As long ago as 1938, Zora Hurston, a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University, suggested that there could be a material basis for the zombie phenomenon. Having visited what she believed to be a zombie in a hospital near Gonaive, in north-central Haiti, she concluded that “it is not a case of awakening the dead, but a matter of the semblance of death induced by some drug known to a few: some secret probably brought from Africa and handed down from generation to generation. The bocors know the effect of the drug and the antidote. It is evident that it destroys that part of the brain which governs speech and willpower. The victim can move and act but cannot formulate thought.”

Scientific interest in the zombie poison was rekindled recently by reported cases of zombies under the care of Haitian psychiatrist Lamarque Douyon. In one case it was suggested that the patient had been made a zombie by a bocor who had used a poison. Physicians close to the case recognized that the correct dosage of the proper drug could lower the metabolic rate of an individual to the point where he would appear to be dead. Cognizant of the profound medical potential of such a drug, they asked me in 1982 to investigate the composition of zombie poison in Haiti.

During the course of three expeditions, the complete preparation of five poisons used to make zombies was documented at four widely separated villages in Haiti. Although a number of lizards, tarantulas, nonvenomous snakes, and millipedes are added to the various preparations, there are five constant animal ingredients: burned and ground-up human remains, a small tree frog, a polychaete worm, a large New World toad, and one or more species of puffer fish. The most potent ingredients are the puffer fish, which contain deadly nerve toxins known as tetrodotoxin.

The effects of tetrodotoxin poisoning have been well documented. The most famous source of puffer poisoning is the Japanese fugu fish. The Japanese accept the risks of eating these fish because they enjoy the exhilarating physiological aftereffects, which include sensations of warmth, flushing of the skin, mild paresthesias of the tongue and lips, and euphoria.

Case histories from the Japanese literature about fugu poisoning read like accounts of zombification. A man who had died after eating fugu regained consciousness seven days later in a morgue. He claimed that he recalled the entire incident and said he feared he would be buried alive. Another case involved a man who walked away from a cart that was carrying him to a crematorium. Last summer, a Japanese man poisoned by fugu revived after he was nailed into a coffin.

One of the zombie patients who described his experiences to me said that he remained conscious at all times; although he was completely immobilized, he heard his sister weeping as he was pronounced dead. Both during and after his burial, his overall sensation was one of floating above the grave. He remembered that his earliest sign of discomfort before entering the hospital was difficulty in breathing. It was reported that his lips had turned blue. He did not know how long he had remained buried before the zombie makers released him. From his testimony and the medical dossier compiled at the time of his apparent death, it is evident that he exhibited twenty-one, or virtually all, of the prominent symptoms associated with tetrodotoxin poisoning.

The poisons I collected during my first two expeditions are currently being analyzed. Preliminary experiments with rats and rhesus monkeys have been most promising. Twenty minutes after a topical application of the poison to a monkey’s abdomen, the animal’s typical aggressive behavior diminished and it assumed a catatonic posture. It remained in a single position for nine hours. Recovery was complete.

These preliminary laboratory results, together with the biomedical literature and data gathered in the field, indicate that there is an ethnopharmacological basis for the zombie phenomenon. The toxins contained in the puffer fish are capable of pharmacologically inducing physical states similar to those characterized in Haiti as zombification. That the symptoms described by the zombie patient match so closely the symptoms of tetrodotoxin poisoning documented in the Japanese literature suggests that he was exposed to the poison.

From ethnopharmacological investigations, we know that the poison lowers the metabolic rate of the victim almost to the point of death. Pronounced dead by attending physicians who check only for superficial vital signs, and considered dead by family members and by the zombie maker, the victim is buried alive. Undoubtedly, in many cases the victim does die, either from the poison or from suffocating in the coffin. The widespread belief in the existence of zombies in Haiti, however, is based on those instances where the victim receives the correct dosage of the poison, wakes up in the coffin, and is dragged out of the grave by the zombie maker.

The victim, affected by the drug and traumatized by the situation, is immediately beaten by the zombie maker’s assistants. He is then bound and led before a cross to be baptized with a new zombie name. After the baptism, he is made to eat a paste containing a strong dose of a potent psychoactive drug (Datura Stramonium), known in Haiti as “zombie cucumbers,” which brings on a state of psychosis. During that intoxication, the zombie is carried off.

