Tragic Techniques In Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane is perhaps known around the world (and especially in the United States) as one the greatest American films ever made, and created by one of America’s greatest film directors that ever lived, his bold style and unconventional techniques made him a maverick, a genius, and rebel in the entertainment industry, and like the character portrayed in the film, director Orson Welles also had his rise and fall to fame.

The film begins among the desolate landscape and remains of Xanadu castle as “aging newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) dies in his sprawling Florida estate after uttering a single, enigmatic final word -- “Rosebud“ -- and newsreel producer Rawlston (Phil Van Zandt) sends reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) out with the assignment of uncovering the meaning behind the great man’s dying thought. As Thompson interviews Kane 's friends, family, and associates, we learn the facts of Kane 's eventful and ultimately tragic life: his abandonment by his parents (Agnes Moorehead and Harry Shannon) after he becomes the heir to a silver mine; his angry conflicts with his guardian, master financier Walter Parks Thatcher …show more content…
This method of weaving back and forth through time, in flashbacks and memories, has been used skillfully by other directors like Quentin Tarantino most famously in his films like Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Kill Bill (2003). Other well-known films of the past have played with the chronological order of scenes depicted within a movie to move the story along such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966), and George Roy Hill’s Slaughterhouse-Five