Gregg Toland - Innovations On The Long Voyage Home and Citizen Kane

Innovations On The Long Voyage Home and Citizen Kane

Toland's techniques have proved to be a revolution for the art of cinematography. Before him, shallow depth of field was used to separate the various planes on the screen, creating an impression of space, as well as stressing what mattered in the frame by leaving the rest (the foreground or background) out of focus. With Toland's lighting schemes, shadow was a much more interesting tool, dramatically as well as pictorially, to separate foreground from background and thus to create space within a two-dimensional frame while everything was in focus. This technique was also, according to Toland, more comparable to what the eyes see in real life, since our vision does not blur what we look at, but what we do not look at.