The conceptions are basically kitsch… popular melodrama-Freud plus scandal, a comic strip about Hearst.

Although these words are used by Pauline Kael to describe CITIZEN KANE, in a long essay introducing the film’s script, they might apply with greater rigor to her own introduction. Directly after the above quote, she makes it clear that KANE is “kitsch redeemed,” and this applies to her essay as well: backed by impressive research, loaded with entertaining nuggets of gossip and social history, and written with a great deal of dash and wit, “Raising KANE” is a work that has much to redeem it. As a bedside anecdote collection, it is easily the equal of The Minutes of the Last Meeting and Robert Lewis Taylor’s biography of W. C. Fields, and much of what she has to say about Hollywood is shrewd and quotable (e.g., “The movie industry is always frightened, and is always proudest of films that celebrate courage.”) Her basic contention, that the script of KANE is almost solely the work of Herman J. Mankiewicz, seems well-supported and convincing — although hardly earth-shaking for anyone who was reading Penelope Houston’s interview with John Houseman in Sight and Sound nine years ago (Autumn 1962). But as criticism, “Raising KANE” is mainly a conspicuous failure — a depressing performance for a supposedly major film critic — in which the object under examination repeatedly disappears before our eyes. Contrary to her own apparent aims and efforts, Kael succeeds more in burying KANE than in praising it, and perpetrates a number of questionable criticalmethods in the process. The following remarks will attempt to show how and why.

First, a word about The CITIZEN KANE Book itself, which appears to be a fair reflection of Kael’s tastes and procedures. In many ways, it epitomizes the mixed blessing that the proliferating movie book industry has generally become: one is offered too much, yet not enough, and usually too late. Thirty years after the release of CITIZEN KANE, the script is finally made available, and it is packaged to serve as a coffee table ornament — virtually out of the reach of most students until (or unless) it comes out as an expensive paperback, and illustrated with perhaps the ugliest frame enlargements ever to be seen in a film book of any kind. (1) One is grateful for much of the additional material — notes on the shooting script by Gary Carey, Mankiewicz’s credits, an index to Kael’s essay, and above all, the film’s cutting continuity — and a bit chagrined that (1) no production stills are included, (2) Carey’s notes are somewhat skimpy, and (3) apart from THE MAGIFICENT AMBERSONS, FALSTAFF, and MR. ARKADIN, no other titles directed by Welles are even mentioned (and the latter, inexplicably, is listed only under its British title, CONFIDENTIAL REPORT).

When Kael began carving her reputation in the early Sixties, she was chiefly known for the vigorous sarcasm of her ad hominem attacks against other critics. Now that she writes for a vastly wider audience in The New Yorker (where “Raising KANE” first appeared), the sarcasm is still there, but generally the only figures attacked by name are celebrities — like Orson Welles; the critics are roasted anonymously. This may be due to professional courtesy, or the likelier assumption that New Yorker readers don’t bother with film books by other writers, but it makes for an occasional fuzziness. Thus we have to figure out on our own that “the latest incense-burning book on Josef von Sternberg” is Herman G. Weinberg’s; and that when she ridicules “conventional schoolbook explanations for [KANE’s] greatness,” such as “articles…that call it a tragedy in fugal form and articles that explain that the hero of CITIZEN KANE i s time,” she is referring not to several articles but to one-specifically, an essay by Joseph McBride in Persistence of Vision. (2) The opening sentence of McBride’s piece reads, “CITIZEN KANE is a tragedy in fugal form; thus it is also the denial of tragedy,” and three paragraphs later is the suggestion that “time itself is the hero of CITIZEN KANE.” Yet taken as a whole, McBride’s brief essay, whatever it may lack in stylistic felicities, may contain more valuable insights about the film than Kael’s 70-odd double-columned pages. While it shows more interest in KANE as a film than as the setting and occasion for clashing egos and intrigues, it still manages to cover much of the same ground that The CITIZEN KANE Book traverses three years later — detailed, intelligent comparisons of the shooting script with the film (the first time this was ever done, to my knowledge), an examination of the movie’s relationship to Hearst, and a full acknowledgement (amplified by a quotation from the Houseman interview) that “Welles does play down Mankiewicz’s contribution.” And if we turn directly to Kael’s own account of KANE published in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang the same year, we find not only “conventional school book explanations” that are vacuous indeed (Kane is “a Faust who sells out to the devil in himself”), but also the assumption that KANE is “a one man show …staged by twenty-five-year-old writer-director-star Orson Welles.”

