Sound - Text 6
Toland’s achievements eventually attracted the attention of the young Orson Welles, who asked him to work on his first professional feature, Citizen Kane (1941). The essential role played by the cinematographer in the making of this celebrated film is attested to by the fact that the name of the individual responsible for the “Direction-Production,” Orson Welles, and that of the person responsible for the “Photography,” Gregg Toland, appear on the screen at the same time during the film’s credits. In their preparatory meetings, Welles and Toland agreed to make realism the core of their approach. According to Toland, they more specifically decided to direct and film Citizen Kane “in such a way that the audience would feel as if it was looking at reality, rather than merely at a movie.”[11] Toland further elaborated on this approach in the pages of American Cinematographer:
Everything was planned with reference to what the camera could bring to the eyes of the audience. Direct cuts, we felt, were something that should be avoided wherever possible. Instead, we tried to plan action so that the camera could pan or dolly from one angle to another whenever this type of treatment was desirable. In other scenes, we pre-planned our angles and compositions so that action which ordinarily would be shown in direct cuts would be shown in a single, longer scene – often one in which important action might take place simultaneously in widely-separated points in extreme foreground and background.[12]
The BNC, as it was more compact than cameras relying on a blimp for soundproofing, facilitated the execution of the camera movements which served Welles and Toland’s realist aesthetic.