Orson Welles Influence On The Film Industry

From the brilliant work of the Citizen Kane (1941) with all the spotlights to his last work of classic film noir the Touch of Evil (1958). The contributions of Orson Welles (Orson Welles) on transiting the traditional Hollywood film style and developing the film noir in the 1940s is irreplaceable.

The genre Film noir was well known for showing a degenerate and dark underground world. The masterpieces of Orson Welles for example the Citizen Kane(1941), The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and The Strangers (1946) all made significant contributions to the styles of American film noir during1940s. His attempts at the innovation of film technique and creative artistic style greatly influenced the American black film industry. Following the Citizen Kane,

Under the corporation of Welles and his brilliant cinematography technician Greg Tolan, the initial film noir style image was first created. It is unbelievable that this incredible work is only a testing sample directed by a 25-year-old. The editor Robert Wise has claimed that people usually see Welles as a brilliant film maker, but they don't realize that he also did amazing works behind the camera. Until now, the Citizen Kane is still regarded as forever top 5 in the history of American film industry.

People usually began to wonder on his talent when the movie starts with the stiff dark background and silent faction. There was no music or prologue but a huge white headline in a black screen. With the rising of Bernard Herrmann's music work, a horrible castle shows in thick mist and brings audiences into a black desolate world full of darkness and

In the deep and dark underground hall of Golden Gate Park Aquarium, ferocious sharks, stingrays, squid and all kinds of marine life were swimming behind the huge windows. Welles use them to provide strange and ominous background light behind the secret couple to create mystery.

The other example, when Michael O'Hara stood by the edge of Acapulco cliff edge, Welles used extreme high camera angles in order to display a sense of fragility inside this anti hero character.

Also in the scene he was fainted and taken to a playground, the poisons hallucinogenic truly become his nightmare: he headed down and stumble, falling along the curve into a bizarre and highly expressionistic world. The setting of this world reminds us with sceneries of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Welles took a week to design this amusement park setting, however, there still a lot of pictures (including a decaying skull) have been cut off.

Welles made the hall of Mirrors became one flash in the pan throughout the history of cinema. Under the uses of montage, they confront each other with gun fighting in the maze made by mirrors. The Well design of crack-like mirrors successful reflects this femme fatale character Rita and his twisted lawyer husband Everett