Current Forum: Session 2: Film Language in Classical Hollywood Cinema	Read 12 times 	
Date: 22-Jan-2001 16:33:48	
Author: SIMMONS, DAVID C. <dcs7316@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: The Power of Deep Focus in Citizen Kane 	
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       We chose Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane for this week in the course when we discuss Hollywood style because the film can be seen almost as a textbook on film language. I wish to discuss two moments when the element of deep focus in Citizen Kane is used to add a particular layer of meaning.
       Deep focus (having both the foreground and the background of a shot in focus at the same time) is used in the very famous scene, where Kane’s mother is signing the papers that will send the boy to live with Thatcher. Instead of cutting back and forth between the two actions occurring within this shot, Welles allows the spectator to enter the frame and put foreground (mother 
signing the papers) and background (Kane’s last moment with Rosebud: an object that might signify to him a true gift of love) together in his or her mind. An Eisensteinian montage explosion could take place in the spectator’s mind as he or she puts background and foreground together in a way that informs the film’s central question, “What is Rosebud?”
        As a supplementary sidenote:  Laura Mulvey’s work Citizen Kane sees the film in terms of an Oedipal triangle. One corner of the triangle is Kane’s closeness with his mother; another corner is Kane’s aggression toward his father (both the birth father who physically threatens him and his surrogate father, Thatcher, who  emotionally threatens him by taking him away from his mother), and the third corner, Mulvey sees, as being Rosebud: what was lost in the Oedipal triangle. Mulvey sees Kane as being “frozen” between these two worlds (note the film’s use of the snowglobe and the snowstorm.) She sees the sled as being tied to the memory of his mother’s leaving; the image of the sled also returns to a dying Kane after Susan leaves him. Whether Mulvey makes an interesting argument or not, the deep focus of this particular scene (the signing of the papers) allows the spectator to enter the frame and make sense of the 

images without being forced to look only at one particular part of the filmic space.
       Another powerful moment of deep focus comes in the scene where Susan supposedly has attempted suicide. We see the bottle of pills in close-up, Susan lying in bed in the middle of the 
space, and Kane bursting through the door in the background. The deep focus allows the spectator to enter the filmic space and put all of these images together in an explosion of 
meaning. [Another sidenote: this was filmed as a process shot (i.e. the footage of Susan in the bed and Kane at the door were projected on a screen behind the bottle of pills) so that 
everything could be in focus at the same time. Such a shot was extremely unusual at the time. Both the 26-year-old Welles and his cinematographer Gregg Toland took some remarkable risks with the photography of this film. The documentary, Visions of Light (which the Humanities Departments owns and keeps in the video room), mentions that Welles respected Toland so much that he shared a title card with him at the end of Citizen Kane. ]
       Deep focus is just one of the many remarkable uses of film language in Citizen Kane. It’s a film that should provide the undergraduates with lots of practice in identifying and attempting to discern meaning through the use of particular elements of film language.