Citizen Kane T. Weatherby

Citizen Kane is a very interesting film from 1941. Director Orson Welles used many techniques such as lightning and angling, and used them well. It’s no wonder that Citizen Kane is voted as the best movie of all time. Welles utilization of technique and equipment is innovative for the time. For example, in the beginning it starts with the fading in and out with transitions to show the various layers of the property that is Xanadu. It in turn shows the extent that the character, Charles Kane, went to distance himself from people. One of the particular scenes where it shows Emily and Kane talking at a dinner table over an undisclosed amount of time, cutting in and out to show the general progression of time, shows how Kane had changed. By the end of this montage, Kane was reading his newspaper the Inquirer, and Emily was reading the Chronicle. I thought this was interesting, and when it pans back out they seem distant even from only across the table. Emily, reading the oppositions newspaper, shows that they had two totally different mentalities. In the end, one of the flashback had Emily doing a puzzle on the fireplace and Kane sat in a chair quite some distance away. They talked to each other by yelling across the room. This showed how distant he was to even his wife.

One of the very memorable scenes for me in particular was the one pictured above. The journal of Thatcher which is about to be read by the reporter, is placed on the table where the light is angled to come in through the window. It was as if they were trying to say they would shed some light on the mystery of Kane’s life. There were many other areas where the lighting in particular was very memorable. In the flashback of Kane’s childhood, the scene was bright, there was snow everywhere and he was playing on his sled, Rosebud, which is his memory of a simpler, happier time.

Charles Kane was many things to many different people, and they use the jigsaw puzzle as a metaphor for describing the character. In the shots that show the end of his life there are typically vast spaces of nothing within the shot. It shows how distant he has become since his youth. I could recall Susan calling Xanadu a dump, even though it was extravagant. One man’s utopia could be another’s dystopia after all.

Works Cited

Citizen Kane. Dir. Orson Welles. Perf. Jospeh Cotton, Dorothy Comingore and Agnes Moorehead. 1941. DVD.

Giannetti, Louis. Understanding Movies. Pearson, 2011. Print.