Starring Orson Welles, Joseph
Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, Dorothy Comingore, Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins,
Erskine Sanford, William Alland, George Couloris
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 (1941)
By Jim Emerson That tarnished sign on a forbidding black wire fence is the first thing we see in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, the rather formidable beginning of an opening sequence that's still as electrifying as any in the history of movies. Charles Foster Kane -- the eponymous tragic hero and central enigma of 1941's Citizen Kane -- expires moments after the movie bearing his name comes stirring to life, gasping that cryptic word Rosebud with his last breath. But Citizen Kane, now re-released on its 50th anniversary, is as thrillingly alive as it has ever been. The thrills of Welles' breathtakingly exciting debut picture are multifarious. For one thing, there's the exhilaration of watching a cocky 25-year-old genius named Orson Welles explore the possibilities of the medium for the first time, playing provocatively with the properties of film as if he'd been doing it all his life. Visually and aurally -- from Gregg Toland's celebrated deep-focus cinematography to Robert Wise's crisp, complex editing to the multi-layered impressionistic/expressionistic soundtrack -- Kane is as stunning and sophisticated as any movie ever made, and it crackles and whizzes along at a pace that can even keep the MTV generation riveted to the screen. Then there's the thrill of watching the exuberant young Mercury Players, among the finest actors ever to work in front of a movie camera, having the time of their lives as they projecting themselves into the future and into the past. Their fresh performances still bristle with spontaneity and an edge that few contemporary actors (Robert DeNiro comes to mind) can match. And, behind that NO TRESPASSING sign, there's also the thrill of the forbidden. For Citizen Kane -- in its first few images -- takes us behind that barrier, erected to keep out the public, for an intimate look at a great and powerful man who got everything he ever wanted... and then lost it. As Bernard Herrmann's ominous score rumbles portentiously on the soundtrack, the camera surmounts several layers/levels of fences and, in a series of dissolves focused on a lit window in a distant tower, moves across the dark, spooky, deserted grounds of Kane's Xanadu estate. That window remains in the same place in the frame -- upper right-hand corner -- in each successive shot, including one that turns the image upside down: a reflection in a disused boating pond. As we approach the window, a light inside (and, soon, a life) is snuffed out. Another match-dissolve takes us almost imperceptibly from outside Kane's castle to inside his room, where... it is snowing. A house sits nestled in a soft, white landscape, but the camera pulls back rapidly and we see it's one of those little liquid globes with fake flakes inside. This wintry world held tight in the palm of his hand, Charles Foster Kane loosens his grip on life. The glass bubble bursts on the floor as his disembodied lips (in close-up) whisper: "Rosebud." Like that shining window in the distance, Rosebud becomes the elusive focal point for a newsreel reporter's investigation into the life and times of Citizen Kane, an exploration which provides the plot framework for the movie. And like those shifting, sometimes inverted initial images, each person reporter Thompson (William Alland) interviews provides a different perspective, a contrasting image of the same man: Charles Foster Kane. In one of the film's most memorable images, Kane, having torn apart in anger the bedroom of his wife (who's finally worked up the strength to leave him), walks trance-like down an echoing corridor lined with mirrors, where his reflection is multiplied a hundred-fold into the distance. Citizen Kane is about those images that we all reflect and project, the sum total of which -- the impressions we make on other people -- are all we that leave behind us. And that central, unsolveable riddle of personality is at the core of what makes Citizen Kane so endlessly watchable. Charles Foster Kane -- despite the best efforts of Thompson and the people he interviews -- refuses to be reduced to any convenient formula. And how many contemporary movie characters can you say THAT about? Citizen Kane is a portrait of a public and private figure that, by design, remains tantalizingly unfinished. It's an elusive shadow-play, done in a vivid black-and-white that's far richer, more suggestive and mysterious than the neon paint-by-numbers palette of most of today's stupefyingly unimaginative Eastmancolor pictures. As Thompson puts it near the end of the movie: "Perhaps Rosebud was something he couldn't get or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything. I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle." It's the mystery -- combined, of course, with the mastery of Orson Welles and his collaborators -- that draws us back to Kane again and again. Kane is a movie about perception and projection. Critic David Thomson (no relation to the newsreel reporter) has even suggested that: "The whole of Citizen Kane might be Kane's own dreamed recollections in the last moment before his death -- his life flashing before his, and our, eyes. The fact that the film takes the form of investigations carried out by a representative of a newsreel company," Thomson writes, "could be interpreted as showing the degree to which Kane's own publicity has conditioned his attitude to himself." Indeed, the whole movie seems to take place in a kind of psychic projection room. The deathly, dreamlike hush of Citizen Kane's shadowy prologue jumps abruptly into that blaring newsreel ("News On the March"), which introduces us to the Official Version of the Life of Charles Foster Kane. But when the film runs out, flipping on the reel of the
projector, we're left in the dark -- in a dim screening room with shadowy faceless
figures, silhouetted in front of the screen, who (like us) aren't satisfied with the
portrait of Kane they've just watched. Yes, we eventually find a symbolic meaning for the riddle of
Rosebud -- even though none of the characters in the film is ever priviledged to discover
it. But, in the end, the movie reverses itself and we back out of the life and works of
Charles Foster Kane the same way we came in: drawing back behind the fence and coming to
rest on that stubborn NO TRESPASSING sign, as the remains of a man's life
turns to smoke in the distance. |
