1104 Citizen Kane

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nitin
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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#201 Post by nitin » Tue Nov 26, 2019 2:49 am

Yeah same here.

Was also going to post something but zedz has said everything I wanted to re the Rosebud ending.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#202 Post by Roger Ryan » Tue Nov 26, 2019 10:02 am

therewillbeblus wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 10:34 pm
...We don't know him at all, the composite we 'get' from the collective is itself a joke because it's not an accurate representation of who he is, just as we never really know what Rosebud actually means to him.
This is why the penultimate shot in the film (a return to the opening shot of the "No Trespassing" sign) is more important than the "Rosebud" reveal. Thompson's quest is doomed from the start since it is a contrived angle to even try and fit a man's life into a newsreel let alone hang it on a single word. Note that Welles is setting up a juxtaposition between the old media (the newspaper) and the new media of the day (the newsreel). Despite the fact that Kane was a yellow journalist, his twice-daily publications had plenty of newsprint to cover the world in depth. In comparison, the newsreel can only present its content superficially (think of how Welles might have shown the life of Kane in a series of tweets today!). Rawlston's line "we've got to get something more into this newsreel..." should be heard as ironic since the very format is ill-suited for in-depth coverage. The information that Thompson is getting from Kane's surviving associates could never even be summarised in a newsreel which is what makes that single word so tantalizing to the new media providers: it's something simple to explain everything quickly. After the name of the sled is revealed to the audience, Welles reminds us with the "No Trespassing" sign that Kane is ultimately unknowable. I'm even of the belief that "Rosebud" is a mystery to Kane as well. The snowglobe triggers an association to the word for Kane, but it's likely he's forgotten that the word was emblazoned on his childhood sled; he himself is ruminating on the meaning during his last weeks on earth. Incidentally, the replacement sled that banker Thatcher gives the young Kane as a Christmas present is called "The Crusader".The name is only visible for a split second as the wrapping comes off, so this ironic turn remains nearly subliminal...at least until the viewer could freeze-frame the moment on home video.
Last edited by Roger Ryan on Tue Nov 26, 2019 1:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#203 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Nov 26, 2019 10:59 am

Roger Ryan wrote:
Tue Nov 26, 2019 10:02 am
therewillbeblus wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 10:34 pm
...We don't know him at all, the composite we 'get' from the collective is itself a joke because it's not an accurate representation of who he is, just as we never really know what Rosebud actually means to him.
This is why the penultimate shot in the film (a return to the opening shot of the "No Trespassing" sign) is more important than the "Rosebud" reveal. Thompson's quest is doomed from the start since it is a contrived angle to even try and fit a man's life into a newsreel let alone hang it on a single word. Note that Welles is setting up a juxtaposition between the old media (the newspaper) and the new media of the day (the newsreel). Despite the fact that Kane was a yellow journalist, his twice-daily publications had plenty of newsprint to cover the world in depth. In comparison, the newsreel can only present its content superficially (think of how Welles might have shown the life of Kane in a series of tweets today!). Rawlston's line "we've got to get something more into this newsreel..." should be heard as ironic since the very format is ill-suited for in-depth coverage. The information that Thompson is getting from Kane's surviving associates could never even be summarised in a newsreel which is what makes that single word so tantalizing to the new media providers: it's something simple to explain everything quickly. After the name of the sled is revealed to the audience, Welles reminds us with the "No Trespassing" sign that Kane is ultimately unknowable. I'm even of the belief that "Rosebud" is a mystery to Kane as well. The snowglobe triggers an association to the word for Kane, but it's likely he's forgotten that the word was emblazoned on his childhood sled; he himself is ruminating on the meaning during his last weeks on earth. Incidentally, the replacement sled that banker Thatcher gives the young Kane as a Christmas present is called "The Crusader" (the name is only visible for a split second as the wrapping comes off, so this ironic turn remains nearly subliminal...at least until the viewer could freeze-frame the moment on home video).
Thanks for this, Roger! The idea that this tangible object becomes ironic in its application to comfortable meaning is very much what I see as the joke, but the Rosebud ending of pathos is complicated by that reading that suggests Kane himself isn't even clear in the source of his existential longing - in addition to us as viewers, and the various side characters, unclear themselves. If Kane is actually unable to match the tangible object of the sled, or awareness into the specifics of his emotional release, for the word that escapes him, his understanding of this longing and pain continues to by enigmatic in meaning to him even on his deathbed, which is probably truer to life and all the more soul-shattering in its overwhelming obscurity.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#204 Post by Drucker » Tue Nov 26, 2019 1:27 pm

I consider myself one of the forum's Welles' devotees, so I'll chime in and say that my two cents is the film absolutely lives up to the hype. I am very drawn to the way it was made, and think what comes out of it is so lively, much more so than anything else Welles made.

