The story of Citizen Kane's restoration

[Leo Enticknap]

During the recording of the interview with Bodanovich, they got into a fight over the part in "Raising Kane" where Kael maintained that one scene happened because the cinematographer just kept the camera rolling and I believe she also maintained that there was some improvisation. Bogdanovich got so angry that he walked out, but later called to apologize.

Interesting. Both of them had at least some experience of actual filmmaking by the time of their infamous spat over Kane, so their positions were informed, at least in part, by knowledge of how movies actually get made. Where the critical stuff got seriously silly was when professors in psychology, literary theory, sociology, etc. etc. who never had the slightest clue about the actual process of making, distributing, and selling movies, started the film theory racket at around the same time. What sums it up to me was reading Barry Salt's book on the effect of film technology on style. In one chapter, he absolutely flamethrowers one of the leading lights of critical film theory at the time, citing the latter's analysis of a scene from Death by Hanging. Salt concluded that the scene in question had "...very little to do with some obtuse concept of 'narrative space,' but a lot to do with the difficulty of getting a cat to behave as the director wants it to in a film studio."

As for Welles, his shtick was essentially that he brought drama techniques from the Broadway stage into the movie studio, and in doing so, ignored some parts of the "Classical Hollywood" script/performance/continuity rulebook. The rub is that Welles's talent for shameless self-promotion enabled him to take the credit for having been the first to do so. In fact, a lot of the weird lighting, melodramatic acting (extreme close-ups of facial contortions, and that sort of stuff), and so on had been done by the newly arrived German immigrants working on the Universal horrors a decade earlier. But those were low to mid budget, definitely culturally lowbrow, and created with the intention of making a quick buck, not of being celebrated as works of authorial genius.