Orson Welles Masters the Newsreel Look

In News On The March! in Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles (god among men and a man among women), we see how fictional elements are crafted to appear as documented reality. In the Thatcher news conference scene there is a sound cutting discontinuity that emulates the difficulties newsreel editors encountered when having to cut together footage where all the sound was captured on film. There is a hand-held shot of an elderly Kane being pushed around by his servant in a wheel chair which looks like it was captured by some greasy paparazzi. We see Kane standing in with look-alikes of Hitler and Teddy Roosevelt. Welles even went so far as to drag the actual film along the ground to have the scratches and dirt defects that would have been seen in actual newsreel footage of the era (people actually stood up and hissed during the first shooting because the quality of the film was so bad). Welles, having worked on the ‘real’ news program, March of Time, had been well acquainted with the structure, form, and signifiers of the ‘real’ news style. He well realized that the events portrayed in the news don’t just happen by themselves but are organized and put together in a certain recognizable way. His genius lies in the utilization of this ‘real’ style to give not just a higher sense of reality to the fictious character Kane, but also are an expository device used to guide the audience through the territory of the complex flashback narrative just as the news functions as a map to guide people through the territory of their complex lives.