While people here familiar with Too Much Johnson and Hearts Of Age know that it's obviously not true that Welles first got into film with Kane, reading The Making Of Citizen Kane is exhilarating, and there's a real sense that the film's production felt like the group flying by the seat of their pants. I'm especially drawn to Carringer's reading that the film is the result of working with significant limits. Unlike with the poor cuts to Ambersons, all of the limitations imposed on Kane from budgetary and external pressures really do work out. Start shooting the newsreel scenes without announcing to the studio. Cut out the political espionage. Make-do without sets that were too expensive. It packs so much energy into two hours, and yet the results from a storytelling standpoint are what Roger notes above: we learn so much about a man's life, but we are left with all of this mystery at the end.

I find Welles to be a consistent filmmaker, and the pacing of many of his films follow a similar trajectory. They start with a bang, there is early energy, conflict emerges, and in the second to last section there is a substantial cool-down before the finale. This plays out really well in films like Macbeth and Chimes At Midnight. But it's a template he perfects with Kane, which brings me to my last point. Most of Welles' films don't reflect his true 'vision' for what they were to be, and so that has to be reckoned with when evaluating his work. But with Citizen Kane, it's exactly what it was supposed to be. We are not left with pieces of a greater whole, and there is no 'what if' with the film. Nearly 80 years later, it stands out from films of its time, has an immediate energy, is at times hilarious, and at other times quite sad, and still inspires quite a bit of discussion. Welles may think and feel that other films were greater and he had much more to contribute to the world of cinema than merely his first film, but Kane is a near-perfect work of art. And there is really nothing quite like it!

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#205 Post by FrauBlucher » Tue Nov 26, 2019 5:01 pm

Nice going Roger and Drucker. You guys wrote what I always think of Kane. Knowing everything about Kane but he still remains a mystery. Which btw, I feel that way about Welles himself, which may not be a fair or accurate point but his persona gives off that air of mystery to me. All the tangible objects in Kane are just a hint but give us nothing conclusive. Hearst/Kane was a master manipulator which Welles wants the audience to see first and foremost. The only thing Welles drives us directly to is Kane’s comeuppance, which really is a theme in Welles’ canon

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#206 Post by Sloper » Sun Dec 08, 2019 4:46 pm

The above discussion definitely captures a lot of the things I love about this film. I agree that the ‘Rosebud’ reveal at the end works so well because it’s not a cheap twist: it is a dramatic reveal but it tells us something we’ve already been told multiple times, in every section of the narrative, so it doesn’t feel like a trick; and it’s profound and revealing without being reductive, because as others have said its precise meaning remains ambiguous.

You could even argue that Rosebud doesn’t represent innocence or betrayal. A rosebud is a symbol of potential: the boy Kane used the sled to attack Mr. Thatcher, and when he (presumably) cried about having left it behind at home, Thatcher replaced it with a sled called ‘The Crusader’. Kane’s life is thereafter blighted by a kind of oppositional defiant disorder. When the aged Thatcher asks the only slightly less aged Kane, ‘What would you like to have been?’, Kane says ‘Everything you hate.’ Leland refers to this as well when he says that Kane spent his life trying to ‘prove’ things, like undoing the quotation marks in the ‘singer’ headline (‘That’s when you’ve gotta fight ‘em’). See also Kane’s journalistic campaign against the traction trust and his political campaign against Jim Geddes – he’s always against something, never for anything. You can even see this play out in his first marriage: he marries the president’s niece, then rails at ‘Uncle John’ over the breakfast table; he marries Emily but then neglects her so much that she ends up hating his work, his paper, and his friends. Perhaps Kane dies lamenting the fact that he spent his whole life locked in different versions of his hate/hate relationship with Thatcher, engaged in a series of crusades that culminated in him building Xanadu and burying himself in it, one last belligerent, inarticulate rejection of the hostile world outside.

