"It isn't enough to tell us what a man did. You've got to tell us who he was." – Mr. RawlstonWhen Mr. Rawlston (Philip Van Zant) tells reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) to investigate "rosebud"—the perplexing last words of the late newspaper mogul and eccentric Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles)—he's not interested in a plot of the man's life. He wants something deeper than the details: the man's essence.
After a puzzling prologue involving a shattered snow globe, Citizen Kane (1941) opens with fake newsreel footage that chronicles Kane's public life. We learn a great deal about the events surrounding Kane—his humble beginnings, his rise to prominence in the newspaper world, his botched political campaign, and his retirement to the palace Xanadu—but, as Rawlston points out, "all we saw on that screen was a big American! But how is he different from Ford, or Hearst for that matter, or John Doe?"
Citizen Kane earns its place at the top of the cinematic canon because of how it answers Rawlston's challenge. Using narrative techniques unique to the medium, such as montage and repetition, the film proper shows us what the preliminary newsreel footage could not: the motives behind Kane's conquests and, more importantly, the man behind those motives.
Kane's life could have been told in a book or on the stage, with few details cut or altered, but we would lose the nuances that make Kane the flawed yet sympathetic being he is. Certain revelatory sequences could not have been done outside of film. Take, for example, the montage in which we witness the full arc of Kane's first marriage in under two minutes. To feature two characters who change outfits and outlooks roughly every twenty seconds on the stage would require one of the quickest crews in the world—and even if they were to pull off costume and prop changes in mere seconds, each second would interrupt the flow the sequence. This is not an issue with film—hours, weeks, even centuries can pass between the cut from one frame to the next. We can tell that time is passing, but we nonetheless witness the deterioration between Kane his first wife (Ruth Warrick) as a complete, cohesive, and convincing unit. As the cordiality drops and the silence increases, we can see how Kane changes from the eager populist visionary to the curmudgeonly control freak who drops the snow globe in the prologue, just in his shifting reactions to his wife's pleas.
Although the film opens with Kane's death, the life we see through Thompson's quest, is, for the most part, linear. But the film manipulates time in key places, resulting not in disorientation, but revelation. We watch the opening performance of Kane's opera house twice—once when Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotton) tells us about his falling out with Kane over his review of the performance, and again when Kane's second wife, Susan (Agnes Moorehead), describes her struggles with opera and Kane's attempts to keep her in his control. Alone, these sequences provide some spectacle, elucidate on some details, and even show us more about Kane's relationship with his wife, but contrasted, they illustrate (without words) Kane's relationship with the world.In the sequence's first occurrence, the curtain opens and we ascend slowly to the rafters, where two nameless stagehands mime their distaste for Susan's singing. Far removed from the spectacle that Kane has created for the audience, behind a backdrop of behind-the-scenes ropes and pullies, these would-be critics see the performance for what it really is: a crude imitation of art. Yet, when revisit the sequence a second time, we go beyond the stage, into the audience, where we see familiar faces, such as Leland and Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane) struggling to focus on the lackluster performance. We lose sympathy for the naysayers, however, when we see Kane's reaction—a face so stoic and ominously lit that we completely deny the farce that he has produced. We are no longer in the world of the commoners and the critics; we are in Kane's world, and we must abide by Kane's laws and tastes. We see now, in light of our previous impressions of the performance, the magnitude of Kane's power. His very presence has transformed farce to fantasy. It is this drive to create alternative worlds of fantasy, so convincing to his detractors, that drives Kane into self-exile.
Analysis of Citizen Kane spans many volumes, and I hope to return to this cinematic giant in another season. For now though, I hope I've begun to demonstrate the unique power of cinema when it's in the proper hands hands (Welles went on to direct several other highly respected films, but none would top Kane). The ability to change our whole perceptions of a person, a people, or the entire world, by merely stitching together images and speaking few (if any) words is not something to be taken lightly. Cinema is not "moving pictures" that give us information; rather it is pictures that move us into new modes of persuasion, where time and space no longer abide to convention and things we could never have before accepted now ring true. This is why, in spite of his adulterous, condescending , and overbearing nature, Kane still has our sympathies in the end.
