City (2005; directors: Frank Miller and Robert
Rodriguez; sound designer: Paula Fairfield), the
sounds of violent action are greatly emphasized
so that fists hit with a bone-crunching “thunk” and
cars crash with a deafening noise. The same exag-
gerated emphasis applies to many animated
movies, in which the violence is loud but usually
harmless.
Sound in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane
During the 1930s, the first decade of sound in film,
many directors used sound as an integral part of
their movies. Their innovations were all the more
significant because most of them had little or no
prior background in sound. Between 1933 and 1938,
Orson Welles established himself as one of the most
creative innovators in American radio broadcasting.
Before Welles, radio broadcasting had been a waste-
land lacking in creativity, but Welles approached the
medium the way he approached the theater and,
later, the movies: experimenting and making things
different.
As always, Welles was a one-man show: writer,
director, producer, actor. As writer, he specialized
in making modern adaptations of classic literary
works; as producer, he cast famous stage and movie
actors, generally saving the most important part
for himself; and as director, he orchestrated voices,
sound effects, narration, and music in a complex
mix that had never been tried before, at least on the
scale that he created. There was no commercial tel-
evision broadcasting at the time, and Welles under-
stood the power of pure sounds, without images, to
entertain, educate, and engage listeners. He also
understood the power of radio to shock people, as
his notorious 1938 production of H. G. Wells’s The
War of the Worldsproved. Indeed, it was the awe-
some imagination behind that one radio broadcast
that not only made Orson Welles world-famous
overnight, but also was instrumental in his recruit-
ment by Hollywood.
Welles’s complex sound design for Citizen Kane
(1941; sound: Bailey Fesler and James G. Stewart) is
a kind of deep-focus sound in that it functions much
like deep-focus cinematography. Indeed, we can,
with confidence, call Welles the first sound
designer in American film history because of the
comprehensive way in which he used sound to
establish, develop, and call our attention to the
meanings of what we see. In this discussion we will
look more closely at the impressive uses of sound in
the party scene that celebrates Kane’s acquisition
of the Chroniclestaff for the Inquirer. In addition to
the combined staff of reporters, musicians, waiters,
and dancers, the principal characters are Charles
Foster Kane (Welles), Mr. Bernstein (Everett
Sloane), and Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten). The set-
ting for the party is the Inquirer’s offices, which
have been decorated for the occasion. The room is
both deep and wide, designed to accommodate the
deep-focus cinematography. Welles made his com-
plicated sound design possible by covering the ceil-
ings with muslin, which concealed the many
microphones necessary to record the multiple
sounds as the scene was shot.
We hear these multiple sounds simultaneously,
distinctly, and at the proper sound levels in relation
to the camera’s placement, so that the farther we
are from the sound, the softer and less distinct the
sound becomes. When Bernstein and Leland areDVDThis short tutorial shows how sound
functions in a short scene from Andrew Lund’s
Snapshot.SOUND IN ORSON WELLES’S CITIZEN KANE 423