# Citizen Kane (1941)

### reviewed by
Long Che Chan

    Citizen Kane
    directed by Orson Welles
    starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingore
    Not Rated (mature themes)

How do you tell the story of such a legendary film? Citizen Kane is not only a powerful film, but a revolutionary one- every single movie made today has at least some of Kane manifested in it. This evocative motion picture changed the way filmmakers made their films. It is, of course, a masterpiece of storytelling- it is nearly essential for film students to watch. Every second has become a classic and it has been lauded as the greatest motion picture ever made. Is that true? Who knows, but it certainly is the most studied and probably alongside The Birth of a Nation as the most technically and structurally important picture of all time.

Orson Welles, then 25, was given full control by RKO Radio Pictures to make any film he so desired. Welles, an exceptionally intelligent man, brought along for this project his Mercury stage actors whom he had worked with in radio and theater, and co-wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay with the seasoned Herman J. Mankiewicz. The resulting film was highly controversial- it was said to poke fun at mogul William Randolph Hearst. The film went through hellfire to get released and when it finally was, was ignored by the public and critics alike. This controversy should make Kane's being snubbed at the Academy Awards much more understandable. Oscar rarely succumbs to the pleasures of films with ingenuity.

In all this hoopla about its technique, the film's story seems to have diminished. Citizen Kane has an extremely powerful tale to tell- it is a story of greed, unhappiness, and the pursuit of love. The title character is a lonely, financially thriving man named Charles Foster Kane. As a young child, he was taken away by a rich man named Thatcher. That arrangement helped his parents in their financial woe. Charles was promised a huge inheritance, but what he wanted was a newspaper to run. Kane, while still quite young, ran the flourishing Inquirer newspaper and transformed it into a powerful empire. He dabbled into politics, and everything else he could get his hands on. He had many friends, but his inability to love and his thirst for love didn't balance out.

This disability was his downfall. The film shows how cold Kane was through the distance between characters. There is a very famous montage in the film in which Kane's first wife start out as a happy newlywed couple sitting close together at their breakfast table and then, with time, grow apart which is shown by the characters sitting further apart. At the end of the sequence, the table seems longer than when the montage started out and, instead of sitting on the same side, hand in hand, Kane is sitting at one end of the long table while his wife sits on the other end.

Kane divorced his first wife after he is seen with a mistress, which caused scandal, thereby smashing his chances of being elected as governor. His mistress, an aspiring singer, later marries him, but to her, he also cannot express love. He buys her everything under the sun, but, as she illustrates in an emotional monologue, it isn't what she wants. Kane builds an opera house for his second wife and, despite her wilted voice, pays impatient music teachers to train her. Her debut opera is unsuccessful, a flop. A memorable image during this chapter in the film is one where Kane's wife is belting her song on stage and the camera moves up to reveal two men on the balcony holding their noses, hating the music. Charles Kane is a driven man and will not be made a fool of- after scathing reviews, he continues to force his wife to sing. Later, at their house in Xanadu, a monument Kane has built for himself, Orson Welles uses the distance technique to full effect, showing the bored wife far away from her egotistical husband in a room.

Citizen Kane is not told the way most films before it were. Kane begins with the famous dying sequence and with a newsreel, putting Kane's life in a nutshell, explaining the impact he had on people. Then, the film goes into detail, drawing on diaries and interviews with people Kane knew. All this investigation of Kane's life is aiming to find the meaning of his last word- "Rosebud". However, that's just a prank to draw the audience in, the film is not about Rosebud so much as it is about the man who uttered the word. When Mr. Berstein, one of the interviewees, is asked about the word, he gives one of the best speeches ever committed to film-

"A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since, that I haven't thought of that girl."

Citizen Kane is a maze of an enigma's life. Those closest to him talk about him, his ambition, and his ruin. Gregg Toland's revolutionary deep-focus cinematography is extremely compelling. In the first sequence, the dying sequence, Kane murmurs "Rosebud" on his deathbed and drops a glass, ball paperweight. It shatters on the floor and we see, through the broken pieces of glass, a nurse come into the room. The film is a collection of sharp and distorted images- one of my favorite uses of light in the movie is when the reporter investigating "Rosebud" visits the library of Kane's guardian Thatcher and is sent to a room to read Thatcher's diary. A ray of brilliant light falls into the darkness of the room. Toland shot several scenes from the floor looking up which caused quite a stir. In older films, you almost never see the ceilings of buildings because that was where the lights and microphones were. Here, you see ceilings made of cloth which look real, but behind them Toland and Welles put the microphones. Citizen Kane is probably the greatest work of photography ever seen on screen, most definitely the best use of the camera in a black-and-white film.

There are several images in the film that stick in one's mind forever. There is a scene where the old and defeated Kane walks past many mirrors, spawning infinite reflections. There is, of course, the scene where the sleigh with the word Rosebud on it is thrown in the furnace with all the rest of Kane's other stuff that is being burned after his death. The flames curl around the sleigh, the word Rosebud darkening and vanishing. The images of Kane's monumental home Xanadu and Kane at a political rally are astonishing.

Citizen Kane is not filled with a lot of emotion and maybe that's why some people don't respond to it. It is a massive achievement, the first and last famous directorial achievement of an infinitely talented man, Orson Welles. Can you believe people actually wanted to colorize this film? Watching it in a colored version would be as blasphemous as watching the deliberately black-and-white Schindler's List in color. It would be a sin, a crying shame just as it is to watch the power and enigmatic quality of Casablanca leeched out in badly colorized versions. What Citizen Kane has brought to the art of film is great- a different kind of narrative structure for films. Kane's life was not a straight-forward story but a winding, curving morality tale. The earlier use of linear storytelling in films would have done the story little justice. Citizen Kane is one of those lasting achievements, one of those ageless films, and one of the most gratifying film experiences ever.

    By Andrew Chan

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