Cosmogony Several Layers Deep

Rating: Null/10 (23 April 2012)

I watch Kane every couple of years, each time with more films inside of me, with more references around the thing, and expect it will kind of crumble a little, seem a little more borrowed or less sharp, or basically not that big a deal. I do not hope, mind you, being an ardent Welles fan. I just think I will have outsmarted him this time around.
I fail every time. Every time I come up with even more impressive insights, discover fresh corners I had not accounted for. Every time it makes my head spin this was at all possible or allowed to happen. It really is the work of genius and just so rich in every aspect.

dramatically, for instance the scene where young Kane is about to be handed over to the bank, where tables are turned at the last moment and turns out the stern mother is really the caring parent, something that ties in with the overarching sentiment that appearances can fool you and really mean nothing. This is perfect writing right here, complex characters, Kane of course above the others, a man who can go on a noble rhetoric about the workingman even as he plots war.

visually, goes without saying really and has been extensively documented elsewhere.

the structure above all, the image pieced together from many not entirely trustworthy testimonies, as the film- and storymakers inside the film keep pushing for better drama and better 'truth'.

But all this has been celebrated a thousand times over, rightly so. The startling insight for me this go around was the staging of the opera, just two shots.
One is clamor and commotion on stage as the camera pulls back to reveal the curtain has not yet lifted, then everyone freezes into place, lights wash into the space as the curtain lifts to the sound of applause, and choreographed with the first bars of the song the camera tracks up and above, across a multitude of strings leading up to the two stagehands overseeing the show. Later into the film we get the reverse shot, the mirror. Everyone freezes into place as before, but now we see the curtain lift, lights blaring directly in front of us, but the curtain lifts and we don't see an audience. Only pitch black darkness and the song going out to it.
The astounding accomplishment is neither shot individually, even though both are perfectly crafted. It is how much of the world of the film is mapped between them (it would take a Tarkovksy to sustain more internal space between anchors).
One anchor is puppetmasters in control of this image being staged, but not who we thought, not Kane, who watches impotently as part of the audience, not anyone important, only those two ordinary workers on the level of the gods. The reverse of this? Nothingness that contracts space of itself to create something out of nothing, something that fills the void and is light and song calling out.
Between them we have a cosmogony several layers deep, each one generated by an image being staged to frame something out of nothing. It's worth puzzling over the many shots this ties into, all to do with projected light through the dark creating the world of the film.
Something to meditate upon.