Paul Arthur, ‘Out of the Depths: Citizen Kane, Modernism and the Avant-Garde Impulse’, in Ronald Gottesman (ed.), Perspectives on Citizen Kane (1996), p.373.
‘In the breakneck idiom of 1930s "infotainment," intertitles are blended with other graphic images — animated maps, photos, newspaper headlines — and with a wide variety of "archival" footage. Cut for maximum visual dynamics, spatial transpositions are accomplished by wipes, by sudden camera movements and object movements. For instance, a title card: "In its humble beginnings," introduces the development of the Kane press empire. In the next shot, an Inquirer truck races across the extreme foreground; as it passes the camera it exposes a deep view of the original newspaper building. A cut returns us to the flat image of a map with blinking lights to designate corporate growth. We then see a long shot of a grocery store that is interrupted by a passing car, this time compressing the space of the image. In the following shot in a papermill a roll of paper is thrust right at the camera from the extreme background. Without belaboring the point, there is a concerted effort in this sequence to activate the viewer's capacity to assimilate and respond kinesthetically to rapid alterations in represented depth.’
Paul Arthur, ‘Out of the Depths: Citizen Kane, Modernism and the Avant-Garde Impulse’, in Ronald Gottesman (ed.), Perspectives on Citizen Kane (1996), p.373.
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