ABSTRACT
After 1925, and up until Citizen Kane (1941), that depth of field which was “naturally” operative in the majority of films is lost... Now, neither of these two dates is free of any attendant problems. On the one hand, work must be carried out to clarify these “years after 1925” so briskly designated by Mitry: they are articulated, synchronically, and according to a relation of determination which is yet to be analyzed, with the transition from orthochromatic to panchromatic film stock and the transition from silent to sound cinema, which was certainly more decisive and more difficult (although in the text referred to above Mitry does not mention it). With regards to these “technical” changes, we have seen that the former – and we will see that the latter – does not only involve “technical” matters, but is, albeit in an uneven fashion, ideologically and economically determined. On the other hand, if we more closely interrogate the status of “breakthrough film” [film-coupure] conferred on Citizen Kane – more by Bazin than by Mitry, but also, before Bazin, by the great majority of critics at the time – and if we concern ourselves with depth of field, we can observe that, while Welles and his director of photography Gregg Toland re-inscribe it into this film, and while this reinscription provokes the effect of a transgression, of a true innovation, it is not because we can not find, in the very period of its greatest eclipse, a certain number of films where, exceptionally, it does have a role. Such exceptions (even if, for Renoir alone, they included Boudu sauvé des eaux, Une Partie de campagne and La Règle du jeu) are rare enough to confirm the rule of the demise of depth of field – whose determinations we are in the midst of elucidating. But their very existence also obliges us to interrogate the question of the “oblivion” that they suffered up until Bazin calls attention to them by attributing them with a central position in his thesis on the evolution of film language toward a “surplus realism,” and which can be measured by the shock produced by the reactivation of depth in Citizen Kane. For it is in this way that the repression of depth of field for almost 15 years and the coup de théatre of its return largely exceed the mere technical scene to which Mitry strives to confine them. Instead, they involve ideological investments, practices, principles, a certain conception of the production and distribution of the film, struggles against the dominance of this conception, in short, the functioning of the cinema as an ideological apparatus and the economic conditions of this functioning.