If you look at his second marriage in this light, it gives a clue to another layer of Rosebud. The snow globe makes its first (chronological) appearance on Susan’s dressing table, right in front of what looks to be a photograph of Susan as a young girl (about the same age Kane was when he lost his sled). Susan’s mirror is flanked by two pictures of herself as a child, and on a shelf above the mirror is a picture of her mother. Imagine Susan looking at herself in the mirror, flanked by her two childhood-selves and watched over by her stern mother, it’s a neat summation of the state of arrested development she’s in. When asked what she wants to do with her life, Susan claims she always wanted to be a singer, then corrects herself (‘That is, I didn’t, my mother did…’) and is cut short mid-correction by Kane, who latches onto the idea of making her a famous singer. A little later, she refers again to her mother’s stubbornness in getting her to pursue this career, and comments, ‘You know what mothers are like’, to which Kane replies, ‘Yes…’. He will do to her what her mother did, and what his mother did to him, by forcing her into a role she doesn’t want to occupy but which he deems to be in her best interests. ‘My reasons satisfy me, Susan. You seem unable to understand them. I will not tell them to you again.’ Compare the way he talks about ‘the people’ and how they need someone with means ‘to look after their interests’ – all of this echoes the way his mother suddenly found herself equipped with a kind of material omnipotence, and used the money to buy her son into a state of complete security, both from poverty and from abuse, but also from any chance of love or self-fulfilment.

I don’t think Kane mis-interprets what his mother does, I think he understands it all too well, to the point where he can’t relate to other people in any other way. ‘Rosebud’ stands for the defining tragedy of Kane’s life, not because it represents a loving maternal bond that was lost, but because it recalls the root of his attachment disorder – or whatever you want to call it – in a profoundly dysfunctional home, run by an uncaring and abusive father and an emotionally suffocated/suffocating mother. She could have been written and performed as weepy and clingy and overly affectionate, with a terrifying psychopath for a husband, but it’s not quite like that; what defines these parents is that they either have no love for their son (the father), or cannot express it (the mother). So in this reading, the deathbed lament is for the child that never quite received love, even in early childhood, and all the stuff with Thatcher etc. that followed the discovery of the goldmine was just ripples flowing from that original loveless home.

The other thing that really makes this film stand out for me – its structure – has only been briefly touched on above, so I’ll drone on for a while about that...

Even without getting into a deep conversation about the film’s themes, just from a storytelling perspective it is a masterclass in how to engage your audience and carry them from A to Z. It demands the active attention of the audience and doesn’t offer much of the thrills and romance that usually comprise what we think of as ‘entertainment’, but whenever I watch this film I’m always amazed at just how much fun it is, and how utterly compelling it is from start to finish. Because the film jumps around so much in the first hour or so, my brain becomes accustomed to seeing Kane’s life from a number of perspectives at once, and at a number of different chronological phases at once, so that at no point do I ever feel like I’m watching the ‘first act’ or the ‘third act’, and afterwards I can’t remember whether any given scene comes near the beginning or the end of the film; and yet, at the same time, I never feel frustrated or bored or disengaged, I just feel pleasantly immersed in the experience. Zodiac has a similar effect; like the characters in the film, you lose track of whose perspective you’re seeing things from or how far along in the narrative you are, and just become one with the all-consuming mystery being explored.

And (also like Zodiac), Citizen Kane manages this feat while still being consistently entertaining in a wide variety of ways, whether by making us laugh, making us cry, scaring us, or just dazzling us with a kaleidoscope of cinematic creativity. It’s amazing. For me, a lot of it comes down to the order in which things are presented to us, and I can sum this up best by looking at it in terms of ‘intimacy’. I think this is a film about wanting to connect with other people, and as someone who has always struggled to do this I find that it taps into just about the deepest aspect of the human condition; and what makes it so great is the way it expertly toys with the audience’s desire to connect with a fictional character, which is (I think) the main reason we consume any kind of fiction.

We begin by trespassing on the most intimate moment of all, the man’s death, and it’s presented like an enticing mystery full of great emotional significance, but we lack any form of context with which to make sense of it. Then we retreat to a position devoid of intimacy, an artificial and hyperbolic newsreel that tells us all the context – and none of it. Rawlston’s reaction sums this up: the newsreel shows us Kane’s life, but we want to go back to the opening scene and make sense of that emotional connection we started to form with the title character. The newsreel gives us the overview we will need in order to follow the complicated story that follows, while also being frustratingly withholding; the scene in the projection room reassures us that this frustration will be relieved by what follows.

The abortive visit to Susan Alexander is another tantalising hint at a level of intimacy we’re not quite ready for yet. Here is someone who loved Kane so much that his death has broken her, so much so that she can’t even talk about it. We know that there is some kind of emotional truth waiting to be discovered here, but for now we head over to the Thatcher library, to hear the testimony of a man who didn’t care about Kane at all, but who unwittingly makes us care about him. Thatcher presents an alternative, and more telling, account of the great man’s life, as that of a little boy torn from his mother, growing up to be a tireless crusader against injustice, and going to his death still ‘gagging on that silver spoon’ and standing up to the money-mad pirates. It’s an appealing narrative, albeit simplistic, and it serves the purpose of making us like and feel sorry for Kane.

