Citizen Kane (1941) by Orson Welles

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CRITIQUE – Citizen Kane (1941) by Orson Welles is one of the most famous films in world in the circle of cinephiles and one of the most highly rated among critics. It is not at all a question here of embracing such a masterpiece in its entirety, but of emphasizing essential points.

Citizen Kane is the well-known story of Citizen Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) who dies in his Xanadu mansion, uttering in his last breath “rosebud”, an enigmatic word.  

Kane's biography is that of a child who had to leave his mother, Mary, who happened to be the heiress of a gold mine. She took him, with a heavy heart, from a violent father and entrusted him to a financier (the Bank) in the hope of making his fortune grow. Kane became a press magnate (a story inspired by the life of Randolph Hearst), married the niece of the President of the United States, but his political career ended when it was learned that he was cheating on his wife with Susan, a failed singer. Kane married Susan who then separated from him, and died alone in his immense unfinished estate. 

One could write an entire book on the film from an aesthetic point of view. Long shots, short focal length, playing with depth of field, daring special effects for the time, influence of German expressionist cinema in the lighting due to the director of photography Greg Toland, where Welles subjugates the technique to his imagination… It must be said here that the staging is exemplary. 

The film can be understood in two central points. First of all, the existential point of view: the story of a man who is as much adored as he is hated, mysterious, who has everything going for him, but who lives as a recluse at the end in his unfinished palace. What is he hiding that is so important that the press, his friends and his enemies set out to find this mystery ? In reality, the answer is banal and yet essential if we want to grasp a human being in all his complexity and ambiguity. The second way is what it contains concerning the history of the United States since Kane defines himself as an American first and foremost. 

This is a classic story as a starting point. But what could have made it become what it is ? In reality, this enigma that created such delirium, such an ego, such a gigantic empire is as derisory as it is banal in comparison. This very real and very material empire is based on nothing, or almost nothing, on a very small thing, fragile and intimate, that everyone has, but tries to get rid of by pretending that it does not exist: the fracture, the fault. 

As we know, it is this sled, combined with the traumatic family context, that triggers Kane's madness for power, a symbolic, emotional and original frustration that the character understands at the very end just before dying and that he takes with him to the grave. This incredible desire for endless fulfillment made him commit all his follies, made him ignoble, hegemonic, obese. An idea that is as brilliant as it is simple. Of course, the film does not emphasize the sled and its genius is to hide it while putting it before our eyes as in Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter. 

The masterful introduction places the film in its narrative: from the outset the camera, the mistress of the story, passes a fence on which is written “No trepassing” and comes to collect the last breath of its owner. The subtlety of the editing is to switch in successive crossfades to the only crucial point: the lit window of Kane's dying apartment. Each shot is modeled on this window (and even, supreme subtlety in the reflection of a lake) which we approach each time. Then we pass to the other side; a mouth pronounces its last word: “Rosebud” and a hand drops a snow globe. 

The shot of the mouth emphasizes the word that will be the driving force of the film. It certainly plays on Welles' magnificent voice but also on the quest for meaning that covers a whole symbolic, complex and imaginary universe, which will obliterate the destiny of a man. 

The story takes us to the News on the March to paint a media portrait of Kane: a man of colossal fortune throughout the world, famous to the point of making the front page of all the newspapers when he died. Kane left his mark on history, infiltrating through the media into the lungs of America. He was its intimate breath. The beating heart. He is powerful. He had 37 daily newspapers, two unions, a radio network, grocery stores, paper mills, buildings, factories, forests, ships… He has everything and yet he is alone in his Xanadu, an immense palace built in the deserts of the Gulf Coast where a mountain was “built” with 100,000 trees and 20,000 tons of marble: a zoo comparable to Noah's, we are told. Excess, hubris, gigantism. It's God or almost. 

