No matter what genre is involved, no matter how deep it goes, "Citizen Kane" is always a mountain that filmmakers can't get around. The first halo of film history has shrouded this masterpiece in absolute sense since its birth, guiding the way forward for all explorers on the road of film.
"Citizen Kane" can be called the pioneering work of modern movies in a sense. It breaks the single-line mode of traditional dramas from the screenplay, replaces it with nested retrospective narratives, and liberates the logical sequence of time and space for the screenplay. Limitations (but this is not the first, Sjostrom used spiral nested narrative for the first time in "The Ghost Carriage", and Wells played it to perfection); from the lens for the first time, extensive use of deep focus photography, a breakthrough The limitations of shallow focus photography on spatial composition and depth distance have opened up infinite possibilities for the image to convey multiple information. Has become the norm throughout the article). In addition, there are a series of bold and pioneering elements such as the auxiliary use of the teleprompter, the extension and cohesion of the phantom overlay on the picture, the coherent development of the subject's perspective switching, and so on. This is why it is almost impossible in the future. All movies have the shadow of "Citizen Kane". It can be said that "Citizen Kane" is the starting point of modern movies. Of course, this starting point has reached its peak and cannot be surpassed.
Orson Wells, the movie prodigy, has accumulated a lot of experience in stage plays since he was a child. He has already learned how to position the characters and lighting, and how to highlight the tension of the drama through photography. During the period of the Mercury Theater, he knew how to manipulate the audience to achieve his own goals. All of these laid a solid foundation for his superb shot scheduling. Such an unparalleled character also destined his multi-fold career. In the anti-system and anti-traditional struggle, he stuck to the bottom line of an artist, never to Commercial concessions, standing proudly on top of Hollywood with unique artistry. It is a pity that such a "heterogeneous" in Hollywood must not be tolerated by major studios. In the face of art and business, no company will choose art, and the result is a ruthless scissor hand. How much effort was cut to pieces, how much inspiration was strangled in the swaddling clothes, turned into the phrase "They'll love me when I'm dead." in the master's mouth, so much sigh, it is Wells to be loved after death. The sorrow is the sorrow of the film industry and the sorrow of artistic creation.
The success of "Citizen Kane" is both a brilliance and a curse for Wells. Even his future movies will be compared with "Citizen Kane". Some people even ask Wells when they encounter it. "Have you made any other movies besides "Citizen Kane"?" It is true that from the perspective of film history, "Citizen Kane" is indeed the pinnacle of Wells, but throughout his entire creative career, almost Each work is highly artistic and dramatic, but it is relatively eclipsed under the light of "the first in film history".
Here is a brief review of all the works of Wells. "The Great Amberson" staged a history of the rise and fall of the family. Wells grasped the characteristics of the times with an extremely sharp eye, and accurately endowed each character, expressing the sigh of the passing of time amidst the ups and downs. "Mr. Akatin" has a script structure similar to "Citizen Kane", using flashback techniques to reveal the complicated life of Mr. Akatin, and at the same time expose the history of the crimes of the capital society. After that, Wells began to focus on film noir and adaptations of Shakespeare. Based on his childhood experience of living in Shanghai, he created a black suspenseful story "Miss Shanghai", reflecting the darkening of humanity by interests. Next, Wells went a step further on the road of film noir, creating the pinnacle of film noir, "Gone with the Tribulation", which perfectly restored the contrast between good and evil in the essence of film noir, and concentrated it in one body, combining the law itself with the law. The contradiction of the executor finally leads to the dialectical relationship between purpose and means. At the same time, Wells has been trying to restore his loyal adaptations of literary works. "Othello", "Macbeth" and "Don Quixote" have all completed the visual transformation of literature in his genius adaptations. With these step-by-step accumulations, Wells has assembled all the advantages of great writers and created the pinnacle of drama and film "Midnight Bell" in one fell swoop, which played the death knell of power and desire, and the tragedy of the end of the era, nakedly presenting The tragedy of friendship turned into nothingness under the temptation of power. During his exile in Europe, Wells took another literary adaptation of the pinnacle of work "The Trial", which restored the absurd and cold world in Kafka's writings to light and shadow, and enlarged it to the entire social form and the individual through K's unprovoked conviction. The oppression of existence closes the door of the invisible law in front of everyone, and uses his own understanding to change the ending into an open choice, whether to rise up to resist or accept it willingly. "Immortal Story" reveals how individuals gain immortality in a limited life course, spread to the world in the form of a story, and become immortal. At the same time, it satirizes the uselessness of unrealistic dream experiences in the real world. "The Other Side of the Wind" shows the other side of reality, the other side of the wind that no one knows, in and out of the scene, both true and false. . . . . .
Looking back on Orson Wells’s dramatic life, from his first appearance to the wall, from exile in Europe to his hometown of honor, he was like Kane, from a passionate little boy to a weather-beaten successful loser. , From the obsession of chasing the original heart to the body of losing the original heart, from the rose bud to being loved after death. Whether it is Kane or Wells, their life is a broken puzzle, they will always be missing the first piece of rose buds. They exhausted their lives to find but they will never find it. Perhaps, being loved after death is the most important thing for them. good result. Therefore, if you want to understand Wells, you must start from the very beginning, starting from "Citizen Kane".
