Lens choice

I want you to stop all this nonsense. It's deep focus, but I think what people don't realize about this style, they talk about deep focus a lot. Toland was also using a wide-angle lens at Welles' instruction. And we don't notice it so much today, but at the time this was very unusual in Hollywood. It gives the movie a slightly haunted, hallucinatory effect. The slight fisheye.

20:16 · jump to transcript →

Here's a good example of that wide-angle lens I was speaking of. You see how you can almost see every pore of the face nearest. But it's not just the depth. It's the strangeness of the exaggeration of that lens. I think going back to the doubleness issue, part of the thing about our attitude toward Kane is that Welles, and this dates back to the time when he was doing the Mercury Theater in New York,

27:52 · jump to transcript →

That is a great example of the optical printer there, that exit, that little slight zoom. And this, I think, is an important scene. She is the person who has most directly suffered from Kane. And yet he says, I feel a little sorry for him. She says,

1:46:26 · jump to transcript →