For all its theoretical limitations and embarrassing factual errors, the best criticism of CITIZEN KANE is still probably found in Andre Bazin’s small, out-of-print, and untranslated book on Welles (Orson Welles, Paris: P.-A. Chavane, 1950). It is one sign of Kael’s limitations that she once wrote in a book review about Bazin’s essays being “brain-crushingly difficult” — in English translation. A brain that easily crushed is somewhat less than well equipped to deal with intellectual subjects, as her early remarks on Eisenstein and Resnais (among others) seem to indicate. IVAN THE TERRIBLE, for her, is “so lacking in human dimensions that we may stare at it in a kind of outrage. True, every frame in it looks great…but as a movie, it’s static, grandiose, and frequently ludicrous, with elaborately angled, over-composed photography, and overwrought, eyeball-rolling performers slipping in and out of the walls….Though no doubt the extraordinarily sophisticated Eisenstein intended all this to be a non-realistic stylization, it’s still a heavy dose of decor for all except true addicts” (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). And LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD is “a ‘classier’version of those Forties you-can-call-it-supernatural-if-you-want-to movies like FLESH AN D FANTASY — only now it’s called ‘Jungian’” (I Lost It at the Movies). Basic to both these reactions is a refusal or inability to respond to self-proclaiming art on its own terms, an impulse to cut the work down to size — or chop it up into bite-size tidbits — before even attempting to assimilate it. At her rare best, as in her sensitive review of MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER last year, Kael can grapple with a film as an organic unity; more frequently, it becomes splintered and distributed into ungainlv heaps of pros and cons, shards of loose matter that are usually dropped unless they can yield up generalities or wisecracks, until all that remains visible is the wreckage. Many films, of course, are wreckage, and few critics are better than Kael in explaining how certain ones go over the cliff — the complex (or simple) mentality that often lies just behind banality or incoherence. But confronting the depth of KANE, she can hail it only as a “shallow masterpiece.”

Small wonder, then, that so much of the film confuses or eludes her. First she tries to “explain” as much of the film as she can by relating it to the biographies, public personalities, and (presumed) psychologies of Welles, Mankiewicz and Hearst (“Freud plus scandal”). And when some parts of the film don’t seem to match her “real-life” drama, she connects them anyway: “There’s the scene of Welles eating in the newspaper office, which was obviously caught by the camera crew, and which, to be ‘a good sport,’he had to use.” But what’s so obvious or even plausible about this fantasy when we find the eating scene already detailed in the script?

Kael is at her weakest when she confronts the film’s formal devices. The use of a partially invisible reporter as a narrative device, for instance-training our attention on what he sees and hears rather than on what he is — clearly confuses her. After criticizing William Alland in a wholly functional performance for being “a vacuum as Thompson, the reporter,” she goes on to note that “the faceless idea doesn’t really come across. You probably don’t get the intention behind it in KANE unless you start thinking about the unusual feebleness of the scenes with the ‘News on the March’people and the fact that though Thompson is a principal in the movie in terms of how much he appears, there isn’t a shred of characterization in his lines or performance; he is such a shadowy presence that you may even have a hard time remembering whether you ever saw his face…”

Quite aside from the speculation she sets up about “the scenes with the ‘News on the March’people” (isn’t there only one?), it is distressing — and unfortunately, not uncharacteristic — to see her treating one of the film’s most ingenious and successful strategies as a liability. Where, indeed, can one find the “unusual feebleness” in the brilliant projection-room sequence — a model of measured exposition, a beautiful choreography of darting sounds and images, dovetailing voices and lights — except in her misreading of it? Kael’s use of the second person here, like her resort to first person plural on other occasions, is ultimately as political and rhetorical as it is anti-analytical: one is invited to a party where only one narrow set of tastes prevails.

It’s hard to make clear to people who didn’t live through the transition [from silent to sound films] how sickly and unpleasant many of those ‘artistic’silent pictures were — how you wanted to scrape off all that mist and sentiment.

