Summary:
The rich, powerful media tycoon Charles Foster Kane meets a lonely demise in the vast empty rooms of his palatial home, Xanadu. A reporter sets out to uncover the meaning of his final words, interviewing people who knew him well, including his second wife and his closest business associates. Through their eyes we see episodes in Kane’s life as he is rescued from childhood poverty through a chance bequest and then rises to global notoriety as his business empire grows. We see him nurture the Enquirer, a failing newspaper, building it into a crusading voice for the people. His campaign for high political office founders when a private scandal is made public. Both of his marriages end tragically and he gradually alienates even his closest friends. The arc of Kane’s life provides a panorama of America, but there remains the mystery of his dying worlds. What was it that mattered most to the man who had everything and lost it all?
Analysis:
Few films have enjoyed, or been encumbered with, a reputation quite as high as that of Citizen Kane. In 1952 the British film periodical Sight and Sound asked leading film critics from around the world to choose their ten best films. Citizen Kane didn’t feature in that first ‘top ten’ list but when the survey was repeated ten years later in 1962 it appeared at number one. It continued to top the poll at each ten-year interval since then. In 1992 Sight and Sound introduced a second poll based on the views of an international panel of film directors and again Citizen Kane was placed first before dropping to second in 2012.1 Similarly, the American Film Institute’s ‘Top 100 Movies of All Time’ in 2007 confirmed the status of Citizen Kane by placing it at number one.2 Such consistent acclaim also creates its own hazards in that the film has almost become beyond criticism. Its elevated position can be daunting to any student approaching the film for the first time; can any film avoid arousing feelings of disappointment when it trails such unrivalled levels of expectation behind it.
A further obstacle to examining the film dispassionately has been the problem of disentangling Citizen Kane from the wider legend of its principle creator, Orson Welles. The opening of David Thomson’s biography of Welles conveys something of the mythology when he writes: ‘He had moved people, men and women, with anecdotes, laughter, heady company, genius, beauty, the brightest heaven of invention. He had been loved, admired, revered’ (Thomson 1997: 3). Another biographer, John Russell Taylor, alerts us to Welles’ own tendencies towards self-mythologising, noting that ‘his favourite image for the artist in general and himself in particular was that of a stage magician, an illusionist’ (Taylor 1999: vi). The legend tells us how the ‘boy genius’ bluffed his way into a job as an actor at Dublin’s prestigious Gate Theatre when he was just 16, and how the 23-year old Welles had convinced America that Martians were landing with his infamous radio production of War of the Worlds. Citizen Kane remains a lynchpin of the myth, the masterwork of a 26-year-old first-time director, destined to be the greatest film ever made. The myth also encompasses Welles’ later decline into obesity and chat-show celebrity, a development seemingly paralleled by the ‘rise and fall’ plot of Citizen Kane. This part of the legend also includes the erroneous assumption that he was never to achieve the heights of Citizen Kane again; an idea belied by the vitality and artistry of subsequent films such as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Touch of Evil (1958).
One straightforward way to approach Citizen Kane is by way of the auteur theory, seeing the film as the first cinematic expression of Welles’ characteristic themes and stylistic traits. Regarding the former, Welles has often been seen as a director fascinated by the figure of the Shakespearian hero. Obvious evidence is provided for this in the form of his three film adaptations of Shakespeare – Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952) and Chimes at Midnight (1966) – as well as by the characters he portrays in Mr Arkadin (1955) and Touch of Evil. The narrative arc of these films presents the rise and fall of charismatic, romantic but flawed figures, brought down through their own weaknesses and by fatal overreaching. This is certainly part of the fascination of Citizen Kane as we follow Charles Foster Kane from the dynamism and high-minded principles of his youth, when he turns the failing newspaper the Inquirer into a populist, campaigning ‘voice of the people’, to his final isolation and despair, imprisoned in the fantasy palace he has created at Xanadu, lonely and embittered. A much celebrated sequence which conveys this with characteristic cinematic bravura shows Kane and his first wife in a series of breakfast table encounters over the course of their marriage. A montage of shot-reverse shot combinations depicts the gradual change from intimacy to coldness as Kane’s priorities shift to his political career. The final sections of the film, with the elderly Kane lumbering round the vast, empty interiors of Xanadu, contrast strikingly with the exuberance of early scenes at the Inquirer where an ever-smiling Kane fires up his team of young reporters with energy and idealism.
Auteurist examinations of the film have thrown up a number of other interpretations of Welles’ intentions. For James Naremore, Citizen Kane is a fundamentally political film, offering a critique of the corruption endemic in American capitalism (Naremore 2005: 341–58). This is most apparent in the close correlation between Kane’s story and that of the American media magnate William Randolph Hearst who is generally assumed to have provided the real-life model for Kane. In contrast, Laura Mulvey has read the film as both a political allegory (in which Kane’s final desperate loneliness is a metaphor for America’s own isolationist stance to the war in Europe) and a text that invites psychoanalytical interpretation; the latter leading her to a meticulous reading of the film’s complex rendering of the inner life of its central character, as well as providing a meditation on the power of memory. Mulvey neatly summarises the rich possibilities which the film offers to those attempting auteurist textual evaluations when she argues that ‘its elusiveness is one of the qualities that makes it infinitely re-viewable, re-debatable’ (Mulvey 1992: 9).
