Charles Foster Kane's dying words announcing the birth of Modern cinema ...

Rating: 10/10 (16 July 2011)

In a vast and gloomy property, you're welcomed by a sign as cold as the cloudy night sky, 'NO TRESPASSING' dominated by a big "K" atop the door gate. The atmosphere is like getting ready to mourn the life that is gasping its last breaths, and then in one of the many rooms that populate the manor, a mouth covered by a big brushy mustache whispers "Rosebud" in a solemn echo. A life has gone, and a big snow globe falls to the ground and shatters in thousands of pieces. A man is dead, a masterpiece is born. "Rosebud."
How can you define a life, a man or anything that carries so much contradictory and complex interpretations, in one word? The attempt to understand a figure as larger-than-life as Charles Foster Kane, the press magnate, through his dying word is not only the mystery that "Citizen Kane" tries to solve, in a Utopian effort, but also the greatest cinematic secret ever created. I know this superlative has been overused ad nausea to describe Orson Welles' masterpiece to a point the movie that currently thrones over the American Film Institute's Top 100 became the epitome of cinematic greatness, but this is not without reasons.
What strikes the most when you watch "Citizen Kane" is the way the movie exudes a modernity that gets more palpable after each viewing. The film tries to understand the man that embodies the American Dream in its most appealing and appalling aspects. A man who, as a child, was torn away from his family to be precociously raised in manhood, until becoming the ruler of one of the most influent newspapers in America, as an idealist and social oriented figure first, before being alienated by his own egomania. Never has a character study, literally, challenged our intelligence in such a thrilling way. If the movie is not the first one to use non-linear narrative, it sure is the one that transcended the entertaining value of flashbacks.
This is the first element that is remembered when we evoke "Citizen Kane", the way the journalist, interestingly seen in shadows like making one with the audience, interviews some protagonists of Kane's life : the surrogate father, Mr. Thatcher, his banker, Kane's best friend, his ex-second wife and his butler, each one of them giving a particular insight on Kane's personality, sometimes idealistic, a bully, a mix of contradictions that maintains the enigma more than it solves it. The editing that swings between crucial parts of Kane's life using so many artistic cuts and masterful ellipses is the key element on "Citizen Kane"' newness, but not the part of the technical achievement.
The modernity on which relies the general appreciation of "Citizen Kane" is so omnipresent that if I didn't want to take the movie's greatness for granted, I would say that Orson Welles tried every new trick he could, turning the film into some kind of arty experimentation. But this is a critic I used with another milestone film, Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" where I thought the absence of a story distracted from the directorial accomplishment. For "Citizen Kane", it works, the uses of deep focus is never gratuitous, like in this memorable shot where Mary Kane signs the papers while you can see, young Charlie Kane sledding in the snow, foreshadowing, the end of his innocent days. The delightfully elliptic editing showing the downfall of Kane's marriage, as he and his wife get more and more distant, the use of shadows, close-ups, and this never-ending feeling of irony, like this moment where the camera dramatically rises over the opera's curtain to show two workmen express their appreciation of Susan's singing talent, the extraordinary make-up transcended by the acting talent of Orson Welles, and even Joseph Cotton to play other characters, the innovation technique in "Citizen Kane" could be a subject for a long thesis. Let's just say that it paved the way for modern cinema like "The Birth of a Nation" did during the silent era.
Now, is this the only reason that can explain why "the movie is so great, is such a big deal"? I think the story contributed to more than 50%. "Citizen Kane" is about understanding a man whose ambition exceeded the limits of his functions. He didn't want to inform, but to be loved, to rule America with his own visions, to be the one who'll say to people what and how to think, prophesying the current media totalitarian monopoly even in democracies. And this is only one element of a vast psychological jigsaw puzzle whose central piece is still 'Rosebud'. There's no particular strategy when you solve a jigsaw puzzle, but the journalist follows the most usual one, assembling the common elements, and then joining them together.
Why such a need for love? Maybe the loss of his mother is the Oedipian driver that inspired him to get more in touch in people? Maybe his failure in politics transferred his blind ambition on Susan, the second wife? Or maybe money and power, corrupt the purest souls, and the more powerful, and richer you get, the more detestable becomes the idea of being criticized. In the last appearance of Charles Foster Kane with many reflect mirrors the multidimensionality of a man who still intrigues and fascinates now. And in one of the all-time greatest performances, Welles embodies Kane as the precocious genius who's to cinema what Kane tried to be for America.
The movie wasn't successful, but time did it justice, "Citizen Kane"s is now part of American Culture like Mark Twain or Jazz music, and one of the most iconic films ever with these scenes forever graved in our memories, "Rosebud", the 'New on the March' reel, the dance scene, Xanadou, "I'm Charles Foster Kane!", and of course that immortal ending that gives the clue about the one true thing that was "Rosebud", as the most valuable and irreplaceable part of any man's life ..