Cinema History (A6M002)
Dr. Piotr Sadowski
CA2 – Critical Essay
2015-04-05
Emma Sorensen
Citizen Kane:
The use of realistic cinematography and unreliable narratives in the
creation of the enigmatic Charles Foster Kane
When Orson Welles first arrived in Hollywood, the renowned Scott F. Fitzgerald supposedly
predicted that Welles would “change film so radically that it would be necessary to return to
the beginning and to rediscover the art of film” (Heptonstall, 2004, p. 299). Though Fitzgerald
died before the completion of Citizen Kane, and it will never be known if he believed his
predictions to have been right, it cannot be denied that Orson Welles’s major film remains an
important piece of film history. This essay will discuss the film’s use of innovative
cinematography and prismatic narrative, and how the collaboration between the two created
the portrayal of the enigmatic Charles Foster Kane.
Citizen Kane begins with a shot of a sign on the gates of Xanadu saying “No Trespassing”:
a command the camera soon disobeys as it moves over the gates, across the lands and finally
into the bedroom of Charles Kane. Robert Carringer believed that this establishing scene set
the entire plot premise: “to discover the private figure behind the public mask” (1976, p. 187).
In addition to doing so, it lets the audience know that answers will not be found easily. After
all, Kane built a forty-nine thousand acres large estate to hide inside. That should tell us as an
audience something about his unwillingness to expose anything truly personal about himself.
Orson Welles is believed to have received inspiration for the scene from Alfred
Hitchcock’s Rebecca, a film that had just premiered in Hollywood, as it too sets a mysterious
space and uses an investigative camera eye (Mulvey, 1992, p. 11). However, the mystery of
Rebecca is soon relieved by the introduction of a narrator, while Citizen Kane throws the
audience from the death of Kane, an anonymous man to us at the time, straight to the “News
on the March”-newsreel. As viewers, we find ourselves completely disoriented when it comes
to establishing what point of view the film will take. Finally the character of Mr. Thompson, a
news reporter whose face is constantly concealed in shadows, is introduced and it is from his
perspective and interviews that the story of Charles Kane will unravel.
The film mainly consists of five different sets of flashbacks, from five of Kane’s
acquaintances, showing his life in a roughly chronological order. Thompson starts out with
reading the diary of Mr. Thatcher (Kane’s guardian) and goes on to interview Mr. Bernstein
(Kane’s manager), Jed Leland (Kane’s former best friend), Susan Alexander (Kane’s ex-wife)
Cinema History (A6M002)
Dr. Piotr Sadowski
CA2 – Critical Essay
2015-04-05
Emma Sorensen
and finally Raymond (Kane’s butler).
Every flashback introduces a different side to Charles Kane. Thatcher’s portrays him as an
irresponsible and quirky young man who gives witty retorts with a sly smile. Bernstein’s
flashback shows a passionate and successful Kane who builds a newspaper enterprise that
adheres to his own, idealistic set of principles. Leland’s shows a Kane who soon goes against
said principles and becomes more corrupt and self-absorbed. Susan Alexander remembers her
disintegrating marriage and a Kane who became increasingly controlling, rigid, cold and
distant. Finally, Raymond’s account shows the aged, desperate and lonely Kane that was left
after Susan walked out on their marriage.
Though every single one of the witness’ accounts are biased by personal relations, and
could very well be entirely false, most viewers would initially perceive them as being true to
what happened. A contributing factor to the film’s sense of trustworthiness would be its use of
a realistic camera-eye. In “How I broke the rules in Citizen Kane”, Gregg Toland, the film’s
cinematographer, explains how he and Welles decided to go against Hollywood conventions
and have the camera focus resemble the approximate focus of a human eye (1996, p. 570). In
order to achieve the effect, most scenes were shot in deep-focus. Which means that there is no
prominent focal point and blurred out sections in the picture, allowing the viewer to partake in
the action that goes on in the background as well as the foreground of the scene. One of the
most notable examples of the film’s use of deep-focus is the scene in the cabin where Mrs.
Kane signs the deal with Mr. Thatcher. Mrs. Kane and Mr. Thatcher are visible in the
foreground, with Mr. Kane walking about in the middle of the picture and Charles playing in
the background.
In keeping with Welles’s wish to tell the story as efficiently and realistically as possible,
direct cuts were also avoided. Toland explains how this was achieved: “… scenes which
conventionally would require a shift from close-up to full shot were planned so that the action
would take place simultaneously in extreme foreground and extreme background” (1996, p.
571). This was of course rendered possible only by the use of deep-focus.
One of the most interesting facets of Citizen Kane is the very subtle way that the
photography, choreography and arrangement of set-design and props are used to speak what is
not spoken in the dialogue. One example is the scene where Kane first meets Susan Alexander
in her apartment. The image gets slightly fuzzy and reaction shots, which Welles otherwise
shied away from, are used. The snow globe that we had previously seen drop from Kane’s
Cinema History (A6M002)
Dr. Piotr Sadowski
CA2 – Critical Essay
2015-04-05
Emma Sorensen
hand on his deathbed, and that we will see again as Susan leaves him, is visible next to her
reflection in the mirror. Everything is arranged to give off the impression of a blossoming
love and perhaps to imply that Susan, being the simple country girl she is, reminds Kane of
the mother he lost.
A second example can be found in the breakfast montage depicting the failing marriage of
Kane and Emily Norton. As we go from scene to scene, the pair move further away from each
other, until they are on opposite ends of the table. In one of the final shots, Emily is reading
the “Chronicle”-newspaper in an obvious attempt to spite Kane.
Another clever use of props is the puzzles Susan Alexander entertains herself with at
Xanadu. They can be considered symbolic to what both she and the audience have been trying
to do throughout the film: put together everything that has been said about Kane and try to
figure out who he really was. Was he a communist, a fascist, an idealist or a capitalist? Was
he a good man? A bad man? Or was he simply the one word he chose to describe himself as:
American? Perhaps he was all of the above. The use of a realistic camera eye has led the
audience to believe an unreliable narrative. But ultimately, as the film finishes with a shot of
the same “No Trespassing”-sign it started off with, everyone is thrown back outside the fence.
Left to piece together the conflicting narratives and conclude for oneself who Charles Foster
Kane really was. But even though the audience has been clued in on what Rosebud was, and
thus has what Mr. Thompson referred to as “the missing piece of the puzzle”, can anyone be
sure to end up with the complete picture? Citizen Kane teaches an important lesson about the
incomplete nature of human perception and that is one of the reasons why it is still as relevant
for discussion today as it was seventy years ago.
Cinema History (A6M002)
Dr. Piotr Sadowski
CA2 – Critical Essay
2015-04-05
Emma Sorensen
Bibliography
Carringer, Robert L. (1976) ‘Rosebud, Dead or Alive: Narrative and Symbolic Structure in
Citizen Kane’. Modern Language Association of America, 91 (2), pp. 185-193.
Heptonstall, Geoffrey. (2004) ‘The indelible signature of Orson Welles’s films’.
Contemporary Review, 285 (1666), pp. 298-302.
McBride, Joseph. (1972) Orson Welles. Cambridge: Da Capo Press (1996 ed.)
McGinty, Sarah M. (1987) ‘Deconstructing Citizen Kane’. The English Journal, 76 (1), pp.
46-50.
Mulvey, Laura. (1992) Citizen Kane. London: British Film Institute
Toland, Gregg. (1996) ‘How I broke the rules in Citizen Kane’, Perspectives on Citizen Kane,
ed. Ronald Gottesman. New York: Hall. pp. 569-573.