“Watching it without the sound generates the impact of a glorious “optical symphony”; listening only to its sound track stimulates extremely dynamic visual imagery; studying its script (even with Welles’s numerous directorial remarks on the text’s margin) confirms that it stops short of describing in literary terms what one experiences while perceiving the film in the movie theater; and seeing it on a TV screen (the bigger the worse) is like trying to aesthetically appreciate Rembrandt’s paintings reproduced in the newspaper…It is the greatest American movie about seeing.” (Sterritt, 1991)
Both Welles and Toland had put it so much thought in visualizing the scenes that the visuals masterfully supplement the verbal narrative. Kane, despite his great material success and social status, is perennially in need of love. After all, it was as a young boy that he was separated from his parents by his foster father, who was cold and calculating and put money before human tenderness. As a result, Kane grew up a love-deprived child and his actions in adult life are attempts to recompense for this loss. But the folly of the great Charlie Kane is in believing that he can buy all the love he needs with money. His hobby of collecting antique statues from Europe is again a rich symbolic touch – for these statues, while monetarily very valuable, are just objects of stone, incapable of giving him any love. They once again highlight Kane’s misplaced belief that somehow these stone objects would give him personal fulfilment. As the final days of his life in decline clearly show, his belief was wrong. The grand final scene when the property of Xanadu would be disposed-off by officials, we see vast halls full of statues lined up. The mise-en-scene is brilliantly conceived, as the aerial shot of these antique statues reveal both the scale of Kane’s material possessions as well as the inevitable futility of such an exercise. After all, the term Xanadu is borrowed from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem Ozymandias, the Emperor of Xanadu, whose decline and fall is the mythical allegory to that of Charles Kane. One doesn’t usually associate Citizen Kane with special effects, but
“its reliance on optical compositing may be judged by the simple fact that the film was heavier in special effects than any RKO picture since King Kong. In fact, some of the famed deep focus shots had to be achieved through opticals or projection process. Strangely enough, the visual style of the film was employed-as Welles, Toland and Wise all have noted-with a view toward heightening realism. The deep focus, wide-angle shots were more akin to what the eye is accustomed to seeing in life than are the customary views made in variable focus with longer lenses.” (Turner, 1991)