But News on the March tells us nothing but the official legend and we know that journalists, in general, don't tell us much. However, journalist Thompson is sent, because we know that when he died, Kane said one last word, Rosebud. But, we believe, this word will reveal the mystery. The journalist therefore investigates Kane's relatives, friends and enemies, because the tycoon was as adulated as he was hated, a communist for some, a fascist for others, provoking a mind-boggling number of comments. And the film, like a police investigation, tries to uncover the secret of this word, which, of course, no one will be able to reveal. This means that to understand someone, a man, neither the press nor his relatives are really useful in many cases, especially when it comes to an emblematic personality. No one can shed light on Kane's desire, his delusions of grandeur, his desire for conquest and power, and it is not in what he shows of his fortune that we will have the revelation. 

The journalist, who is barely visible, like an anonymous witness, talks with Kane's relatives: he first visits Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), Kane's second wife, who has become an alcoholic, but he is abruptly sent away. He then consults the memoirs of Thatcher, the man from the bank, and this is where the famous sequence is introduced.

The key scene at the twentieth minute is the one where little Kane slides on his sled and throws a snowball. This is the central point where everything is already there, before our eyes. The whole scene is designed in the form of a mirror, in two diametrically opposed sequence shots, one inside the house, and the second outside, the window being the junction point between the two from where the camera starts each time, but in the opposite direction. 

The first sequence shot films little Kane throwing a second snowball. It lasts about 1'46''. His mother has called out to him. The shot was framed by the open sash window, making us believe that we were outside. Wrong, because the camera pulls back and shows us the three protagonists of the scene: the mother (Agnes Moorehead), the father (Harry Shannon) and Thatcher (George Coulouris), the man from the bank, and of course, little Kane who we see through the window in the distance playing, a presence constantly present and at the center of the image. It is the mother who directs everything, it is she who goes to a table and sits down. The father tries to intervene, but in vain. We barely listen to him. He has no power. She is the one who inherited. We think that the mother is “odious” since she “sells” her child to a financier. It is not so. And she signs. The father resigns himself and in a movement goes to close the sash window. 

The second sequence shot is barely longer (1'56'') and begins with the connection of the mother reopening the sash window. A symbolic window that still connects the mother and the child. And the mother is moved and calls little Kane who continues to play outside with his sled. She knows that she will have to “abandon” her child. The couple and the financier go out and join little Kane. And when he is told that he is going to leave, he is worried. He is clearly suffering from being separated from his mother. No matter how much he is told, he does not give in and asks twice if his mother is going to come with him. When Thatcher approaches him to shake his hand, little Kane protects himself with his sled. He manages to make Thatcher fall. His father then tells him that he deserves a beating. Immediately, his mother protects her child and lets out the revealing sentence of the entire scene: “That's why I'm keeping him away from you.” “And that's where we learn that the mother “protects” her child by taking him away from a violent (and in my opinion quite alcoholic) father. Painful dramatic irony, it is this “protection” that will obliterate the whole destiny of little Kane. 

A shot closes this sequence which is the driving force of this story. Where Welles could have made a tearful melodrama with this scenario of a mother who separates from her son, he treats it coldly. This shot of the sled covered in snow over time and a train noise in the distance signifying that the child is being carried away is remarkable for what it evokes: the abandoned sled no longer allows the child to play, a child who is now far away and who has been torn from his mother. His childhood has been reduced to powder. The whole symbolic universe with its atmosphere will crystallize and cover the fracture of little Kane like the snow covers the sled. This episode will mark him so much in his imagination that he will forget everything to rediscover it at the end, at the moment of his death. Kane has amnesia of his own personality. This is in any case what we call a specifically cinematographic shot, belonging only to cinema. 

What is exemplary is that everything is before our eyes, and yet no one sees it as we do in life. Our existential blindness is such that we do not know how to see or we do not want to understand what is there, spread out before our eyes. And what we do not want to see and understand is our own mystery, our own intimate secret. It is not only Kane's. Because if we understood it, men and women would have a wisdom that would prevent them from missing out on their lives and judging others in a simplistic way. 

