United States, 1941
Directed by Orson Welles
With Orson Welles (Charles Foster Kane), Everett Sloane (Bernstein), Joseph Cotten (Jedediah Leland), Dorothy Comingore (Susan Alexander Kane), Ruth Warrick (Emily Monroe Norton Kane), Agnes Moorehead (Mary Kane), George Coulouris (Walter Parks Thatcher), William Alland (Jerry Thompson)
These shards of glasses reflecting a nurse stepping too late in the bedroom: an astonishing idea of shot composition, the striking expression of life giving way to death and disillusion to emptiness, but also the statement of a cinematic vision, the agenda of the work to come: the film as an elaborate composition of broken lines and surfaces where what can be perceived would remain warped, blurred, partial.
This is a biopic which ultimately casts itself as a failure – at least in part. As journalist Jerry Thompson claims at the very end of his investigation, and of the film, a single word cannot sum up an entire life and there is nothing actually that can stand out as enough to grasp what the life of an individual was. Still, ironically, the camera proceeds to survey the amazing heaps of goods Charles Foster Kane has stored in his maddeningly and absurdly sprawling property of Xanadu, a long, impressive crane shot, and focuses on a wooden object a man is going to throw in a bonfire. The audience, in the nick of time, would now gather what “Rosebud” was referencing to. However, that may not be enough to grasp the complex emotions that overwhelmed Kane on his deathbed. Above all, the very fact the sled has escaped the attention of the reporters and Xanadu’s servants only emphasized, with wit, how futile the effort to unravel the mystery surrounding Kane were. The search for truth is not just thankless and tortuous, as Jerry Thompson found out and the film eagerly reported, it remains deeply unsatisfactory.
That is ironic – but this is a debut feature that basks in irony, wit, parody, and comedy – as Jerry Thompson’s assignment springs from the real dissatisfaction of his boss after they watch the newsreel they produced on the death of the media tycoon. The reel looks to him out of touch, barely delving into the complexity and the mystery of the celebrity. The editor, obsessed by this bizarre and intriguing last word Kane uttered, readily slams the work set to be dispatched as usual to movie theaters, the very reels in fact that the “Citizen Kane”’s audience have just watched as the narrative of Kane’s death throes has been boldly cut into that newsreel, a standard work of journalism so painstakingly imitated hijacking the film and catching off their guard the spectators. This imitation was actually even more ponderous and declamatory than the real stuff, trying to awe the audience even stronger and presenting the news in an even more lurid light: this “March of the World” may be failing to reach any truth as it stands as a send-up of this kind of journalistic work. From the start, it is clear that journalism should not be taken too seriously as a source of truth and precision, and doubt is cast on the mere possibility to get them.
Still, an impulse has been given to the narrative: an investigation it would be, enabling to portray the titular character through flashbacks brought upon by Jerry Thompson’s interviews with people who knew Kane well, his second wife, Susan Alexander Kane, the loyal partner who has been the manager of his papers, Berstein, and the old pal who fell out with him badly after helping him so much, Jedediah Leland.
Jerry Thompson would also read part of the private and secret memoirs of the businessman who was the guardian of the young Kane, Walter Parks Thatcher, after a down-to-earth if heartless transaction with Kane’s mother, Mary Kane. A stern widow who remarried and settled on a rural property that turned out to have a gold mine on its premises, she made sure through a special contract that her son would get properly educated and wealthy in exchange for granting Walter Parks Thatcher’s group the exploitation of the mine. Here, the irony is as blinding as the snow covering the area the day the contract is signed, although of the bitterest kind: a kid’s carefree games in an untainted and magical environment is the poignant background, clearly visible thanks to an open window and a striking depth of field, to a blunt negotiation that would cause the kid, for the sake of his future, to get evicted from the maternal home and the magic of childhood.
In his early 20s, Kane would prove a headache and a disappointment to his guardian, always dismissed from colleges and never interested in his fortune and in business – till he decides to become the editor of an old and staid, and declining, New York newspaper – that is, to enter the business the film has suggested may be so illusory and unsatisfactory. Overnight, with the help of Bernstein and Leland, he turns the middling and old-fashioned daily into an amazing success setting the tongues wagging and breaking records of sales. The method is simple: to pick and choose the news so only the most lurid and shocking can prevail, to highlight them with more or less genuine revelations, and if needed, invented stuff. Yet, Kane is not entirely amoral: he does have strong, respectable opinions and sincere concerns: an eloquent and forceful editor fitting the passionate climate of the Reform era. It is just that the end justifies the means, even more when he got the idea of entering politics and getting elected.
He would dramatically fail this time, and this is linked to a wider failure hidden behind his roller-coaster progress to greater wealth, climaxing with the title of being the richest American, rich enough to afford the gigantically costly and sumptuous Xanadu. The tragedy is that his romantic flights of fancy, stirring him so brashly and making him so awkwardly ebullient, lead inevitably to disasters. Twice he gets besotted, twice he marries, twice wear and tear appear, twice separation comes. The first victim was Emily Monroe Norton Kane and the next one Susan Alexander Kane; when he started cheated on Emily Monroe Norton Kane with Susan Alexander Kane the first marriage was already breaking apart and he was in the midst of a tough electoral campaign; his rival found it easy to ruin his candidacy with a sexual scandal that simply hastened a divorce in the works; but standing by his new love would prove as challenging as the previous marriage.
