Citizen Kane & ATPM

Despite the importance of sound in film as an audio-visual medium, that half of the equation is often forgotten by audiences and critics in favor of image.

After all, as Michel Chion writes in his seminal work “Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen,” the popular term is that patrons “see” movies, not listen to them. However, “one perception influences the other and transforms it” (XXVI).

While it is widely understood that image dictates sound, Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) and All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) emphasize sound’s power to inform the meaning of images.

The films interrogate truth and lies through the relationship between image and sound, namely the presentation of foregrounded sound as truth. Citizen Kane and All the President’s Men both follow journalists in a quest for the verbal truth behind a constructed image.

In the former, this search manifests through reporter Jerry Thompson’s (William Alland) interviews with loved ones of the titular Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles). Kane, a news mogul himself and a failed politician, dies in the opening scene of the film, muttering his final word: “rosebud.”

The importance of the utterance is immediately conveyed by the extreme close up of Kane’s mouth paired with the unnaturally high volume of the whisper, its echoic effect, and the lapse in score to highlight the word.

In an introduction marked by visual obscurity through the darkness of Kane’s gothic manor and the camera’s interest in the setting and a snow globe, “rosebud” is a paragon of sonic clarity.

It is the first word of the film, said by the main character before his face is even revealed. It goes on to drive the plot as Thompson seeks the meaning of rosebud, the unknown element of Kane’s otherwise public life.

The inciting incident of All the President’s Men — which depicts the real-life investigation by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) into the Watergate scandal — is also heard rather than seen.

After a prologue, the opening credits fade in and out over a black screen as we hear the Watergate burglars break into the National Democratic Committee headquarters. Even as visuals are reintroduced, showing the burglars bumbling around the office building, sound remains the principal mode of information as the screen is cloaked in shadow.

When police arrive, the burglars’ lookout warns them via walkie-talkie that they’ve been made, but the saboteurs made the fatal mistake of silencing their radios. Instead, the lookout’s words serve as a narration solely for the audience, creating dramatic irony. After the burglars are arrested, Woodward is told about the story by his boss while Bernstein overhears.

The burglary scene is a rare instance within All the President’s Men where the film depicts an event the journalists did not experience themselves. Generally, the film is predicated on what the men hear about the ensuing political sabotage, not what can be seen.

Citizen Kane, similarly, is structured around what Thompson is told by Kane’s former loved ones; the visual imaginings of the stories — the flashbacks — are evoked by sound.

The sound that these reporters seek, the meaning of rosebud or the secrets of the Nixon administration, are represented as the truths behind the lies of the constructed images of Kane and the U.S. government.

The premise of constructed images is introduced early in both films through the medium of diegetic journalistic videos.

After Kane’s death, the audience is shown a biographical newsreel from “News on the March.” Philip Brophy describes the segment as a “barrage of images and barking narration” in his paper “Citizen Kane: The Sound of the Look of a ‘Visual Masterpiece’” (1). Indeed, the newsreel includes a mercurial orchestral score that changes pace to match the footage depicting Kane’s wealth and influence as well as the practiced tone of its voiceover.

It’s all larger than life as it purports to tell a man’s life story; in less than 10 minutes, viewers are meant to understand Kane, but the reel lacks authenticity and intimacy.

The musicians and narrator who dominate the sonic landscape are performers. The only inclusions of characters speaking are to crowds as they, too, perform for the people and the camera. The visuals are curated, the script pre-written, the camera always a cool distance from its subject as it fails to crack the surface of Kane’s veneer.

Similarly, All the President’s Men begins with archival footage of President Richard Nixon arriving by helicopter to address Congress in a joint session. The voiceover is not as theatrical as “News on the March’s,” but its enunciation, slowness, and flat tone are hallmarks of a scripted newscaster.

The narrator describes what we see — Nixon approaches the podium, “a happy president, smiling” — giving some context but ultimately serving the image’s purposes.

It does not interrogate its subject, uncaring that while Nixon performs charisma to applauding legislators, he harbors the secrets of conspiracy.

In “Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary,” Linda Williams refers to the assumed “ability of the camera to reflect objective truths” and yet, due to emerging technologies, the “loss of faith in the objectivity of the image” (10).

While she is writing about documentaries and the 1990s — neither of which apply to Citizen Kane and All the President’s Men — this sentiment of questioning the truth in image, and sound’s role in it, is established in these broadcast news sequences.

Following Citizen Kane’s “News on the March,” the film cuts from the newsreel to a side angle of the video being projected, thus stepping out of the manufactured reality and into the reality of the film’s characters.

The shift is cemented by the unpolished sound of the projector being cut off, like a record rewinding. The sound continues to be radically different than what came before as a group of journalists discuss the reel, its lack of insight into Kane, and a proposed search for rosebud’s meaning.

Their naturalistic and overlapping dialogue, with no imposing score, creates a novel sense of authenticity. These men are not performing. Notably, they are in a private screening room, encased in darkness; the details of their faces cannot be made out.

Brophy describes these faceless voices as “radio drama introducing itself as the narratological form from which Citizen Kane is shaped” (1). The film’s creator and its actors come from a background in radio where, of course, sound is the only mode of expression.

Brophy writes that in the transition from silent films to talking ones — over a decade before Citizen Kane — an actor’s voice is as important as their face, and the radio actors of Citizen Kane form their characters as “aural identities” (3). Welles’ history in radio, especially with this being his first film, ensures that sound is not only innovative, but brought to the forefront.

The scene’s shadows decenter the image to accomplish this, which Brophy terms as highlighting voices by absenting faces (1).

This emphasis on sound primes the audience for later instances of faceless voices, like when Kane — having recently acquired his first newspaper — writes his declaration of principles. As Kane hunches over a desk to write the declaration, his face is entirely cloaked by the dark, leaving only the sound of his words.