Yet, everything is revealed little by little like a rebus or a puzzle, like the one Susan has towards the end. This is why the film goes from one interlocutor to another, thinking it has found the key to the enigma. Even the memories of those close to him fail to understand because Kane is only seen through them. If we witness Kane's rise through flashbacks, his marriages, his methods within the newspapers, we still learn nothing about Rosebud, a key word that runs throughout the film. Orson Welles does not hesitate to make leaps in time, going from little Kane to the mature man in this masterful sequence shot where Bernstein reads a contract that hides Thatcher for a moment. Then we see Kane emerge from the right, go to the back of the screen before coming to sit at the table with the two men to sign the contract where he gives up his newspapers. Yet Kane says touchingly about his secret: “My wealth has handicapped me. You know, Mr. Bernstein… Without that wealth… I could have become a great man.” Thatcher then asks him: “What would you have liked to be ?” and Kane replies: “Everything you hate.” But there his fracture has made him deviate. 

After Thatcher, the journalist meets Bernstein (Everett Sloane) who also talks about Kane's meteoric rise. In particular the purchase of the Inquirer newspaper where Kane imposes the methods of the tabloid press on its former leader, old and outdated, but honest. Kane does not hesitate to buy the Chronicle journalists as soon as he can afford it, as if they were sweets (an allusion to childhood) as he himself says. This is the moment when the character falls into excess and begins to buy hundreds of objects. At the beginning with Thatcher, he became social, attacked the powerful, but he quickly changed his mind. Orson Welles is not gentle with the methods of the press. Same problem today. 

Bernstein touches on Kane's secret without directly linking it to him when he mentions a woman in a white dress he met on a boat. “But not a month since then have I not thought of her.” The imaginary… He adds later: “It's not rocket science to make money when that's all you want. What Kane wanted was not money.” He is right. We witness the beginning of Kane's meeting with his first wife, Emily Monroe Norton (Ruth Warrick), the niece of the President of the United States. The thirst for power only eats away at Kane to better prepare his downfall and the total failure of his life. The flaw. 

Then, the journalist goes to see Leland (Joseph Cotten), Kane's friend and closest collaborator, in a hospice. Right away, the latter reveals an important piece of information: Kane wants to be loved by everyone, but he has little love to give, a classic characteristic of an obese ego. The comical episode in successive shots with his wife where the two are at the table and exchange sometimes funny, sometimes acerbic remarks ends with them no longer speaking to each other and reading the newspaper. “Of course, he loved Charlie Kane. Very deeply. And his mother. He must have always loved her,” Leland will say ironically. 

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At the time of his impromptu meeting with Susan who feels lonely because she knows few people, Kane answers: “I know too many and I'm lonely too.” He reveals something crucial to his future wife. He was going to the warehouse in Western Manhattan, in search of his childhood and to recover the furniture of his dead mother. A sentimental journey. Right after, Susan reveals that her mother wanted to make her a singer and says, which does not fall on deaf ears: “You know mothers!” “Yes” answers Kane who, at that moment, adopts Susan body and soul to make her the instrument of his fantasy. Kane asks her to play the piano and sing. A revealing detail for Kane that this dream of a mother towards her daughter, he who vainly seeks his own, the enchanting voice of the siren who seduces and bewitches. The charm between the two characters is obvious, attracted to each other according to their fallen dream. The situation is terrible deep down, because Kane does not know himself and is unaware of himself. He is looking for a love that has been amputated from him and he crushes others with it. In any case, this is crucial knowledge for knowing oneself and knowing others. Except that we never use it. Leland will rightly say of Kane like a maxim of La Rochefoucauld: “You are only interested in yourself. You persuade people of your love to force them to love you in return. But you want love in your own way. It is a little game whose rules you decide.”

This is not the only revealing sentence if the thing did not seem clear: “You speak of people as if you owned them. As if they belonged to you. You always speak of giving them rights, as if you could offer them freedom as a reward for their services” Leland would tell him again. Welles here couples false love and rhetoric of speeches in favor of workers and peoples to show that it is the same lie. The great strength of the film is not to be contaminated by the spirit of propaganda. It seeks to understand even when it is a detestable, vain, arrogant character, crushing everyone. 