Then comes Bernstein: he was closer to Kane and fonder of him, but this was primarily a professional rather than personal relationship. What we get here is an expansion on the second section of the Thatcher flashback, and it’s the most ‘fun’ bit of the whole film – you really get a vivid sense of these young, rebellious, principled men taking on the world and riding high on the success of the Inquirer, and it’s exactly the shot of feel-good adrenaline we, as an audience, need at this point. It’s also full of poignant hints at the downfall we know will happen later: like any good mystery story, the film makes us feel that we’re gaining a deeper and fuller understanding of what happened at the start (i.e. the end), and in this case that means seeing Kane’s glory days and appreciating how much he lost as he grew older, and how painful this must have been to reflect on in his final moments. Bernstein ends his story on a high, with Kane marrying Emily Norton and being cheered on by his employees at the Inquirer, but then he punctures the mood by commenting that ‘Emily Norton was no rosebud’, and he can’t bear to tell the rest of the story.

I love the switch to Leland’s perspective, and how it begins with him saying how nice Emily was; Emily’s withering comment about Bernstein in the breakfast montage gives us a clue as to the source of his animosity towards her. The film is full of wonderful touches like that, not all of which draw attention to themselves. Anyway, Leland’s narrative brings us much closer to Kane because he was the best friend, and Kane told him the details of his first marriage and his courtship of Susan. Now that we’ve seen the ‘Kane was a hero and married a president’s niece’ story, we can switch to the ‘Kane fucked up his career, friendships, and marriages’ story. The Bernstein/Leland transition is a perfectly judged movement from uppers to downers, where we’ve built up a sufficient amount of good will towards Kane and have had enough pleasure in his company to be able to deal with the bad stuff – and we also know enough about Kane and his life by this point to be able to interpret his self-destructive behaviour, while still retaining that sense of mystery and un-revealed secrets. We’re also getting the perspective of someone who was deeply hurt by Kane but still has a lot of affection for him, and both sides of that equation are about to be amplified in the next section…

Susan Alexander’s narrative gets me by the throat every single time. I can’t watch it or even remember it without tears coming to my eyes. There’s one moment in particular that exemplifies what is so superlatively great about this film: the opening night of Salammbo, as told from Leland’s and then Susan’s perspective. With Leland, we see the performance from a distance, and we’re dazzled by that famous upwards tracking shot that turns out to be a technically elaborate joke, the point of which is simple: Susan Alexander stinks. That’s pretty much all we know about her from Leland. Her meet-cute with Kane is presented through the lens of that snarky comment about her being a ‘cross-section of the American public’. Like the stage-hands, Jed looks down his nose at this giggly, bird-brained blonde who had never heard of Charles Foster Kane and mindlessly allowed herself to be crowbarred into a purpose-built opera house, and who was fawned over by Kane’s puppets at the Inquirer. Leland clearly sees the relationship with Susan as going hand-in-hand with Kane’s betrayal of his political principles; his focus is on blaming Charlie, and he barely recognises Susan as having any role or agency in the matter.

Then Susan tells us the same story from her point of view, and fills in what happened before the Salammbo debut. The music lesson scene takes that ‘pretty but hopelessly incompetent’ singer and shows us the real human being behind the caricature. She knows that she can’t hit those notes, and her despair and self-loathing at her own failure is all the more painful because she gets no sympathy from any direction: Signor Matiste yells at her, then under pressure from Kane he gives up and just sits there staring in disbelieving resentment at Kane. It’s a painfully funny moment when Kane says ‘I knew you’d see it my way’; Matiste has stopped even trying to teach Susan how to sing, and Kane seems to see this as a step in the right direction, as if it doesn’t matter whether she can actually sing or not so long as he’s paid the best singing teacher available to sit in the room with her for hours on end.

Now, when we see the debut performance for a second time, we’re right there with Susan on the stage, somehow overhearing the insults from the crowd. Having laughed at her in the previous section, we now see that she registered all of that scorn and ridicule, and suffered terribly under it, and really didn’t want to be in that position in the first place. When we now see Leland dicking around with his programme and rolling his eyes, he just seems sort of callous. Susan is not some over-reaching upstart who took advantage of a millionaire’s foolish generosity, she’s an abuse victim. This version of her stage performance ultimately boils down to a shot-reverse-shot sequence between her agonised wails and Kane’s unyielding glare, and it's hard to watch. After the equally painful confrontation in the hotel room, the opera montage (one of my favourite sequences) takes that abusive interplay and turns it into a nightmarish spiral of ever more intense extreme close-ups, ending in that pitiful sound of Susan’s weak voice trailing off (echoing the dying of the footlight) that tells us she has been pushed to the edge.

