presence of Orson Welles in Robert Stevenson's Jane Eyre (1944), The

Let us first examine two examples of expressionism in the mise en scene of Jane Eyre, both because they are vivid traces of Welles's vision and because they point toward Welles's cinematic portrayal of Jane's interior life. Instead of the melodrama of the close-up, for which many times he expressed his distaste,2 Welles chose most frequently to explore character through mise en scene. Expressionism, the artistic style that portrays internal states by means of external visual distortions, avoids sentimentality by means of hyperstylized mise en scene in which perspectival distortion, including chiaroscuro lighting and often grotesquely canted elements within the frame, transports the viewer into a symbolic psychological setting in which the central figure both signifies subjectivity and is signified within a setting of externalized subjectivity.

In figure 2 below, expressionism is unmistakably at work, and the mise en scene may be even more plausibly assigned to Welles when we compare it to a shot immediately preceding it. Here Jane has just been punished by Mr. Brocklehurst for lies she is alleged to have told. Note in this shot (figure 1) that the mise en scene, while dramatic, is not expressionistic, and conveys its narrative weight in fairly conventional ways. Whether Welles created it or not (I think not), the shot reveals little of Jane as subject.3

Now, by contrast, note a shot from the very next sequence, in which evening has descended and expressionism has appeared to give us Jane's "point of view" by symbolizing within the mise en scene her own agonized psychic state (figure 2). The radial lines suggest not only imprisonment but a kind of ferocious concentration, visually and psychically. Moreover, Helen Burns's radiant figure at the top middle of the frame casts a grotesque shadow at the right of the frame, a shadow that suggests both her own impending death and, in a trick of optical perspective, a shadow cast by, and symbolizing, Jane's own brooding inferiority. It is in such shots as this, I believe, that we most clearly see Welles's presence in this film, as well as his abiding interest in how the cinema, an art of surfaces, can portray the self's experience of its own subjectivity.

Here is another example, one which gains in power when we compare it to a shot from The Magnificent Ambersons. In the shot from Jane Eyre (figure 3), Jane has just shut the door in bewilderment and torment after the party with Blanche Ingram, and the expressionist shadow across her body communicates the emotional and psychological barriers she feels within. The Wellesian presence here is even more obvious when we compare this shot to a similar shot near the end of The Magnificent Ambersons in which Aunt Fanny has collapsed from fear, exhaustion, and despair (figure 4).

Welles's expressionistic sensibilities are powerful throughout Jane Eyre, and Ellis and Kaplan observe the film's faithfulness to the Gothic elements within the novel, though they attribute the expressionism, incorrectly in my view, to Stevenson rather than Welles (86-89). The film has yet another device to suggest that middle space Jane occupies, that of composition in deep focus combined with unusual framing. Several times in this film, Jane appears in the frame as an observer, not as she looks on longingly-in fact, we do not see her gaze-but as she frames the scene we also witness. (One thinks in this regard of the symbolic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, one in which human observers function as witnesses and symbolic creators, standing in a middle space that invites both contemplation and identification.) Citizen Kane is justly celebrated for its deep-focus cinematography, of course, and throughout that film Welles loves to frame his shots with one figure on one side of the frame in the extreme foreground, one figure on the other side of the frame in the middle ground, and one figure in the center in the background, all in focus. In Jane Eyre, however, several shots go even farther with this technique to suggest Jane's double authority as character and narrative creator, and I believe these shots are Welles's invention. Consider first the shot from the scene in which Jane is commanded to be present while Rochester's apparent belle, Blanche Ingram, is playing the piano and singing (figure 5).