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The unfortunate tendency of most studies of narrative films has been to arrive at interpretations by studying characters, incidents, images, and words, while neglecting vital patterns of spatial movement which often define and develop central conflicts and tensions. Yet what may be termed "spatial action or plot" is so unique and fundamental to motion pictures that its utilization deserves sustained exploration for purposes of cinematic interpretation and evaluation. It is discouraging, therefore, that popular methods of film criticism persist in regarding plot narrowly as a succession of acts and incidents executed by a film's characters. Rarely is the idea of spatial plot or action developed or even introduced. The result, too often, is that the conclusions reached by popular methods are inadequate even when they appear roughly correct; for they lack the intimate conviction which can be attained only by methods that adhere faithfully to the essence of the medium. Few narrative films have been addressed in terms of their spatial action. Some films are too meager in this respect to warrant the effort. Citizen Kane, however, is a motion picture virtually possessed by conflict in space. Yet even in the case of this valuable film about which so much has been written, there has appeared to my knowledge no article or book which has investigated the work principally in terms of the spatial action that propels it from start to final frame.
Kane and other films by Welles, of course, have been the subject of numerous studies which have made reference to spatial situations. In a discussion of Magnificent Ambersons, for example, Charles Higham has referred to a recurrent configuration of spatial entrapment in that film.1 In an illuminating but overly recondite essay on Kane, Hector Currie has pointed to a tension or duality in the film between containment and release.2 Both observations about space are relevant to the respective films; yet both studies remain typical of the failure to undertake the thorough spatial exploration films like these deserve. It is such an extended exploration of space and of movements in space toward discovery of an underlying spatial plot that I propose for Kane. The film encompasses a variety of places and journeys, but it decisively returns to spatial dilemmas and movements too fundamental...