This is as deep as we go into Kane’s cruel side, and the film is making us hate him; so now it allows him to soften, he finally empathises with Susan, and he stops making her sing.

From this peak of emotional intensity, the film slows down and focuses on understanding rather than feeling. As the couple get older and the marriage becomes more and more stale, Susan has plenty of time to figure out what’s gone wrong. Whereas Emily became more and more distant from Kane as he devoted himself to his journalistic and political careers, Susan is locked in a claustrophobic intimacy with this man who has rejected the rest of the world. It therefore makes sense that she is given the clearest understanding of his nature and his ‘problem’, which she expresses succinctly during the picnic sequence. At the heart of all the complicated stuff we’ve been learning about Kane is the same problem his parents had: an inability to love except by force, through impositions, with the threat of banishment or (in this case) physical violence hanging over anyone who dares to point this out. There’s a significant echo between Kane hitting Susan and his father hitting him as a child: it underlines the fact that he’s inherited the dysfunctional aspects of both parents. And yes, the end of Susan’s story has a dramatic finality to it. Her full understanding of this man prompts her to leave him, and we’re relieved to see her escape.

We understand why Kane’s wife and friends abandon him, and why the only perspective left to hear from at the end is that of the heartless butler (‘sentimental fella, aren’t ya?’). But because we’ve seen Kane from a wider range of perspectives, and because Raymond’s point of view reminds us of Thatcher’s (the one that made us like Kane in the first place, all the more so because it was detached and uncaring), we’re not ready to leave him yet. That’s one of the incredible things fiction does: it makes us empathise with people beyond the limits of any real-life human relationship, beyond the point where we would have given up on a best friend or spouse, because it allows us to get even closer than them while still keeping us at a safe distance – unlike Raymond, we actually care about this person, but unlike Susan we can’t be hurt by him.

This means we go one layer beyond Susan’s insight. She says, ‘You never give me anything you really care about’, and he responds to her departure by destroying everything in her bedroom. It’s as if he’s furious with all these material objects for having failed to ‘buy’ Susan into loving him, and/or furious with himself for investing so much in all this meaningless trash. His rampage comes to an abrupt halt when he finds the snow globe. This wasn’t something he gave her, but something she had before he met her, maybe something she’d had since childhood, and evidently something she valued since she still has it after all these years and her meteoric rise in fortune. So Kane steals it. Susan wanted him to give her something ‘that really means something, that belongs to you’, and instead he takes something that presumably means something to her, and that also clearly means a lot to him.

It seems to me that Kane pockets the snow globe and keeps it close to him partly as an affirmation that, despite the failure of the marriage, he and Susan shared something deep and meaningful, namely a sense of loss stemming from childhood, and a troubled parental relationship. I like seeing it this way because it fits with a key point made in the above discussion: the deep, internal pain and longing represented by Rosebud is something that everyone can identify with, but it’s also the kind of pain that no one can really understand from the outside. This is the point of Bernstein’s story about the woman on the ferry – we can all identify, but only Bernstein knows the specific feeling associated with this woman – and Kane makes the point more explicitly when he raises his glass ‘To love, Jedediah, on my terms. Those are the only terms anyone ever knows: his own.’ But Kane’s final appropriation of the snow globe sums the idea up best, I think, because it’s an emotional connection formed at the moment of separation. In that sense it prepares us for the ending of the film, where we catch a fleeting glimpse of Rosebud before it goes up in smoke and we find ourselves back outside, staring at the ‘No Trespassing’ sign. You couldn’t ask for a more fitting or more powerful ending.

And this is really just scraping the surface. Almost everything in this film is exactly where it needs to be; it’s as if the film-makers miraculously found the ‘right’ way to put together a jigsaw puzzle.

This applies to the much talked-about technical brilliance of the film as well. I’ve never really cared all that much about whether the film is innovative or ground-breaking; and for what it’s worth, I think the celebrated ‘ultra-low-angle’ scene between Kane and Leland is one of the weakest. What I like about the technique in this film is its constant variety. The cinematography, the music, the editing, the set design, the acting styles, the special effects – there’s always something new and interesting for our senses to take in, and no two scenes feel similar.

This dovetails perfectly with the way the film engages us in its subject. We’re kept in a constant state of excited anticipation about what the image or the soundtrack will do next, and we’re constantly surprised, but nothing feels like a cheap gimmick: the form is always suited to the content. This (along with the perfectly structured narrative) is why we stay interested in Kane, why we keep wanting to see him from a new point of view, why the experience is so emotionally satisfying over the course of two hours, and why you feel so completely fulfilled at the end.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#207 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Dec 08, 2019 7:04 pm

Wonderful comment, Sloper!