It’s hard indeed if you (Kael) fail to cite even one film as evidence — does she mean SUNRISE or THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK (lots of mist and sentiment in each), or is her knife pointed in another direction? — but not so hard if you (Kael) don’t mind bolstering the prejudices of your lay audience: they’d probably like to scrape off “all that silent ‘poetry’” too, and producers at the time with similar biases often did it for them.

Kael finds a similar difficulty in taking KANE straight:

The mystery…is largely fake, and the Gothic-thriller atmosphere and the Rosebud gimmickry (though fun) are such obvious penny-dreadful popular theatrics that they’re not so very different from the fake mysteries that Hearst’s American Weekly used to whip up — the haunted castles and the curses fulfilled.

Within such a climate of appreciation, even her highest tributes come across as backhanded compliments or exercises in condescension, as in her reversions to nostalgia. Having established why none of us should take KANE very seriously, she grows rhapsodic: “Now the movie sums up and preserves a period, and the youthful iconoclasm is preserved in all its freshness — even the freshness of its callowness.”

But if Kael can be dreamy about the past, she also records her misgivings about film as “the nocturnal voyage into the unconscious” (Bunuel’s phrase): “Most of the dream theory of film, which takes the audience for passive dreamers, doesn’t apply to the way one responded to silent comedies-which, when they were good, kept the audience in a heightened state of consciousness.” But does a dreamer invariably relate to his own dream — much less someone else’s - passively? And are “dreams” and “a heightened state of consciousness” really antithetical?

Much of the beauty of CITIZEN KANE , and Welles’style in general, is a function of kinetic seizures, lyrical transports, and intuitive responses. To see KANE merely as the “culmination” of Thirties comedy or “a collection of blackout sketches” or a series of gibes against Hearst is to miss most of what is frightening and wonderful and awesome about it. When the camera draws back from the child surrounded by snow through a dark window frame to the mother’s face in close-up, one feels a free domain being closed in, a destiny being circumscribed, well before either the plot or one’s powers of analysis can conceptualize it. As Susan Alexander concludes her all-night monologue, and the camera soars up through the skylight over her fading words (“Come around and tell me the story of your life sometime”), the extraordinary elation of that movement is too sudden and too complex to be written off as superficial bravura: a levity that comes from staying up all night and greeting the dawn, the satisfaction of sailing over a narrative juncture, the end of a confession, a gesture of friendship, the reversal of an earlier downward movement, a sense of dramatic completion, a gay exhaustion, and more, it is as dense and immediate as a burst of great poetry. At its zenith, this marvelous art-which is Welles’and Welles’alone-can sketch the graceful curve of an entire era; in the grand ball of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, perhaps the greatest achievement in his career, a track and dissolve through the mansion’s front door, while a fleeting wisp of garment flutters past, whirls us into a magical continuum where the past, present and future of a family and community pirouette and glide past our vision-the voices and faces and histories and personal styles flowing by so quickly that we can never hope to keep up with them.

What has Kael to say about AMBERSONS? It’s “a work of feeling and imagination and of obvious effort…but Welles isn’t in it [as an actor], and it’s too bland. It feels empty, uninhabited.” It’s nice of her, anyway, to give him an A for effort.

Throughout “Raising KANE,” a great show is made of clearing up popular misconceptions about Welles. Yet within my own experience, the most popular misconception is not that Welles wrote CITIZEN KANE (although that’s popular enough), but that he “made” or “directed” THE THIRD MAN. And the worst that can be said about Kael’s comments is that they don’t even say enough about his style as a director to distinguish it from Carol Reed’s. So intent is she on documenting Welles’vanity that the films wind up seeming secondary, trails of refuse strewn in the wake of the Great Welles Myth, and many of his finest achieve ments are denied him.

Seeing KANE again recently, she reports that “most of the newspaper-office scenes looked as clumsily staged as ever” (no reasons or explanations given). With a sweep of her hand, she consigns the rich complexity of THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI and TOUCH OF EVIL to oblivion: “His later thrillers are portentous without having anything to portend, sensational in a void, entertaining thrillers, often, but mere thrillers.” (Like James Bond?) A page later, noting “the presence in KANE of so many elements and interests that are unrelated to Welles’other work,” she takes care of those elements and interests by adding, parenthetically, that “mundane activities and social content are not his forte.” I’m still puzzling over what she could mean by “mundane activities,” in KANE or elsewhere, but if interesting social content is absent from any of Welles’later movies (including the Shakespeare adaptations), I must have been seeing different films.

