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Citizen Kane Cinematic Techniques

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Citizen Kane (1941) brought about change to the way Hollywood made movies. It is likely the most famous and highly-rated film due to the extraordinary innovative cinematic techniques used throughout this black and white film by its star, director, and producer, Orson Welles. This paper will discuss some of these techniques and provide a few examples from this remarkable movie. Orson Welles, in his film Citizen Kane (1941) challenged the traditional narrative and technical elements of classic Hollywood through innovation with techniques such as deep-focus, moving through objects, wiping, low angle shots, inventive use of light and shadow, and storytelling.
Deep Focus Deep-focus is one of the most significant advances in cinematography. …show more content…

In Citizen Kane the camera takes us from a picture of Susan Alexander up the side of the building to the roof. On the roof we see the nightclub sign, El Rancho and the camera takes us directly through the sign to a skylight looking down into the nightclub at a forlorn Susan Alexander. Once again the camera takes us thru the skylight into the nightclub (Fraley, …show more content…

They are useful in wiping from full-scale sets to miniature sets. An excellent example is during Susan Alexander’s opera debut. As she starts to sing, the camera moves up to a catwalk above the stage, and one stagehand turns to another and reviews her performance by holding his nose. Only the stage and the stagehands on the catwalk are real. The middle portion of this shot is a miniature built in a model workshop. The model is invisibly wiped in by the stage curtains, as we move up past them, and wiped out by a wooden beam right below the catwalk (Ebert, 2004)
Low-Angle Shots Low angle shots made the characters appear larger and Welles used them frequently to indicate the mammoth personality of Charles. In order to do so, Welles cut holes in the floor of the studio allowing for the lowest angle shots possible, which now revealed lights and microphones up above. In order to conceal these items, he used muslin as ceilings (another innovation of Welles) to hide the equipment (Brady, n.d.). The use of low-angle shots and ceilings is especially evident in the sense with Welles and Joseph Cotton after Kane lost the election.
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