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#208 Post by DeprongMori » Mon Dec 09, 2019 1:48 am

Sloper, I truly appreciated your write-up. It illuminated so much that I had otherwise missed in the film (such as the snow globe belonged to Susan) that I feel like the next time I watch it, it will be with fresh eyes.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#209 Post by Roger Ryan » Mon Dec 09, 2019 9:50 am

Sloper wrote:
Sun Dec 08, 2019 4:46 pm
...Bernstein ends his story on a high, with Kane marrying Emily Norton and being cheered on by his employees at the Inquirer, but then he punctures the mood by commenting that ‘Emily Norton was no rosebud’...Emily’s withering comment about Bernstein in the breakfast montage gives us a clue as to the source of his animosity towards her...
Yes, thank you "Sloper" for such a wonderfully insightful post. Although I've watched the film dozens of times, I never consciously connected Emily's vaguely anti-Semitic attitude toward Bernstein with his earlier dismissive comment. That Emily could have been like that girl with the parasol, potentially perfect by being kept at a distance, adds yet another melancholic layer to a story about the investigation of the human psyche.
Sloper wrote:
Sun Dec 08, 2019 4:46 pm
...A little later, she refers again to her mother’s stubbornness in getting her to pursue this career, and comments, ‘You know what mothers are like’, to which Kane replies, ‘Yes…’. He will do to her what her mother did, and what his mother did to him, by forcing her into a role she doesn’t want to occupy but which he deems to be in her best interests...
This is a good example of how Welles made significant improvements to the screenplay prior to filming. In Mankiewicz's draft, when Susan comments "you know what mothers are like", Kane replies with a hefty paragraph of dialogue discussing mothers and their influence on children's lives. Welles reduced all of this to the softly murmured "yes...". Apart from the substantial portions of the screenplay that Welles did write on his own, his script editing sharpened many of the scenes and allowed for a subtler treatment of the film's themes.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#210 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Dec 09, 2019 12:06 pm

I thought that I would copy over an old post to this thread too. I also agree that Sloper's post here is fantastic and would add fuel to the idea that the film is a lot about multiple perspectives as a prism to view the world as about any objective 'actual truth' of an event, from the private to the public (or the private turned into public spectacle, or informing a public figure's actions), which makes it an amazingly piercing film about the newspaper business, or the limitations of journalism:

I wonder if Kane, as much as being a William Randolph Hurst figure also seems sort of in the Gatsby vein in the death scene with his final reaching out for the one thing he can never acquire, the chance to able to live his life over again after having failed to recreate his halcyon days over and over again in many different forms.

One of the reasons that the 'final revelation' does not really spoil Citizen Kane is that it is also used as an ironic counterpoint to the investigator's searches. As a member of the group says after the screening of the newsreel obituary at the beginning of the film: "It's a great story, all it needs is an end" - it is not important what that 'end' is to the investigators, just that it can bring Kane's story to a neat climax, an obviously manufactured one or not, and the film itself plays on this beautifully in using this element for its own climax.

I love the way that the investigator is sent out to look for a big story, finds all of the different perspectives on and gossip about the man's life - enough for a hundred articles from a hundred different angles, so much that he can pretty happily pass over the failure of never having uncovered the mystery of Kane's final words (for me the most shocking aspect of the climax is not the Rosebud revelation but the uncommented upon firery destruction of all of Kane's 'useless junk' in a casual holocaust of memorabillia (like the destruction of Susan's room earlier, as Sloper notes). The physical aspect of a man's life, no matter no grand and intended to last for the ages, all going up in smoke. Only intangible memories and arguments about the person's legacy remain). It also seems an ironic comment on the way that people will immediately gravitate towards the most commercial aspects of a story, which may not be the most psychologically revelatory ones, and the way that the most famous person in the world can still remain a mystery. Also that maintaining the mystery, rather than understanding and therefore exposing it, eventually becomes the best way that the media has found to keep Kane's legacy going.

Except for the audience, who are placed in the most privileged position throughout the film (but also the most impotent - almost ghosts themselves, understanding too late to have influence and watching powerless to use their newfound knowledge to change events. As Sloper also says, we care but we cannot be hurt. But we also have no agency unlike the actual characters being interviewed and adding in their two cents) in a way that is deeply tied in to all of the camera techniques that allow us to drift from listening in on the final words through to the inside of the furnace!

