I think it might be starting to creep back to a basic level of competence, but it's suffered a lot ...
DeleteDo you mean 3D as in wearing 3D specs? I guess you were at the coalface for that. I don't think I noticed a dop in talent for composition, but then I do sit quite close to the screen. Or do you mean CGI replacing matte paintings? There's no reason a camera shouldn't swoop, I suppose. The camera in "CItizen Kane" also swoops, famously.
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