Hollywood style; experimented with achieving
greater depth; created sharper black-and-white
images; used the high-powered Technicolor arc
lights for black-and-white cinematography; used
Super XX film stock, which produced a clearer
image and was four times faster than previously
available black-and-white stock; coated his lenses
(to cut down glare from the lights); and used a cam-
era equipped with a blimpso that he could work in
confined spaces.
In Citizen Kane, these methods came together in
two related techniques: a deliberate use of (1) deep-
space composition, a total visual composition that
places significant information or subjects on all
three planes of the frame and thus creates an illu-
sion of depth, coupled with (2) deep-focus cine-
matography, which, using the short-focal-length
lens, keeps all three planes in sharp focus. Deep-
space composition permits the filmmaker to exploit
the relative size of people and objects in the frame
to convey meaning and conflict.
Toland’s pioneering work on Citizen Kanehad a
profound influence on the look of subsequent
movies and helped to distance Hollywood even fur-
ther from the editing-centered theories of the
Russian formalist directors (e.g., Sergei Eisenstein);
Toland also brought American moviemaking closerFRAMING OF THE SHOT 255Deep-focus cinematography and deep-space
composition in Citizen Kane Gregg Toland built on the
work of previous directors, such as Allan Dwan, one of the
most formally innovative of early film directors, who used
deep-space composition in The Iron Mask(1929; cinema -
tographers: Warren Lynch and Henry Sharp), a silent
swashbuckler featuring Douglas Fairbanks. Dwan could open
up any shot into a complex, three-dimensional space with
strategically placed foreground, middle ground, and background
figures or objects. Similarly, in this beautiful deep-space
composition from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane(1941), Toland
exploits all three planes of depth along a line that draws our
eye from screen right to screen left. In the foreground, we
see the reporter Mr. Thompson (William Alland) in a closed
telephone booth; in the middle ground, outside the booth,
we see the headwaiter of the El Rancho nightclub; and in the
background, Susan Alexander Kane (Dorothy Comingore), the
subject of Thompson’s visit. Each character is photographed
in clear focus in a unified setting, yet each is in a separate
physical, psychological, and emotional space.
Deep-space compositionAn excellent example of the
expressive potential of deep-space composition can be found
in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious(1946; cinematographer: Ted
Tetzlaff). Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), an American
counterspy working in Brazil to discover enemy secrets,
marries Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), a German spy,
at the request of her government. Sebastian and his mother,
Madame Konstantin (Leopoldine Konstantin), eventually
discover Alicia’s duplicity, and in this scene they have already
begun to kill her by poisoning her coffee. As Alicia complains
of feeling ill, Madame Konstantin places a small cup on the
table near her, putting it in the immediate foreground of
the frame. The tiny cup, no more than a few inches tall,
appears almost as large as Alicia’s head in the middle
ground, heightening the menace facing her and raising the
level of suspense.