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Sloper
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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#211 Post by Sloper » Wed Dec 11, 2019 12:50 pm

Roger Ryan wrote:
Mon Dec 09, 2019 9:50 am
In Mankiewicz's draft, when Susan comments "you know what mothers are like", Kane replies with a hefty paragraph of dialogue discussing mothers and their influence on children's lives. Welles reduced all of this to the softly murmured "yes...". Apart from the substantial portions of the screenplay that Welles did write on his own, his script editing sharpened many of the scenes and allowed for a subtler treatment of the film's themes.
That's so interesting - do you have the original speech? And yes, what a great bit of editing. It's a key part of the film's power that Kane's childhood and relationship with his parents are so integral to the central mystery, and yet we never hear his point of view or theirs. We just get these elliptical hints and clues, like 'yes...', 'Rosebud', the few details Thatcher provides, Jed saying 'and of course he loved his mother', and the way his sentimental journey to see the detritus of his childhood coincides with meeting Susan for the first time.

Another sort-of related concise detail: at the end, when the journalists are looking over the junk in Xanadu, one of them points out the Inquirer trophy we saw Kane hastily accepting earlier in the film, then another points out the two-dollar stove belonging to Mary Kane. So now we know that the sentimental journey ended with Kane deciding to keep all that childhood stuff and ultimately store it in Xanadu - and the reference to the stove subliminally prepares us for the presence of the sled amongst the (impressively huge) pile of crud in the climactic crane shot. There's also something nice about the juxtaposition of the stove and sled, like indoor and outdoor emblems of warmth and happiness.
colinr0380 wrote:
Mon Dec 09, 2019 12:06 pm
One of the reasons that the 'final revelation' does not really spoil Citizen Kane is that it is also used as an ironic counterpoint to the investigator's searches. As a member of the group says after the screening of the newsreel obituary at the beginning of the film: "It's a great story, all it needs is an end" - it is not important what that 'end' is to the investigators, just that it can bring Kane's story to a neat climax, an obviously manufactured one or not, and the film itself plays on this beautifully in using this element for its own climax.
I think Rawlston says 'angle', doesn't he? As you point out, what he gets is a multitude of angles and no ending - I always feel a bit worried about Thompson's career at the end of this film, especially when someone says 'What have you been doing all this time?' Part of the frustration is knowing how delighted Thompson would have been if he'd just waded a little farther into the sea of worthless objects and found the sled. But perhaps we're meant to feel that this kind of intimate detail is better left un-sullied by the exploitative 'News on the March' hyperbole machine, and that Thompson's insight that 'no word can sum up a man's life' is the best one he could have drawn from the experience.
colinr0380 wrote:
Mon Dec 09, 2019 12:06 pm
Also that maintaining the mystery, rather than understanding and therefore exposing it, eventually becomes the best way that the media has found to keep Kane's legacy going. Except for the audience, who are placed in the most privileged position throughout the film (but also the most impotent - almost ghosts themselves, understanding too late to have influence and watching powerless to use their newfound knowledge to change events. As Sloper also says, we care but we cannot be hurt. But we also have no agency unlike the actual characters being interviewed and adding in their two cents) in a way that is deeply tied in to all of the camera techniques that allow us to drift from listening in on the final words through to the inside of the furnace!
And to add to the point about our frustration, yes the impotent feeling at the end is really agonising. I think I said this in another post somewhere, but I always think Herrmann's music here (when the sled is thrown onto the fire) sounds like a scream of protest. For me it's the moment when we as an audience finally experience a kind of 'alignment' with Kane, as if his soul is crying out to try and stop the sled being burnt, and we feel the same way - but then we watch helplessly as the smoke rises above Xanadu, and Kane and the sled drift away from us again. Maybe we can be hurt after all, precisely because a film can give us that special insight into the unknowable recesses of a person's soul, and maybe this is too close for comfort. In a way it's a relief to find ourselves outside the fence, no longer trespassing, leaving the cinema...

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#212 Post by Roger Ryan » Thu Dec 12, 2019 9:29 am

Sloper wrote:
Wed Dec 11, 2019 12:50 pm
Roger Ryan wrote:
Mon Dec 09, 2019 9:50 am
In Mankiewicz's draft, when Susan comments "you know what mothers are like", Kane replies with a hefty paragraph of dialogue discussing mothers and their influence on children's lives. Welles reduced all of this to the softly murmured "yes...". Apart from the substantial portions of the screenplay that Welles did write on his own, his script editing sharpened many of the scenes and allowed for a subtler treatment of the film's themes.
That's so interesting - do you have the original speech?...
I've now reviewed three separate drafts of the screenplay, and none of them contain the additional lines I remember seeing. There's a slim possibility they can be found in a first draft I saw once in one of the archives, but it's more likely a faulty memory. My apologies for providing an erroneous example of script editing. Nonetheless, I still believe Welles was chiefly responsible for paring down the screenplay and re-ordering the sequences in the way they appear in the finished film. One of the more interesting aspects of the earlier drafts is just how much of the film was going to center around Kane's involvement with a presidential assassination attempt. The character of Emily would have had more screen-time in this version of the story (her "Uncle John" being the target), but this lengthy subplot would turned Kane into a completely different film.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#213 Post by Roger Ryan » Tue Feb 18, 2020 1:34 pm