Citizen Kaneis also a work about America, about all the scandal stories that embellish rumors and gossip. We think of Trump or others. In wanting to become governor, Jim Gettys, Kane's political rival, knocks him down by revealing to the press (the instrument of Kane's social advancement) that he is cheating on his wife, Émilie (Ruth Warrick), with the singer, Susan, whom he will later marry. “I am Charles Foster Kane!” he proclaims in vain in Gettys' face. In fact, he does not really know who he is. His name covers a void. 

We understand how capitalism operates a systematic destruction (the lack of education and culture, the ruin of any structuring family context) to plunge individuals into a frenzy of purchases and fill their narcissistic wound by making people believe that they can compose an identity à la carte, a flexibility favorable to the Market. Man must be dispossessed of any stable universe in his relationship to the world in order to migrate consciousness outside of man. Capitalism therefore wants to make individuals regress into this infantile sphere to the point where they will have great difficulty reaching the adult state (the “adulescents”). The state of childhood is that of a capricious being. In order to evolve, he must learn to limit his ego in order to become responsible, not anchored in a narcissistic and voracious self-image, and make the world a permanent whim where reality can only oppose his principle of infantile pleasure or his eternal adolescence. These existential and anthropological fractures create selfish individuals who vampirize the world through their delirious quest for power and celebrity through the media, in an endless predatory accumulation where everyone is in rivalry with everyone else. 

To put it another way, Kane fails because of his own personality that made him rise, but that will make him fall just as quickly. By leaving him alone, eaten away by dereliction. Kane's fracture is the secret of the voracity lodged at the base of capitalism, the cellular state of the myth of the self-made man who is only an individual endowed with a raging infantile egoism, dictating his law. The “American dream” or homo economicus (a map will show the progression of his empire). On one side, there is the solitary, selfish actor, in search of the best deal, guided by the “rational choice”, careful not to fall prey to any emotion defying the transfer into monetary gains, and populating a universe filled with characters sharing these same virtues. On the other hand, there is the consumerist, the only character recognized as such by the ideologues of the market – the atomized buyer, preoccupied with himself, looking for the best deal as a treatment against loneliness, the inner emptiness of the self (the two can be combined). Orson Welles undermines this fake dream. 

Kane has accumulated all sorts of objects in his palace to fill his impossible-to-fill void. Kane is truly an American, as he himself says. Welles' era is certainly totally outdated, but it has the same endless dynamic. Xanadu is symptomatic of today's world and all these little self-made men with their small or large empires who set out to conquer the world (start-ups in the digital age) ordering it to be regulated by a narcissistic recomposition of their infantile desire. The word capitalism is inaccurate, because it is a strange human will that goes beyond a simple political or economic system. 

Kane is a Balzacian character like Raphael de Valentin, in The Skin of Sorrow, devoured by his desire to possess, seeking fulfillment in a desire for the absolute that is impossible to achieve (The Search for the Absolute). Balzac will also write César Birotteau on the appearance of capitalism. Welles makes us grasp an existential process more than he attacks a character. The lesson is important, because we could take any politician on the whole spectrum for example that we personally hate and try to grasp what motivates him internally. And we would not be very surprised to find that each of them is tormented by the same kind of intimate weakness, as we ourselves are of course. Because it is easy in our lapidary judgment to “charge” this or that person, but we are in this zone where the spirit of propaganda reigns supreme without making us understand anything. 

After failing politically, Kane marries Susan. He has an opera built for her and has her play a title role. Susan was deluded by her mother when she herself did not believe in her talent. Not only does Kane believe he can shape public opinion through his newspapers, that is, adapt it to his distortion, but he wants to transpose his fallen childhood dream into someone else and against him. But dreams are disasters or nightmares when you want to make them come true. They make you dream, but they destroy people. Susan's acting is disastrous and a famous shot is associated with it: as the singer's failing voice rises, the camera follows the singing as it climbs into the depths of the set to two stagehands, one of whom puts a hand to his nose to signify the total failure. 