The growing dissatisfaction and disillusionment of Susan Alexander Kane, who was promised to get a bright career of opera singer despite a conspicuous lack of skills, takes place inside the cavernous and oversized rooms of Xanadu, the bored wife vainly trying to spend time playing with jigsaw puzzles, still attractive and healthy but reduced to sit in a corner of the vast space while her overweight, stiff, bald husband plods along, increasingly cut off the reality, ensconced in the stately, luxurious, daunting nest he has built. That may arguably be the biggest and most inevitable failure of Charles Foster Kane: to be caught up by age and time, to cope with a poorer health and a more solitary life, to be exhausted and drained, to be a world away from the dashing, daring, delightful, deft young fellow he used to be, the man building an empire and conquering the world but instead drifting into decline and death. “The March of Time” is also about the unforgiving and inescapable loss of energy and life and Kane is not spared by the cruelty inflicted by the flight of time. Xanadu quickly loses the magnificence and easygoing charm it could have meant to become a tomb – death is the only truth to be found and to be unequivocal.
If a narrative arc of sorts can be drawn, the film still emphasizes how imperfect, incomplete, inaccurate it is: Leland, in a bantering mood but quite readily, points out that after all memories are not that reliable while a drunken Susan Alexander Kane would recognize in a fit of lucidity that whatever could be retrieved from the past would not answer the journalist’s question about “Rosebud”, the whole point of his investigation which is the very plot of the film. What the film suggests about Kane touches on far more poignant existential issues, from the sorrows of childhood to the blight of old age, and suggests how the elements determining a man’s position in society are somehow accidental and superficial, barely revealing who he is.
The film was immediately considered an attack against media tycoon William Randolph Hearst – including by the businessman himself. There are teasing parallels between fiction and reality and the film wields so brilliantly the power of parody and satire that rises the suspicion director Orson Welles was having a great time sniping at a feared and influential newsman. But “Citizen Kane” can be appreciated even better inside the wider career of Welles. His feature deftly manipulates a typical media of his time, the cinema newsreels, but then he already hijacked journalism to put on a bold and unexpected show when in 1938 he made his famous broadcast falsely claiming aliens arrived and wreaked havoc, using Herbert George Welles’ “War of the World” sci-fi book for his script. Welles keeps in fact exploring the limits and the meanings of truth and lies, questioning when things get accurate or fake, playing with narratives that could reveal or to the contrary, even at the same time, manipulate.
Jerry Thompson’s futile effort is an oversized puzzle doomed to remain unfinished – exactly like the puzzles of Susan Alexander Kane – but enabling the director to underline, exploit, and poke fun at the very notions of journalistic investigation and biographies, to put on a show that revels in the lead’s excessive success, misdirected energy, excessive success, personal failures, and secret wounds so as to reach a deeper truth. It is also a celebration of the art of performance and of the beauty of an artistic gesture faking, surprising, manipulating only to reveal our humanity.
It is on its strong, shrewd visual terms that the film hints at what would remain Kane’s rawest wound, at the time of his childhood, with a most intelligent use of the depth of field. More broadly, the film is barely interested in shallow focus: the camera must capture as crisply and comprehensively as possible the scene to convey the minutest figments of reality and sentiment allowing eventually to grasp something of the life and characters it records. Shallow focus is not the only cinematic tool Welles seems adamant to discard: level eye shots barely feature. The director favors spectacular closeups scrutinizing searingly overwhelming emotions or sheer obstinacy (this is more and more the case for Kane) and every angle that could stun. Low angle shots, high angle shots, any slanted shots: the tension of a scene is powerfully captured, the trouble, or confidence, defining Kane is splashed on the screen, the world looks more a conflict of lines and masses than ever. This stylistic choice is quite fitting for a film hinting at the impossibility of getting a straight story and the inevitability of blurred borders between the fact and the discourse upon it, what did happen and what is recollected, what lies at the core of a man and what he displays. Of course such a visually warped vision conveniently matches the astonishing drive, incredible ego, flamboyant success of a man looking, and hoping anyway to be, bigger than ordinary life.
The systematically bold cuts the montage makes from the very start may be puzzling: they actually guide the audience to look beyond the twists and turns, the performances and the stunts. The gorgeously Gothic images starting the film cast Xanadu and his dying owner as an eerie world hard to grasp, implying not just death – that concrete narrative element setting the story in motion – but a deeper mystery that would indeed elude the kind of journalistic work that the film highlights right away with the fake newsreel. An old photograph of editors working at a paper morphs becomes the actual event of taking them in picture as they have switched allegiances and now worked for Kane: cuts convey the energy wasting no time and meeting few hurdles allowing Kane to forge ahead. But montage can twist the same composition and the same leitmotif – a whirl of black and white swiping across the screen – to document as relentlessly as wittily the deterioration of Kane’s first marriage as one breakfast after another is more and more marred by bitterness: montage is not only a short cut to the flight of time, the very elision intimates how far both Kane’s vitality and flaws can go.
Welles may be the wunderkind playing with textbook cinematography for the fun of it, but he is also more seriously and importantly the devoted and demanding artist figuring out how to tell his story and his vision the best way, running the whole gamut of technical possibilities available to him. His “Citizen Kane” was in 1941 an extravagant and thrilling demonstration that cinema is a language that must be explored to convey both a narrative and a world view. There is nothing wanton or inexpert in his images, they are an effective and coherent expression that deepens a personal inquiry about what truth and lies look like inside a story, on the stage, and beyond.