Ellis and Kaplan's "yearning, passive" Jane is further complicated in my final example, a series of shots late in the film (figures 8-11). Here Jane leaves Rochester. She is devastated by their interrupted nuptials and the discovery of Rochester's mad wife, Bertha Mason. She still loves Rochester, :p though she will no longer live with him.Yet at the very moment in which the film might have emphasized her melodramatic position as wounded lover, the very Wellesian mise en scene instead reasserts her power within the narrative and her power over it. In figure 8, the departing Jane has grown much larger than the bereft Rochester. In figure 9, Jane begins to open the door, and Rochester is Lilliputian in comparison to her; he has shrunk almost to the size of a thought in her mind, a regret in her heart. In figure 10, Jane has opened the door wide enough to walk out, and in the process she has eclipsed Rochester altogether, excluding him from the frame, a striking visual demonstration of authorial control implied by her position in the frame. The Rochester she leaves behind (Figure 11) seems both devastated and powerless. Here again, the mise en scene suggests not only her power within this narrative but her power over this narrative, indeed her own complex homo-and heterodiegetic relationship to this narrative.
This begins at 1h24m28s - One could compare it the scene where Susan leaves Kane - they're fairly similar when you consider they are filmed at opposite 180 degree angles. Both feature a plane level, central screen receding/advancing figure with emphasis on doors and doorways.
- noticing stuff on the fly - so my ad hoc opinion at this point would be to assume that the Maestro directed (directly or indirectly) about half of the shots (with good, gothic-style :angry: material thanks to Stevenson and Barnes comprising the other half) plus the rhythm of the film is quite bouncy and musical and despite the rather sandwiched plot strands, the scenes themselves somewhow flow together well, so Welles seems to have had (direct or indirect) participatio in the cutting. Although essentially a Selznick Rebecca-gothic romance, there are certain Wellesified thematics that slip in (childhood of Jane, role of Rochester). So although the movie doesn't have the kinetic electricity of a pure Welles auteur project, the Maestro seems to have, for whatever reasons, had enough interest in this project to want to put considerable personal input into it to make it ultimately bear his esthetic stamp. But I'm just boppin' and scattin' 