The large number of depth-of-field lenses in the movie was unprecedented at the time. In order to master deep-focus photography, Wells watched a lot of works of his predecessors. It was very inspiring for Wells. It is worth mentioning that, in order to achieve the desired effect, limited to the limitations of photography technology at the time, many of the deep to exaggerated depth-of-field shots in the film were actually completed by special effects, which formed unexpected effects in the distance, within a room It shows a distance of tens of meters, which adds a sense of compositional aesthetics and artistic rendering, and at the same time strengthens the contrast between the strong and the weak of the characters. These are completely unattainable in a shallow focus lens. Shallow focus photography only focuses the lens on one point, highlighting the content that the director wants the audience to pay attention to, but the large content of the entire screen is wasted, the sense of layering and content is greatly reduced, and the charm of the image is also reduced a lot. Wells has completely broken the limitation of shallow focus photography, injecting soul into the image with a dancing camera, adding flesh and blood to the picture with a deep composition, making lens scheduling and narrative advancement complement each other, promote each other, and evolve multiple levels in the same picture. . At the same time, because there is no focus, the audience can choose the empathy point by themselves, and multiple interpretations of one picture, the level and connotation of the lens have gone up to a new level. In the scene where Kane’s mother and Mr. Thatcher signed the contract, the scene was divided into the mother in the close shot, the father in the middle shot, and Kane playing outside the window in the distant shot through a depth-of-field lens. In sharp contrast with the outdoors, the power of the characters is positively related to the size, and the desolation of being manipulated by others unknowingly is shown to the fullest. In the scene where Susan and Kane were separated, Susan at the door and Kane in the room felt that the distance between them was stretched to infinity due to the deep composition, and the door frames in between were also heartfelt. The barriers between the heart and the heart, although the door has not been closed, but the scars have already been carved in the heart, and they can never be approached. Within a house, like a thousand miles away, this is the charm of a depth-of-field lens.
At this time, Wells used his rich experience in stage play and transformed it into perfect shot scheduling and character positioning. Although he did not use the proficient long shots in the later stage, he still tightly locked the narrative rhythm and narrative with the choice and switching of camera positions. The characters express their emotions, and the dance of the camera is completed between the light and shadow transitions. Wells’s choice of camera position can be said to be unparalleled. In ordinary dialogue, he never uses simple front and back fights, but restores the speaker’s multiple psychology from different angles, fully showing a complex and emotional character image. . At the same time, another major innovation was made to the background. For the first time, the ceiling was boldly introduced into the picture. This was a great challenge for the selection of the scene. The ceiling painting would create a sense of pressure on the space. At the same time, the camera can only choose low camera position. It is necessary to consider the balance between the image of the tall man being created and the oppressive feeling of the ceiling, and the distance between the distance and the head-up view when moving the position. Coordinating all these is a qualified ceiling painting. In order to achieve an exaggerated upward shooting effect, Wells even punched a hole in the floor and asked the cameraman to stand in the hole and shoot upwards, so the camera position has been lowered to the same level as the floor, and the person in the foreground is now on one leg. Full of half of the screen, the characters in the background are as small as ants. This exaggerated sense of condescension and contempt also magnifies the plot conflict and the contrast between the characters to the extreme.
The direction of the whole movie is flashback. With the suspense of the "rose bud" buried by Kane's death, it unveils the ups and downs of a great citizen. During the period, I used the role of a reporter to break the limitations of time and space, interspersed with narrative back and forth at different time periods in Kane's life. Spiral nested narrative breaks the monotony and powerlessness of traditional single-line narrative, introduces branch plots related to the main line without any sense of violation, and accurately constructs a complete logical chain, taking care of every detail without breaking the overall logical connection. . Wells cleverly used the light and the lens to deliberately hide the reporter's face, which allowed the audience to eliminate the subjective color while bringing in the identity of the reporter, examine the whole story from an objective perspective, and subtly complete the transformation of subject and object. The whole story seems to be putting together a broken puzzle. The characters interviewed by the reporter are like fragments. Everyone has a different understanding of Kane. A collection of perspectives is a complete Kane, a diversified and complex. The image of the characters slowly surfaced. And the rose bud is always missing even though it runs through it, just like the missing piece in that huge puzzle, the piece in Kane’s heart that is always missing. The incomplete jigsaw is only infinitely enlarged, but it can never make up for the original rose bud.
Eighty years ago, Orson Wells made a trans-epochal innovation in film language with ideas far beyond the times, impacting everyone’s cognition with dazzling camera positions and dazzling lenses, challenging the traditional aesthetic. Solidification has made an immortal contribution to film art. His life is so similar to Kane's. The incomplete puzzle can only be completed after death, but it is better to be loved after death than to be forgotten after death. Today, we are able to look up to this movie giant and return the status that should have belonged to him, and use "Citizen Kane" to fill in the missing piece in the master's life puzzle-the rose bud.
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