Recent viewings

Citizen Kane. Welles’ epic tale of the rise, fall, and lonely decline of newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane is of course a classic, and one described elsewhere with much more critical insight than Your Humble Correspondent can muster even on his best days. I enjoyed it anyway. There are elements to the film that are still visually startling and unsettling even though I’ve seen it before: Welles’ use of extreme contrasts of dark and light, most obvious in scenes where central characters are literally lost in shadows or reduced to featureless silhouettes for dramatic effect. Those long, soaring, moving crane shots, whether zooming in through the scaffolding of a sign and then plunging through a skylight, or slowly panning across the enormous, jumbled heaps of treasures piled up in Kane’s cavernous mansion without a single human being in sight. The claustrophobic low ceilings and cramped spaces of the newspaper offices which Kane utterly fills up and dominates in the most powerful phase of his career, and how they contrast with the towering edifices of his own construction which utterly dwarf him in later scenes. The way that the movie on at least one occasion shows the same sequence of events twice, once from one character’s perspective, then again from another character’s perspective with an entirely different emotional effect.

The scene I have in mind in that last sentence is Susan’s singing debut at the opera house that the wealthy, powerful, successful Kane has had built specifically for that purpose. From the audience perspective, the moments before her debut appear chaotic but “normal”. When seen a few minutes later from her point of view on the stage, it’s frightening, and rapidly gets worse. Kane has decided to rescue her from her previous life by making her a great singer. Unfortunately he neglected to find out whether she was suited for that role, or whether she actually wanted it. Such hamhanded displays of egotism rarely end well.

The movie’s final shot is of course well known, although I won’t commit any spoilers for the sake of the two or three people who don’t already know. Welles reportedly denounced it as a “cheap Freudian trick” in an interview conducted years later, but I still can’t help but see it as an effective metaphor. Sometimes the most fundamentally defining secrets of a person’s life are locked up in the past: moments, events, people so irretrievably lost to them in later life that no one to whom they can talk would know how to understand it even if they were told.