Orson Welles and Citizen Kane are synonymous with classic film, cinematography, and being named one of if not the greatest film of all time. Much of the praise comes from the technical brilliance of Welles behind the camera, a film many years ahead of it's time for shot selection, cinematography, and lighting. Beautiful light and dark shadowing is performed expertly and does a wonderful job hinting at these themes found throughout the film. Citizen Kane is the story of Charles Foster Kane and his meteoric rise to power and his abrupt decline. The film starts out with the death of the newspaper icon Charles Kane, we start at the beginning of his life showing his childhood where he grew up poor only to be adopted by a wealthy man. This is where Kane inherits his money and good fortune and thinks it would be fun to open and run a newspaper. The plot is told in a nonlinear fashion, alternating between a reporter revisiting Kane's life by interviewing the players involved and the present inquiry of his last word: "Rosebud". Citizen Kane is about the very human nature of our personalities and the flaws that allow us to succeed and rise to power are the same ones that eventually are the cause of our downfall or shortcomings. Rosebud is that thing in which we cannot taste, touch, define or grasp. It is the unescapable emptiness that permeates our very souls, that thing we cannot buy, cannot get back, cannot escape from. When it's all said and done and final chapter is written, nothing changes the inevitable: we're all black smoke rising into an empty atmosphere.
Orson Welles dons makeup throughout many of the scenes as Kane and it is done remarkably well even for a film made in 1941. As he gets older we see the graying hair, the white mustache, we see the extra weight added on and it's quite authentic. One interesting note is that at the end credits it states that many of the actors are new to motion pictures and proudly promotes this. It makes you remember how good this film was when it came out and how it still stands up to time is pretty remarkable. Most noteworthy, is the scene where the camera is shooting from the floor, making Welles look like an absolute giant, towering over his domain. There are numerous shots of Kane showing his physical stature, his presence reflecting his projection. There are multiple shots of Orson Welles where I'm reminded of Brando and Tom Hardy, they seem to have the same well of deep emotional resources. The real currency of Citizen Kane is in it's empathetic masochism of it's main character and that he ultimately is the most tragic of all characters. He has everything except that which matters most. Love.
Rosebud. It's his sled when he was a child. A gift that he couldn't buy, a feeling he couldn't duplicate, a symbol of his inability to love himself or to obtain that thing which truly matters most to him. We all have our own Rosebud, I believe. That this film speaks to a larger human condition than just a look at one man who had all the material things anyone could ever want but not the thing that he needed. Kane's projection like Oedipus is completely without self awareness, it's all about being just and righteous and telling people what the right thing is. It's all about his infallibility as a "man of the people" he doesn't like criticism, he treats people like his sycophantic play things because it's all about what they can do for him. The only thing he loves is himself(ego), he loves being loved but only on his terms. At the end of the day he has nothing because he isn't even fully aware of his own reality, it is what he perceives it to be. This is what makes Kane such a classically flawed fool, didn't you know silly man? You're just a human, and we're all flawed, we're all carrying around some crevice from an old wound. And then there's the last shot, his sled being burned with the other posessions. Rosebud. And that's it. Everything you've ever loved, anything you'll ever become, everything you ever were is just smoke and ash, drifting off into the horizon....just..gone.
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