“I’ll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly,” he promises, witnessed only by his two friends. Brophy notes the privacy of the moment and softness of his tone as an indicator of sincerity (3).

While a shadowy figure may otherwise inspire distrust, Brophy argues — tying this scene back to the dark room of journalists — that “Kane here symbolizes the noble and ethical aspirations of the press — those who erase themselves in the name of the truth, absenting their visage in the face of the plain facts they present” (4).

When Kane steps into the light after he finishes writing, illuminating his face, it is to don his public image as an authority figure. His tone turns commandeering to perform the role of telling his employee to remake the paper’s front page (Brophy 3). Thus, the notion of image as constructed and false, and sound — when unadorned and acting alone — as sincere and true, is solidified.

All the President’s Men also highlights voices by absenting faces to similar effect. The most notable instances of this are Woodward’s conversations with Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), a confidential source from within the government.

Deep Throat is first introduced over the phone as the audience only hears him, the camera planted over Woodward’s shoulder with no cuts to Deep Throat’s side of the conversation. This is a common technique in the film as many of the reporters’ sources are bodiless offscreen voices, another method of decentering image. It also builds the mystery of Deep Throat as, even at the time of making the film, his identity was unknown to the public.

Woodward and Deep Throat meet in the shadows of a parking garage three times throughout the film, the latter’s face always obscured as he reveals, confirms, or steers Woodward toward bombshell truths.

In their first conversation, Woodward’s entrance to the mostly well-lit garage is heralded by the echoing crunch of his footsteps and the oppressive buzz of the environment, emphasizing the expanse of the enclosure. It is a public space — the cars scattered about begging the whereabouts of their owners — and yet chosen for its emptiness. The sound design makes Woodward an obnoxiously loud intruder while also questioning whether he is actually alone in the barren landscape.

This is answered as the long shots of Woodward’s wandering are intercut with an extreme close up of Deep Throat’s face, the white of his eyes stark against the dark. The frame is so tight, and the lighting so dark, that we cannot determine his location save for the continued sound of Woodward’s footsteps and the garage’s hum.

Deep Throat draws the reporter to him with the clink of a lighter that pierces the buzzing, a momentary flame illuminating the dark corner he hides in. As the men begin to speak, the film alternates with close ups of each, forgoing the setting’s openness in favor of creating the semblance of privacy.

This semblance is quickly shattered as the pair are interrupted by an eerie offscreen whistle that causes them to fall silent as their eyes dart around, looking for the source. The sound’s notability, however, lies in its lack of definite physical presence. Its place beyond the frame elevates its status as a reminder that the film’s characters could be under surveillance at any time.

Scholars like Jonathan Kirshner and Paul Chojenta interpret the darkness of the Deep Throat scenes as indicative of the secrets of the government. Chojenta writes that the informant is “shrouded by the darkness of the Watergate scandal” (6). Kirshner writes that the darkness is “contrasted by the piercing brightness of the Washington Post newsroom. In the newsroom truth reigns, a clarity of vision” (57). Thus, the dark represents lies while the light exposes truth.

This visual-focused approach ignores that it is in the dark, when voice is foregrounded, that the truth is revealed to the journalists and audience — not in the newsroom and certainly not in the public spaces where sources are concerned for their images as both loyal servants to President Nixon and as upstanding citizens.

These moments of truth do not only come from sonic clarity; sometimes they are won in auditory battle. The clacking of typewriters is a motif in both All the President’s Men and Citizen Kane, although the former uses the sound against that of the television.

In the film’s last scene, Nixon’s swearing in for his second term as president plays over the TVs in the Washington Post office. Using a split diopter, a television in the foreground and Woodward and Bernstein typing away in the background are both in focus.

The inauguration ceremony is louder and flashier than the reporter’s undeterred work, the constructed image of Nixon still holding popular favor. Nixon confidently repeats his oath to uphold democracy in the measured voice of a politician, and many are happy to believe the performance on their screens.

But as cannons fire a salute to the crooked president, the scene dissolves to just Woodward and Bernstein, then just their typewriters in an extreme close up. The volume of the typing grows and appropriates the cannon shots.

This harkens back to the film’s opening shot of a typewriter, each keysmash accompanied by a gunshot. Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting are the bullets that kill the Nixon presidency. As time lapses in the final scene, the headlines on their reports detail the toppling of the president’s men until, finally, “NIXON RESIGNS.”

The typewriter, and thus the journalists, have drowned out the false notion of the innocent commander in chief.

Ultimately, Citizen Kane and All the President’s Men deconstruct the constructed image of its powerful characters — created through curated visuals and performative voiceovers and monologues — by juxtaposing it with authentic, intimate, and foregrounded sound.

This relationship reveals the artificiality of only bending sound to fit image, and the freedom in divorcing them to treat each as its equal half of the audio-visual medium. The audience is encouraged to, like the films’ journalists, interrogate truth beyond what is shown.

Works Cited

Brophy, Philip. “Citizen Kane: The Sound of the Look of a ‘Visual Masterpiece,’” Music and the Moving Image, vol. 1 no. 3, 2008.

Chion, Michel. “Audio-Vision : Sound on Screen.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Chojenta, Paul. “Celluloid Historians: Understanding Watergate through All the President’s Men.” Humanity, Truth & Artifice, 2015.

Kirshner, Jonathan. “Review of All the President’s Men.” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, vol. 36 no. 2, 2006, p. 57-58. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/flm.2006.0032.

Williams, Linda. “Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary.” Film Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3, spring 1993, p. 9-21. University of California Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1212899?origin=JSTOR-pdf