In the evening, Leland has to critique it, with whom Kane has hardly spoken for years. And when Kane reads Leland's paper, who, quite drunk, has fallen asleep on his typewriter, he rewrites it and fires Leland. In short, his marriage to Susan is a failure and her career is just as disastrous. The more Kane's flaw remains unknown to him, the more he sinks into unbridled gigantism while covering it up with the face of love. As Susan will say: “He wanted everything… Except for my departure.” Welles lucidly analyzes the mechanism of this lying love which, in reality, is not an interest in others, but makes the other a duplication of his greedy and shattered ego. 

The journalist returns to see Susan who does not send him away this time. She tells him about her ordeal in a rehearsal scene. In front of the singing master who despairs at the mediocrity of Susan's singing and what will happen to his reputation, Kane tells him: “You care what people think ? I'll explain. Public opinion, I shape it… In my newspapers.” Then as the singing resumes, Kane adds: “I was sure to convince you.” Indeed, Welles shows how the newspapers knowingly lie about Susan's singing. Here again, today, nothing has changed when the newspapers are run by such individuals. Kane recomposes the world in his image and his mechanism of denial is so powerful that he will be the only one to applaud at the end of a performance of Susan against all odds. Vanity is an illusion for a while, but quickly wears thin. And Welles has a stroke of genius by combining the end of the failing song with the extinction of the filament of a light bulb which ends with a fade to black and leads to Susan's logical suicide attempt in the face of such existential distortion. The shot is well-known. It is the one where Susan is dying in the foreground while Kane tries to force the front door. The glass is clear in the foreground and when Kane enters the room, it is just as clear, despite the depth of field, a shot impossible to achieve without trickery. 

Susan eventually wants to leave. Kane begs her to stop being alone. Here again, he lies to himself. Then she understands what is at stake, always the same lying love, when he tells her: “You can't do this to me.” “It's still about you, not me… Or my feelings. I can't do this to you ? Yes, I can.” And she leaves. Kane remains alone. It must be said that the character is both horrifying and moving and it is this complexity that is enriching, because it clearly indicates that such a man, however overpowering and odious he may be, is determined by something that has guided him without his knowledge. 

The journalist will go and question the steward of Xanadu who will tell him the rest of the story. After Susan leaves, Kane trashes his room in a childish destructive rage. And that's when he comes across the snow globe and understands. The shot of his defeated face indicating all his inner ruin is overwhelming. He has finally accessed his truth, but it is too late. He is old and cannot rebuild his life. He is alone and his palace is symbolically collapsing like a house of cards. A shot shows him at the end, wandering in his palace in front of a mirror that reflects his image in dozens of copies. Symbol of an abysmal solitude where the others were only a double of himself. 

This final epiphany, a classic literary device where the character grasps what has obsessed him all his life without understanding it, is revealing. Welles shows an immense room, accentuated by the short focal length, cluttered with objects of more or less great value to the point that no one pays attention to them. “I don't believe that a word can explain a man's life,” the journalist will say. And as if to deny it, the camera scans this impressive mountain of objects at the precise moment when two workers throw the sled on which is written: Rosebud. After the snow, the fire. The secret will remain secret. No one has seen anything and understood anything. 

This is what makes Citizen Kanean essential film. It will come as no surprise that Orson Welles places himself on the same level as his master, William Shakespeare, whose adaptation of Othello he adapted with less talent. A major and mature work by a young man of 24. It reveals the fracture that constitutes us and blinds us, escaping consciousness. A fracture that we try to erase like a bad image of ourselves, that humiliates us and that we want to fill in vain, but which constantly demands fuel from its greedy mouth. Kane could have found rest in love, but he would not have become what he has become. The film mistreats him to wrest this knowledge and deliver it to the viewer. Because it is this secret that is the most important in reality, a secret that no one discovers in the film for the simple reason that it constantly escapes us in our own lives even when we have it before our eyes every day, when we think we are so lucid and so aware of ourselves. There are those who know it and those who don't and therefore fail in life. Kane's story is of course ours. We could call it the Kane syndrome.

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