Sound - Text 7
The Welles and Toland “pan-focus” also relied on the fact that, unlike the blimped cameras commonly used at the time, the BNC could take lenses with focal lengths as short as 24 mm. In conjunction with new super-fast emulsions such as Kodak’s Super-XX, with the new coatings that improved the light-transmitting properties of lenses and with the use of powerful arc lights, these wide-angle lenses enabled Toland to create many shots featuring extreme depth of field and camera angles that revealed the ceiling of the spaces in which the action unfolded. This approach brought such influential critics as André Bazin to argue that Citizen Kane constituted a key moment in the history of film realism. Bazin more specifically claimed that “the narrative in Welles or [William] Wyler is no less clear than in John Ford, but it has the advantage of not abandoning the use of precise effects made possible by the image’s unity in time and space.” For Bazin, this particular type of realism rooted in the film’s aesthetic “creates a relationship between the viewer and the image which is closer to the viewer’s relationship to reality. […] As a result, the viewer has a more active intellectual approach, and even makes a real contribution, to the mise en scène.”[13]
Welles and Toland’s use of camera movements, depth of field and sequence shots consequently represented for Bazin a contribution to film realism on a par with that of the thematic realism of the neo-realist films made in Italy in the post-war years.
Rationing kept the studios from acquiring much new equipment over the war years, but records show that, beginning in 1946, sales for the costly BNC model suddenly exploded. Mitchell’s NC and BNC models would remain common sights on film sets until the 1960s in both the United States and the rest of the world. The company’s international presence was facilitated by its global network of representatives, which it had begun to establish in the 1930s and eventually covered Australia, Italy, India, Egypt and Japan.[14] Cameras based on Mitchell’s designs were also built under licence in the United Kingdom (by Newall), or copied by other manufacturers in Japan (by Seiki, a forerunner of Canon) and the U.S.S.R. (the Moskva EC 32).