Electric Dissolves in STEVEN UNIVERSE and CITIZEN KANE and MANK
Electric Dissolve? Who made that up?!
Stu here —
In writing this post about Visual Economy in Steven Universe, I was struck by the transitions into and out of the flashback.
They reminded me of Citizen Kane (1941) and ‘electric dissolves’.
AN ELECTRIC WHAT?
The TL;DR: is that electric dissolves are a type of in-camera lighting transition.
I first read about electric dissolves on the blog of Warren Ellis (the writer, not the musician) many years ago. He wrote1:
I’ve been re-reading a book of interviews with Orson Welles conducted by Peter Bogdanovich… and something interesting finally impacted on me . The cuts in CITIZEN KANE are, more often than not, dissolves. Not a method that transposes well (or often) to comics. But the thing is, in KANE, the dissolves were “electric.” An electric dissolve, in the old term, is where the dissolve is physically attained on the set by having all the lighting on dimmer switches, and turning them down slowly in sequence. So the dark creeps in from the sides towards whichever element of the composition is called out as the last thing to be seen before the dissolve completes.
Which is really interesting to me for some reason. It’s very theatrical — and theatre is a big part of comics, 80% of Eisner’s DNA was theatre. I mean, it’d eat up extra panels and real-estate… but, you know, naturalism is only one way to skin a cat. Imagine replicating electric dissolves as a scene-cutting method…
Let’s have a look at an obvious example from the opening of —
CITIZEN KANE (1941)
NOTE: The examples will be video cause Substack’s gifs couldn’t handle the gradients in the fades/dissolves (they looked like utter trash) So you’ll have to watch these on our the website. Sorry! Hope it’s worth it 🤞
Fade in. Fade out. Very theatrical. There is an artifice to them because they feel unmotivated.
Compare to this shot from X (2022) —
The door opening motivates the light to be faded up. But the filmmakers prolong the fade (it should almost be instant) because it adds to the fear: what’s in the basement? Yet it doesn’t feel as stylized as those in Citizen Kane because it is motivated. And I would suggest that most contemporary uses of electric dissolves are when characters enter/exit spaces.
Electric Dissolves. Cool effect. Cool term. I’d name my synthwave band Electric Dissolve. But the thing is I’ve not found any reference to it other than on Ellis’ blog.
It seem as if Ellis was inferring it from this interview between Peter Bogdanovich (PD) and Orson Welles (OW) from This is Orson Welles:
PB: All the dissolves were very carefully designed, it seemed.
OW: They're done electrically instead of optically.
PB: Could you describe that?
OW: We actually dimmed down lights on the stage—leaving lit the one key thing you wanted to see longer— and brought up the lights the same way for the incoming scene. In other words, if the last thing you want to see is Susan, that's the last thing you see, because all the other lights are fading out around her by dimmer, just as you would do it in the theatre. When you add the dissolve electrically, Susan lingers there, instead of the whole picture going out and another whole picture coming in. They were very carefully designed. All so that the dissolve would be more beautiful. And I still do it all the time.
Here’s the larger context from the book:
Let’s take a look at an electric dissolve involving Susan (Dorothy Comingore).
“The dark creeps in from the sides towards whichever element of the composition is called out as the last thing to be seen before the dissolve completes.”
- Warren Ellis
This shot shows the power of the technique: the sequencing of the fade draws our eye to Susan just before we go to black. She — not the men who are talking — becomes the button on the scene.
But these are fades, not dissolves. What PB and OW were really highlighting is what Citizen’s Kane’s cinematographer, Greg Toland ACS, would (IMO) more accurately describe as a lap-dissolve. This is Toland writing in the Feb 1941 issue of American Cinematographer:
A further innovation in this picture will be seen in the transitions, many of which are lap-dissolves in which the background dissolves from one scene to another a short but measurable interval before the players in the foreground dissolve. This is done quite simply, by having the lighting on set and people rigged through separate dimmers. Then all that is necessary is to commence the dissolve by dimming the background lights, effectually fading out on it, and then dimming the lights on the people, to produce the fade on them. The fade-in is made the same way, fading in the lighting on the set first, and then the lighting on the players.