Roger Ryan wrote:
Tue Nov 26, 2019 10:02 am
... I'm even of the belief that "Rosebud" is a mystery to Kane as well. The snowglobe triggers an association to the word for Kane, but it's likely he's forgotten that the word was emblazoned on his childhood sled; he himself is ruminating on the meaning during his last weeks on earth...
An article originally posted in 2013 was linked to a Wellesnet Facebook post today which showcases a press statement written by Welles on January 15th, 1941, ahead of the release of Citizen Kane. Ostensibly the statement was probably an attempt to dissuade speculation that the film was largely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, but it is a remarkably straight-forward assertion of what Welles thought his film was about. I probably first read this press release a decade or more ago which prompted me to settle on my pet theory concerning "Rosebud" noted in the quote above (without remembering that Welles himself had made a definitive statement on it). Here's the key passage:

"In his subconscious [the sled] represented the simplicity, the comfort, above all the lack of responsibility in his home, and also it stood for his mother’s love which Kane never lost.

In his waking hours, Kane had certainly forgotten the sled and the name which was painted on it."

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#214 Post by knives » Mon Mar 09, 2020 8:54 pm

Just encountered this charming interview between the Welleses: HG and Orson.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#215 Post by How rude! » Tue Mar 10, 2020 5:27 am

knives wrote:
Mon Mar 09, 2020 8:54 pm
Just encountered this charming interview between the Welleses: HG and Orson.
What a wonderful, wonderful time capsule. Two generations of witty, thoughtful and now, iconic artists meeting for the first time. I've always thought of Orson Welles as English, not American. He always exhibited the sly wit, and sophistication that American performers rarely showed. A huge ego, but without the crass American ignorance.

Imagine that creative titan now, in the age of Netflix billionaire fanboy funding.


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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#217 Post by cdnchris » Wed Apr 15, 2020 7:37 pm

On John Oliver's show they showed a clip from some interview Trump, Jr. did on a right wing News network and in the clip he talked about binging Tiger King on Netflix. What he took away from the show was that he was surprised a tiger only cost $2000 and how cool it would be to have one. There are a lot of things one can come away with from that show yet it appears he missed the most obvious messages, so it appears misinterpreting stuff runs in the family.


I also suspect the insane level of narcissism from everyone on it went over his head.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#218 Post by FrauBlucher » Sat Nov 21, 2020 6:57 pm

I was going through the Wikipedia Criterion laserdisc page and noticed Citizen Kane has two separate spine numbers (001 and 142). Does anyone know why?

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#219 Post by greggster59 » Sat Nov 21, 2020 7:24 pm

#142 was a 50th Anniversary reissue. If I remember correctly it was a new transfer and had some new supplements

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#220 Post by ianthemovie » Tue Jun 15, 2021 8:14 pm

In a Zoom lecture tonight Jonathan Rosenbaum mentioned that he is planning to record a commentary track on Citizen Kane with James Naremore. He didn't specify whether it was for Criterion, but it's worth noting that they both recorded a joint commentary for Criterion's version of Magnificent Ambersons.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#221 Post by FrauBlucher » Tue Jun 15, 2021 8:50 pm

Perhaps in time for a November release

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#222 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jun 15, 2021 9:00 pm

Just in time for milestone spine 1100

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#223 Post by hearthesilence » Tue Jun 15, 2021 11:29 pm

Would be a perfect inaugural UHD release. I'm not being entirely facetious, the stock BD already looks great, so having a UHD option would be a very helpful selling point. Regardless, if it's a Criterion release I'm sure the extras will be better this time around - the crappy HBO movie and even crappier American Experience documentary piled on to the other one actually took the entire package down a few notches.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#224 Post by FrauBlucher » Wed Jun 16, 2021 6:46 am

Also, they could attach The Eyes of Orson Welles to the release. They’ve been sitting on it for a while. I’m not a fan of the Cousins’ film but it would give the CC release an added curiosity

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#225 Post by yoloswegmaster » Wed Jun 16, 2021 10:11 am

Was it ever confirmed that Criterion has the rights to this? I know that the 2 companies have a close relationship but I can't imagine Warner Bros would be ok with letting the rights go to one of their biggest titles ever.

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