A case could be made, I think, that the influence of Mankiewicz and Toland on KANE carries over somewhat into Welles’s later work, for better and for worse: MR. ARKADIN, in particular, suggests this, both in the clumsiness of its KANE-derived plot and the beauty of its deep-focus photography. But in her zealous efforts to carry on her crusade against Welles’reputation as an auteur, Kael seems to find more unity in Mankiewicz’s career as a producer than in Welles’as a director. And despite her lengthy absorption in the battle of wills between Mankiewicz, Welles, and Hearst, all she can find to say about the following quotation, from one of Mankiewicz’s letters, is that it “suggests [Mankiewicz’s] admiration, despite everything, for both Hearst and Welles”.

With the fair-mindedness that I have always recognized as my outstanding trait, I said to Orson that, despite this and that, Mr. Hearst was, in many ways, a great man. He was, and is, said Orson, a horse’s ass, no more nor less, who has been wrong, without exception, on everything he’s ever touched.

Here, in a nutshell, we have a definition of contrasting sensibilities that is almost paradigmatic: Welles (almost) at the beginning of his career, Mankiewicz (almost) at the end of his own. Considering this quote, it’s hard to agree with Kael when she writes of Mankiewicz that he “wrote a big movie that is untarnished by sentimentality,” that is “unsanctimonious” and “without scenes of piety, masochism, or remorse, without ‘truths.’” KANE, on the contrary, has all of these things, and never more so than when it entertains and encourages the idea that Kane is “a great man,” and worships raw power in the process of condemning it. It is a singular irony that the aspect of KANE that Kael writes about best — Welles’s charm as an actor — is precisely the factor that makes the script’s corruptions, obeisance to wealth and power (and accompanying self-hatred), palatable. But when similar sentimental apologies for megalomania occur in ARKADIN and TOUCH OF EVIL, they carry no sense of conviction whatever. One suspects, finally, that KANE’s uniqueness in Welles’work largely rests upon the fact that it views corruption from a corrupted viewpoint (Mankiewicz’s contribution), while the others view corruption from a vantage point of innocence. By abandoning the “charismatic demagogue” and “likeable bastard” — the sort of archetypal figure that commercial Hollywood thrives on, in figures as diverse as Hud and Patton — Welles gave up most of his audience; but it could be argued, I think, that he gained a certain integrity in the process.

The overwhelming emotion conveyed by KANE in its final moments is an almost cosmic sense of waste: an empire and a life that has turned into junk, and is going up in smoke. If we compare this smoke to the smoke that rises at the end of THE TRIAL, we may get some measure of the experience, intelligence, and feeling that Mankiewicz brought to CITIZEN KANE. Yet thankful as one may be to Kael for finally giving him his due, one wishes that some of the despair and terror of KANE’s ending had found its way into her tribute. Perhaps if, as Kael claims, KANE “isn’t a work of special depth or a work of subtle beauty,” the ending may be just another joke in what she calls “almost a Gothic comedy” — the final blackout gag. But for some reason, I didn’t feel like laughing.

At the time there were few artists among his Parisian group (the JEP) to make such a leap—in fact, Barre instantly lost his support system, the critics who had defended him now accusing him of treason. One could ascribe many causes to this radical turn in his art, but the most important catalyst is probably the great interest Barre took in Yves Klein, though Klein was deemed a thorough charlatan by Barre’s circle—and note that it is Restany, Klein’s champion, who came to Barre’s defense. The position may seem utterly banal now, but rare then was the artist who could at the same time maintain that painting was still a viable medium and admire Klein’s work, which had seemed in those days yet another celebration of the death of painting. One had to be able to look beyond Klein’s histrionics and consider Yves-le-Monochrome’s anticompositional stance as being more than a mere conceptual gesture. For his early admirers both in France (Restany, the Nouveaux Realistes group) and in the US (Donald Judd, among others), Klein represented a fundamental rupture with the (necessarily illusionistic) tradition of painting. “Sure, sure,” we can hear Barre saying, “but yet he still paints.” How to highlight the fragility of painting as medium while keeping it alive would remain Barre’s challenge in all the years to come.