A true original

Rating: 9/10 (9 July 2012)

RKO was the smallest of the Big Five Hollywood studios and the purveyor of mainly undistinguished genre pictures. For this reason they hired a young theatre producer called Orson Welles to make a prestige film. Welles had just shook up radio with his production of The War of the Worlds, a broadcast that was so innovative and realistic it caused widespread panic throughout the United States with some people really believing that Martians were attacking. Welles was given free reign to make the film he wanted. This was unprecedented for an untried film-maker. The film's central character resembled newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. The film was delayed several months while RKO tried to appease Hearst's lawyers. It was well received by the critics but not a popular success. It would remain the high point of Welles career and the one time he enjoyed such complete control. This led in part to the auteur theory where masterpieces of cinema were attributed to the director's genius. However, this is too simplistic as Welles had great collaborators here such as screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and cinematographer Gregg Toland. The former provided a disciplined structure for Welles to work off and the latter the deep focus photography that allowed him to manipulate cinematic space in a way that strengthened the story. The combination of deep focus and long takes allowed for scenes where characters moved around the cinematic space in ways that heightened the drama considerably.
Citizen Kane is often considered a triumph of technique but it's really the way in which the technique was used and controlled to strengthen the story that makes it so notable. It wasn't the first film to utilise deep focus or long takes but it was the first one to use them so systematically. It combined many opposites – social comment / surrealism, European art film / Hollywood entertainment, comedy / tragedy, realism / expressionism. Kane himself is presented in a variety of ways – dreamlike images of him dying, a remote public figure, a man known by wife and friends and finally a detached being. This reality is expressed by a combination of objective fact and subjective opinion. The beginning of the movie illustrates opposites of approach. We begin with a subjective dreamlike death scene and immediately are thrust into the objective 'News on the March' segment that mimics the news documentary in a similar way to how Welles mimicked the radio news in The War of the Worlds. In this part we are told the whole narrative in summary. It's a microcosm of the film as a whole. After this we then piece together the story of Kane's life via the accounts of various people who knew him, all interviewed by Thompson, a man whose face we never see because he really represents us. The use of flashbacks, multiple narrators and an ambiguous conclusion was a very innovative one for the time. The film as a whole resembles one of the jigsaws that Kane's second wife Susan works on, each piece contributed another truth but some pieces are missing. To add to the complexity of the film, different people offer contrasting judgements that make up the differing periods of his life. Welles once remarked that 'the point of the picture is not so much the solution of the problem as its presentation'.
Thompson realises that no single word can 'explain a man's life' and so it proves with 'Rosebud'. The sledge and paperweight represent the time when Kane was happiest and the love he lost but it's left essentially ambiguous and is never fully explained. Kane seeks to regain the love he lost for the rest of his life but always on his own terms, this leads to the ruin of his career and relationships. He winds up in Xanadu his very own pleasure dome with caves of ice. The final tracking shot moves slowly over the expensive rubbish that Kane has accumulated; as we pan forward we see items from further and further back in the story until we find the fateful Rosebud sledge. The 'answer' to our quest.