Analizamos la manipulación en el discurso público, siguiendo el drama shakespeareano Julio César y la versión fílmica de J.L. Mankiewicz. Al centrarse este discurso en la acción, son menos útiles los argumentos coherentes y bien elaborados que las apelaciones emotivas y las imágenes impactantes. Se oculta la verdad con una retórica brillante, pero perniciosa. Solo la participación activa ante la recepción de un discurso manipulador, sin renunciar a la argumentación retórica, puede ponernos en guardia de forma crítica, racional y (...) razonable. (shrink)

Though he has worked almost exclusively in collaborative mediums like radio and film, Orson Welles has always tended to think of himself as an individual author. "Any production in any medium is a one-man production," he said to me. On the question of sharing creative responsibility for the works that bear his name, he is deeply ambivalent. His insistence on multiple billings for himself is legendary. As I can well testify, the very mention of the term collaboration at a wrong (...) moment can be enough to send him into a rage. The controversy over who scripted Citizen Kane initiated by Pauline Kael hurt him very deeply. That the wound still festers to this day is evident in the rancor with which he speaks of former associates like John Houseman. Yet in quieter moments he will fully concede how indispensable his principal collaborators have been to him and will openly discuss the nature and extent of their contributions. He is especially full of praise for cinematographers with whom he has worked over the years, such as Gregg Toland, Russell Metty, and, more recently, Gary Graver. On Citizen Kane, he singles out four individuals whom he thinks deserve special recognition: writer Herman Mankiewicz, art director Perry Ferguson, composer Bernard Herrmann, and Toland. Of these, he says, Toland's contribution to the film was the greatest, second in importance only to his own. In this essay I deal with the history and nature of Welles' collaboration with Toland on Citizen Kane—what brought them together, their working relationship, and the characteristics and rationale of the visual plan they created for the film. As we shall see, Toland brought a largely pre-conceived visual plan to Citizen Kanewhich he had been working out in his previous films. Welles accepted Toland's plan so readily because he recognized how dramatically appropriate it was to the story material. Toland's cinematography for Citizen Kane also left a major legacy to Hollywood films of the 1940s.Robert L. Carringer, is associate professor of English and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This essay is excerpted from his book in progress, The Road through Xanadu. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry was "The Scripts of Citizen Kane". (shrink)

The best-known controversy in film criticism of recent years has been over the authorship of the Citizen Kane script. Pauline Kael first raised the issue in a flamboyant piece in The New Yorker in 1971. Contrary to what Orson Welles would like us to believe, Kael charged, the script for the film was actually not his work but almost wholly the work of an all-but-forgotten figure, one of Hollywood's veteran screenwriters, Herman J. Mankiewicz. . . . The first two (...) drafts of the Citizen Kane script were written by Herman Mankiewicz and John Houseman in seclusion in the desert at Victorville, California, during March, April, and May 1940. Officially, Houseman was there as an editor. But part of his job was to ride herd on Mankiewicz, whose drinking habits were legendary and whose screenwriting credentials unfortunately did not include a reputation for seeing things through. Detailed accounts of the Victorville interlude have been given by Houseman in his autobiography and by Kael in "Raising Kane." There was constant interchange between Victorville and Hollywood, with Houseman going in to confer on the script and Welles sending up emissaries and regularly receiving copies of the work in progress. Welles in turn was working over the draft pages with the assistance of his own secretary, Katherine Trosper, and handing the revised screenplay copy in its rough state over to Amalia Kent, a script supervisor at RKO noted for her skills at breaking this kind of material down into script continuity form, who was readying it for the stenographic and various production departments.1 · 1. John Houseman, Run-Through: A Memoir , pp. 445-61. "Raising Kane," pp. 29-39. Amalia Kent had impressed Welles with her work on the problematic first-person script for his unproduced Heart of Darkness film, and she worked directly with him on various script supervision capacities on other of his RKO projects, including The Magnificent Ambersons and the unproduced Smiler with the Knife. She also continued as the script supervisor throughout the shooting of Citizen Kane and prepared the cutting reports for the film's editor, Robert Wise. Kael gives the impression that Rita Alexander, Herman Mankiewicz's private secretary, was performing all these specialized studio functions herself. Robert L. Carringer is associate professor of English and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of Ernst Lubitsch. His forthcoming edition of The Jazz Singer will begin the Warner Brothers script series. "Citizen Kane, The Great Gatsby, and Some Conventions of American Narrative," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1975 issue. (shrink)