Even attempting an auteur reading of the film is not without its complications. The original publication in 1971 of The Citizen Kane Book with its extended introductory essay, ‘Raising Kane’, by Pauline Kael is indicative of this (Kael et al., 1974: 1–71). One of Kael’s central intentions was to highlight the contribution made by the film’s co-writer, Herman J. Mankiewicz, even to the extent of implying that much of the credit for the film’s startling visual panache and thematic content was derived from ideas developed by Mankiewicz at the scripting stage. Welles’ later apparent decline might, therefore, be at least partially attributed to the fact that Welles never worked again with the unjustly overlooked Mankiewicz. As David Thomson points out, Kael’s argument was based on insecure, highly selective research (Thomson 1997: 396–8) and subsequent film historians have confirmed Welles’ significant role in developing the screenplay and extending its conception in the actual filming. Kael herself subsequently publicly conceded the weaknesses of her own argument.
Another approach to the film has been to focus on it purely as a cinematic text. This has led to a good deal of work which considers the various technical innovations and manipulations of cinematic form which distinguish Citizen Kane. In the most reductive instances the film has almost been seen as a training manual for would-be directors, providing a catalogue of the differing effects of tone and atmosphere which cinema can achieve. In Richard Barsam’s Looking at Movies it is the use of sound which comes under scrutiny, particularly in the party sequence at the offices of the Inquirer (Barsam 2007: 306–11). For Robert Kolker, it is the highly distinctive deployment of deep-focus photography in the arrangement of shot compositions which calls for close examination (Kolker 2006: 70–4). Bordwell and Thompson’s now classic Film Art: An Introduction instead turns its attention to the narrative construction of Citizen Kane, systematically breaking this down into ‘segments’ to illustrate the complexities of its construction and the sophisticated handling of time transitions (Bordwell and Thompson 2004: 91–102).
It is certainly understandable that the film has been read as a technical tour de force. From the use of ceilinged sets and fly-away scenery, through the overlapping dialogue (which Welles had previously used as a director and actor with his Mercury Players theatre company), to the barrage of acute camera angles, swooping crane shots and startling lighting effects, the film offers a shot-by-shot repertoire of dazzling cinematic devices. This may account also for the often repeated claim that the film’s principle weakness lies in the emotional coldness which arises as a consequence of Welles’ fascination with surface effects. In contrast, it is precisely these qualities which account for the film’s continuing fascination according to Peter Wollen. For Wollen, all other interpretations are ultimately flawed and it is only for ‘its virtuosity, its variety of formal devices and technical innovations and inventions’ that it can be considered a film landmark. Wollen sees it almost as a work of cinematic abstraction, whose importance lies in its ‘elaboration of a formal poetic … a text which is a play with meaning rather than a vehicle for it’ (Wollen 1998: 29). Wollen is dismissive of evaluations which seek to place Citizen Kane in any wider social or cultural context. In retrospect, his essay is symptomatic of dominant theoretical trends in film studies during the 1970s and few would be likely to support his position today. It seems eminently sensible to suggest that the film might be seen as a product of the Hollywood studio system in the classical period. Even the technical qualities which Wollen celebrates are in part a consequence of the resources which RKO put at Welles’ disposal. Welles acknowledged this by giving his cinematographer, Gregg Toland, equal billing with himself on the film’s end credits.
Other film historians, including Kael, have chosen to examine Welles’ use of William Randolph Hearst as a source for the film’s content, or considered the attempts made by Hearst to suppress the film and have Welles ostracised by Hollywood. Such approaches acknowledge the complex relationship between Welles and the studio system which both furnished him with the opportunity to create Citizen Kane and then set about making sure that he would never be given such a free hand again.
What this short appraisal has hopefully made abundantly clear is the extraordinary breadth of theoretical approaches which have been applied to Citizen Kane. In addition to those already listed, there is barely space to acknowledge Andre Bazin’s immensely influential analysis of the film which held it up as an example of ‘total cinema’, its use of deep focus and sequence construction combining to produce what Bazin saw as a form of heightened realism.3 Perhaps what all of these viewpoints indicate is that the real reason for the continuing fascination of Citizen Kane is that, rather like the Charles Foster Kane himself, the film is all things to all people; its riches lie its ambiguities and contradictions.
Robert Shail
Notes
1. See Sight and Sound, Vol. 22, No. 9 (September 2012) for full details of all the polls published to date.
2. See www.afi.com for the full list.
3. See Andre Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View, New York, Harper and Row, 1979.
Cast and Crew:
[Country: USA. Production Company: RKO Radio Productions. Director: Orson Welles. Screenwriters: Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles. Cinematographer: Gregg Toland. Music: Bernard Herrmann. Editor: Robert Wise. Cast: Orson Welles (Charles Foster Kane), Joseph Cotton (Jedediah Leland), Everett Sloane (Bernstein), Dorothy Comingore (Susan Alexander Kane), Ray Collins (James W. Gettys), Agnes Moorehead (Mary Kane), Ruth Warrick (Emily Norton Kane), George Coulouris (Walter Parks Thatcher), Paul Stewart (Raymond).]
Further Reading:
James Barsam, Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film, New York, W.W. Norton, 2007.
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, New York, McGraw-Hill, 2004.
Pauline Kael, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, The Citizen Kane Book, St Albans, Paladin, 1974.
Robert Kolker, Film, Form, and Culture, New York, McGraw-Hill, 2006.
Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane, London, BFI, 1992.
James Naremore, ‘The Magician and the Mass Media’ in Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky (eds) Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, New York, W.W. Norton, 2005, pp. 340–60.
John Russell Taylor, Orson Welles, London, Pavilion, 1999.
David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, London, Abacus, 1997.
Peter Wollen, ‘Introduction to Citizen Kane’ in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds) The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1998. Originally published in Film Reader, No. 1, 1975, pp. 9–15.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.