A cult film that has become a myth

Rating: 10/10 (9 March 2008)

The natural question ,we have to wonder about when watching this film, in its new splendor after restoration, is whether Orson Welles did not try to make a movie about himself. He sure did. I would even say it is a posthumous autobiography in prospective expectation. It is an American film about America and the Americans. The grandiose grandeur of those who are dreaming America into being and the petty narrow-mindedness of those who are only defending their own interests. Which tribe is most important? No one can know. The dreamers get isolated and lonely, at times in the golden heart of wealth and money. The self-centered ones just cut the cake and are very careful to give a very thin slice to others and an enormous slice to themselves. Then they all die sooner or later and only the dreamers survive. The others disappear in the darkness of hell, the underworld of forgotten anti-history. But this film reveals, and at the time it was probably scandalous, the power of the press as for building public opinion and the absurdity of the Americans as for forbidding politicians to have a normal private life, I mean the right to have a private life of their own and only their own. The tragic dimension of this character is that he is trapped by the very first, the power of the press he had used tremendously and had even boosted up in incredible proportions, with his very private life. Then the rest is only vanity and vain pretence: he tried to prove what he did not have to prove and he used other people to do so, particularly his second wife, which led to the end of the dream that had turned into a nightmare with a brain stroke and death. One can only prove what is really real and not what is virtually eventually maybe possible. Then of course we have to admire the technique of this film and the marvelous black and white finish and gloss. We also have to point out the film is renewing the genre of the biography of a great man by creating some mystery around one word, "rosebud", which probably has no value at all and is there to make us look at the pictures and images with a more attentive eye, as if we were supposed to be private eyed sleuths. Some say this film is a masterpiece and they must be nearly right. They would be totally right if they said it is one of the few masterpieces of the war years, the years that needed some boosting of the Americans and America. Orson Welles did it with a big tongue in his vast cheek, but probably had more positive effect than all the propaganda films that were filmed by second grade "directors", if they can be at times called directors at all.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines