The film ‘Citizen Kane’ was released in the United States in 1941, It was a famous masterpiece written, directed and performed by Orson Wells, a 25-year-old film master at the time. It is not only an important experimental film in the history of American cinema, but also an innovative and classic film in the history of world cinema. What’s more, the method breaking through the traditional shooting of the movie also provided a direction indicator for later American movies.
Deep Focus Lens
The use of deep focus makes the picture different from the previous scenes, which greatly enhances the expressive force of the picture. Throughout the whole film, there are many scenes with dialogue between characters, and most of them use long shots, which seems to be a feeling of playing a drama. They are changed and adjusted from time to time, and triangular composition is created by using the positional relationship between characters. We all know that triangles are the most stable geometric shapes, so the connection between the foreground and the background is strengthened, then create a unique deep focal length effect.
Theorist Bazin, who has always promoted deep focus technology, praised this technique greatly. He believes that deep focus can reduce the importance of editing and preserve the integrity of time and space. Within the same lens, many spatial planes can be captured at the same time, maintaining the objectivity of a scene. Bazin believes that in this way, the audience will be more creative and not so passive to understand the relationship between people and things.
Low-Angle Shot
In this film, the use of the upside-down camera is the performance of the ceiling in the picture, which is a change in the form of space. First, it changed the previous mode of the room not showing the ceiling when filming indoor scenes in the studio. This form of change was first manifested as the concept of real space. Secondly, the appearance of the ceiling enhances the modeling sense of the composition of the film, especially the street neon lights projected on the ceiling. The change of light and shadow in the picture not only enriches the modeling space inside the picture, but also expands the environmental space outside the picture. Finally, the design of the ceiling sets off the portrayal of the characters. The film was shot from a very low angle and formed a so-called 'tall image'. In a dialectical form, it shaped the image of Kane, the failed giant.
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Nonlinear Narrative Method
‘Citizen Kane’ is no longer a traditional sequential structure and a single-view closed structure, but has a retrospective and open approach to the story. Bazin strongly praised this approach, thinking that it presents intricate things to the audience at this moment, but it does not completely break the meaning of Kane's life, which is very clever. It completely displays the rich and complicated realities, allowing the audience to feel and think on their own, without forcing the audience to pay attention to understand the director's unitary view of things.
Complex and Sophisticated Sound Effects
Director Wells' creative treatment of the image and sound in the film can be described as the first. He was the first person to use the ‘Depth Lens Audio Montage’, weird composition and comparison of light and shade, high-speed editing, changing scenes through sound, and so on. It was a bold challenge to the traditional aesthetics of movies in Wales.
Expressionist Lighting Style
The lighting style of 'Citizen Kane' is obviously a strong contrast between light and dark, and has a visual style borrowed from German expressionism, which also foreshadows the visual style of American film noir. The lighting effect expresses the relationship between the characters in the play, that is, the real Kane is always in the shadow, using the light to illustrate the nature of identity in the movie. First, the use of light is not to express the glory of a star, but to highlight the realism of the space environment in which a character is located. Second, light also acts as the character's psychology and character's destiny, which is very prominent in the application of Kane and Susan. The film's lighting has taken a high-profile route in Kane's youth and as a young newspaperman. As he grew older, and his people became more and more bitter, the lights became darker and the contrast gradually increased. Kane's palace-like castle stands forever in darkness, with only a few rays of light passing through the oppressive darkness. Illumination glare is also used in closer shots to create symbolic effects. High contrast light hits Kane's face, reflecting his integrity and degraded personality.
Conclusion
The challenge of 'Citizen Kane' is mainly reflected in its bold breakthrough in traditional film aesthetics, which does not belong to any type of genre movies. With the pioneering spirit of the New World, Wells has created a novel and multi-perspective modern narrative structure. Coupled with the unique shooting methods mentioned above, ‘Citizen Kane’ undoubtedly has a significant impact on American movies. But in fact, because of the war, 'Citizen Kane' has not been shown on a large scale in Europe since its inception, until 1946 with a large number of Hollywood films flooded into France, and the results were well received. The author of the classic book 'What Is a Film', French film theorist and film critic Bazin was its sincere supporter, and also played a remarkable pen battle with Sartre. In his later classic, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Film’, Bazin argued that ‘Citizen Kane’ has made an epoch-making contribution to the expressiveness of the film. Similarly, in addition to the film's shooting skills brought some inspiration to American films, the theme it revealed was also unusual and thought-provoking. After the general genre movies are over, the audience will only think that it is just the end of a movie, and there is not much conflict with their normal life. But looking at Kane, everyone will have a different feeling in their hearts: a society with material desires trying to become a 'great citizen' at the cost of distortion and alienation of human nature. The 'Rosebud' that has been mentioned in the film tells us that the bud and the bud will change its growth environment, and the future and fate will be very different.
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