Directed by Orson Welles
Written by Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz
Starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloane
USA, 1941
Not Rated
LIFE STORY
I remember sitting down in front of the TV in the summer of 1997 and watching the American Film Institute’s CBS program which unveiled their list of the 100 greatest American movies of all-time. Until it was revealed that the 1941 motion picture Citizen Kane was placed at number one, I hadn’t even known that such a film existed. Since then, I’ve seen this masterpiece about five or six times, mostly on video or cable television, and once at a film series that took place at a rundown movie palace of the past, for whose restoration money was being raised. There was something special about experiencing this powerful film in the sweltering night heat of the summer, with the downtown tunes of traffic and chatting audible, and with an enthusiastic crowd of movie lovers who couldn’t stop clapping when the film ended. I just saw the film again tonight, and I have never been so entranced by it.
There has been so much written about Citizen Kane since its scandalous release sixty years ago. Anyone halfway serious about movies knows the story behind its making: Orson Welles, the twentysomething genius of radio and theatre, was given complete control over his RKO debut, and made a film explicitly based on the life of mogul William Randolph Hearst. He and another genius, cinematographer Gregg Toland, popularized deep focus cinematography, which allowed the background in a shot to appear as clearly as the foreground. There was a big controversy when Hearst did everything he could to stop the film from being shown. The tumult is said to have ruined Welles’ career; he would go on to make The Magnificent Ambersons, only to have it taken out of his hands and sliced and diced, and he would make a number of Shakespeare adaptations, another canonical film called Touch of Evil, and the brilliant interpretation of Franz Kafka’s ultra-paranoid The Trial, but would never reclaim his throne as the greatest and most daring auteur in Hollywood. Many praised Citizen Kane as a remarkable film at the time of its release, but it lost to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley for the Best Picture Academy Award. Today, people call it the greatest film of all-time, and it has topped the prestigious Sight and Sound poll, which is compiled every decade, since 1962. This is not just any movie; this is the movie, and maybe that’s why everybody talks about its technique rather than how moving and exquisite it really is. It’s so famous it’s almost untouchable.
How can I discuss this film in a fresh, interesting way when it already has such an enormous reputation? It is to movies what Sgt. Pepper is to the rock album; it is indulgent, it is experimental, it is influential, and it is the work that definitively represents its art form. Yes, it is, objectively, the greatest motion picture of all-time. What makes it the religious experience it is for many cinephiles is that it is often one of the greatest films subjectively, as well. Citizen Kane itself is about personal perspective, not about consensus. Starting from the end, it begins with the legendary, and still haunting, deathbed scene in which newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane (Welles) murmurs his final word, Rosebud. Later, newsreel reporters ask the question, “What does this word mean and can it sum up the life of this mysterious man?”
It turns out that Rosebud is a sled little Charlie Kane was riding on the winter’s day he was sent off by his impoverished parents to live with Walter Thatcher (George Coulouris), a rich man who promised to give Kane a better life. The film, which is gorgeously, stylistically extravagant, gets a little carried away with popular psychology when, at one point, it concludes that Kane was simply looking for acceptance and love throughout his troubled life, and the very foundation of the plot is a somewhat dated Freudian movie gimmick. The final thought, however, is that an entire life’s meaning cannot fit into one little word, or one little movie, and that one man’s life means different things to different people. It is not anything that happens in the film, but the bold way everything is sequenced and presented, that is one of the great cinematic statements about life and mortality. The film, despite its director’s roots in radio and theatre, is never once stagy; in fact, this is the one movie I would pick as the ideal synonym for the word “cinematic.” The film is a bunch of compelling fragments all in a jumble; the editing is chaotic but beautifully cohesive. Everything is carefully and perfectly orchestrated: the film starts with the death of Kane; crams the important facts on the man into a fake, objective obituary newsreel; then goes on a subjective journey through his life seen through the eyes of those who knew him during his rise and demise; and finally ends up with the meaning of life: there are many meanings, or no meaning at all.
Orson Welles’ passion for moviemaking is rampant in every frame of Citizen Kane, a film which, when compared with other works from the early 1940’s, stands out as the popular avant-garde film of its time. Welles does just about everything right, and he never disregards the importance of acting. He delivers a uniformly compelling and dynamic performance here, but the interesting thing about Citizen Kane is that, even after the key events in Kane’s life have been acted out for us convincingly, we still don’t feel connected to the character. He is an enigmatic, complicated wreck of a person, filmed by Gregg Toland in low angle shots so that he becomes a seductive, towering figure. There is very little subtlety to be found in the film. Welles never shows us the quiet moments that surely took place in his life, instead opting for a showcase of the significant, melodramatic periods of his existence.
It is when the film confronts love, the ultimate factor in most great melodramas, that it pierces the heart in the plainest way. There is a sadly comic montage that concisely deals with Kane’s relationship with his first wife. It boils the marriage down to three stages- adoration, indifference, and aggravation- and we feel the distance between the two characters growing wider and wider as the breakfast table at which each segment takes place grows longer and longer. Welles uses similar visual tricks when trying to communicate the crumbling of Kane’s more hopeful second marriage to an aspiring singer (Dorothy Comingore), for whom he builds an opera house. When her career falls flat due to her thin voice and scathing reviews, Kane is humiliated, and he discards her like a failed project. He builds himself a castle called Xanadu and she amuses herself with vast, impossible puzzles, and they lose themselves in the cold, empty spaces of the narcissistic shrine. The most affecting of Kane’s traits, oddly enough, is his inability to feel or love, and his desperation for perfect love. He is torn between his ambition and spite, and his desire to be the good, honest little boy that his mother would have been proud of.
What Citizen Kane expresses is the limitations of storytelling, and it never firmly answers the many questions it asks about its elusive subject, because the answers have been locked up in the soul of a dead man. All Kane really leaves behind is a bunch of crumpled memories and piles of billion-dollar junk he accumulated through the years, which tell us nothing new about his personality other than he was a materialistic guy. All the antiques and items are thrown into the furnace, along with the “Rosebud” sled from his childhood. Citizen Kane also, to this day, communicates to us the love of this limited art of storytelling, and the passion for the motion picture and its possibilities. Welles’ arrogant-school-boy experimentation and Toland’s unforgettable cinematic mirages give the film a timeless vigor. The film mocks the very idea of objectivity, teasingly telling us that we will never know Kane the way he knew himself, or the way his friends knew him, or the way God knows him. Objectively, the film has made a major, permanent dent on the still relatively short lifetime of cinema, but the most important thing to me is that, subjectively, it thrills me, it moves me, it has made its permanent dent on my heart, and it’s a damn good film.
By Andrew Chan [APRIL 13, 2001]