Historical context
late 1930s & early 1940s
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The New Deal
class politics
the masses or the workers
the rise of Fascism
impending war
“yellow journalism”
Welles
• Success of War of the Worlds
– panic
• Interest in the power of media to shape
popular perceptions and sense of reality
• Leftist - - suspicion of large-scale corporate
power.
• Populism = Fascism? How does the media
speak to and/or represent the people?
• Contradictions and ambiguities in the
message of the film.
• “Prismatic” narrative
• Ingenious juggling of time & perspective
• Wide-angle, deep focus, long take
Time in Citizen Kane
• The film plays with contrasting forms of
telling history.
• Different modes of story-telling, provide
us different experiences of time’s
passage. Compare newsreel with
personal reflections.
• Montage sequence vs. Sequence shots
Citizen Kane &
Various Types of Time
1. Personal time: one man’s bio, portrait
2. Historical time: the shape of history, historical
events, one of history’s big players
3. Narrative time: story
4. Cinematic time: comparison of the above
• Keep track as you watch
The Sequence Shot
“decoupage in depth”
An event “seized by the camera
as blocks of reality”
The Sequence Shot
• Shot in “real time.” Long take -- maintains
real time.
• Maintains the integrity of space
• This technique has a special capacity for
revelation. Constantly unfolding ambiguity.
• Image remains available for multiple
readings. Image can be engaged in a variety
of ways. Available for multiple readings.
Things to look out for
• Camera seems draw into space
– drawing us into narrative, into history
– space=time
– Camera= inquirer, roving, moving inwards,
probing, often met with frustrations and obstacles
• Identify the sequence shots. What do they
allow for? Make possible?
– What is gained from deep focus?
– Note the three planes of interest (Naremore)
• The film’s take on how we assign meaning to
public lives? Read onto a celeb’s life events.
• Attitude toward the public sphere, the general
public, the working class.
• Why does the film leave certain key questions
unanswered? What is it trying to say with
these enigmas? Why might it choose to take
this approach to knowledge in this period?
• Naremore argues that this film
continually reminds us that we are we
are watching a film and not reality itself.
• How might we connect this -- the film’s
self-reflection on itself as cinema -- to
the larger politics questions posed by
the film? Or to what we take to be the
film’s message?