Popular Culture Review Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2010 | Page 69

Up a Backlit Staircase, Casting a Long Shadow 65 shape of the architecture as well as the presence—via absence and suggestion— of other rooms, other spaces, and other participants. The viewer fills in these gaps with his or her own information. In doing so, anyone watching becomes an active participant in the creation of the cinematic landscape. This approach was actually common to many movies of the period, though it is closely associated with Tourneur himself, who at Lewton’s insistence famously used many of the same techniques in Cat People to suggest (without having to depict) a monster, and who would use it to even greater effect in his 1947 film noir Out o f The Past. But Tourneur was not alone. Orson Welles’s 1941 Citizen Kane serves as a normative template for this approach. And Welles stars as Rochester in the 1944 version of Jane Eyre, though it’s widely suspected—if never definitely proven—that he also had a hand in the directorial vision of the film. All the same, the stamp of Kane can be felt in Jane. Enough critics have noted the similarity between the treatment of space in both films (Campbell), and at least one has noted that Stevenson never again used the same uniquely Wellesian combination of techniques: “forced perspectives, exaggerated camera angles and meticulous attention to sound” (Kehr). Welles himself never took credit for the movie’s style, and he need not have. In fact, it’s possible to see the tone and vision of this film as being far more guided by the film grammar of the time as well as by the exigencies of the story. Jane Eyre, regardless of who adapts it, may indeed d [X[