— Greg Toland, ASC in Realism for Citizen Kane2
You can see this being used to excellent effect in the following scene with Susan:
“When you add the dissolve electrically, Susan lingers there, instead of the whole picture going out and another whole picture coming in.”
- Orson Welles
Welles was the consummate salesman (especially of himself), so him asserting that it was done “electrically instead of optically” is an unsurprising bit of aggrandisement — as is the notion that nobody did a match dissolve before Citizen Kane.
The lap dissolve itself would have been done using an optical printer. But the “electric” component gives the dissolve a big assist. With a traditional optical dissolve the darker parts of the image fade more quickly than the brighter areas (what modern NLEs call a “filmic dissolve”). By changing the lighting ratios within a shot, the filmmakers able to control how the lap dissolve looks.
In the digital era, this kind of effect can be achieved using masking to create what I call selective dissolves. The opening title sequence of Sharp Objects (2018) uses masking to cross-dissolve different parts of the images at different speeds.
And I know from my own work that I’ve masked eyes/faces so they dissolve at a slightly different speed from the background. It can take some tweaking to get right because otherwise it can look fake.
And that’s why electrical dissolves are so interesting. They’re physical. So even if they look theatrical, they don’t feel fake. Which brings us to —
MANK (2020)
In telling the story of the writing of Citizen Kane, David Fincher and his team took a lot of inspiration from Citizen Kane’s aesthetics — and the aesthetics of the era — while also twisting them with modern approaches and technology.
And their use of electric dissolves is no exception.
Mank’s Bungalow set was primarily lit from outside the room for day and with practicals for night3. And they use those motivated sources to create some great looking electrical dissolves:
They’re more pronounced than those in Citizen Kane and the resulting effect is different. They make me read these scenes as theatrical — as if the environment itself is on stage. They’re not hidden in lap dissolves because Mank doesn’t use any.
Lap dissolves are a cinematic technique seperate from the characters and their environments. They’re on the surface of the canvas, so to speak. So I know they’re part of how the story is being told, rather than being in the story.
So Mank’s electric dissolves occupy an interesting liminal space. They’re in the diegetic world of the characters but aren’t motivated by any character action (compare to the X example above. They’re neither a dramatic technique nor a literary one. This seems representative of the film as a whole: somewhere between biopic and homage, between anachronistic and modern. “An uncanny valley of history” as I wrote in my letterboxd review4.
Which is perhaps why my favourite of Mank’s electric dissolves is the button on this scene — when Hearst (Charles Dance) closes the door on Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman). The fading practical lights add a finality to the beat without drawing attention to themselves. You feel rather than notice them. They’re emotional.
Which brings us back around to —
Steven Universe, “Garnet’s Universe”
The bookends of the Steven Universe flashback echo this sequence from Citizen Kane, where Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotton) reminisces on the marriage of Charlie Kane (Orson Welles) and Emily Kane (Ruth Warrick).
The background fades to black behind Jedediah, creating negative space that’s filled by the incoming image. At the end of the flashback, “the players” (ie Charlie and Emily) are silhouetted against the background, to make the transition back to Jedediah less busy.
While the physical techniques are different between Steven Universe and Citizen Kane, they are conceptually and graphically similar ideas: isolating the narrator and bringing in the whole picture, and then replacing the whole picture with a silhouetted version of a narrator.
There’s an obvious visual clarity to the technique: this is Ringo telling a story. But that framing device is important because (spoilers) Ringo is lying.
The artifice of the technique tells us that the story itself is artifice.
No different from Citizen Kane — which is about the myth of Charles Kane — and Mank — which is about the myth of the making of Citizen Kane.
And no different the idea that electric dissolve was ever an actual “old term”.
IMDB
Steven Universe, “Garnet’s Universe” (2014)
Citizen Kane (1941)
X (2022)
Sharp Objects (2018)
Mank (2020)
Realism for Citizen Kane — https://theasc.com/articles/realism-for-citizen-kane
Mank: A Writer in Exile — https://theasc.com/articles/mank