Citizen Kane Rashomon Vs Stories We Tell

Some movies are crystal clear. The plot is simple, the jokes are understandable, the theme is graspable, and the question is answerable. It does not take a scholarly film critic to figure these motion pictures out. On the other side, some movies are extremely intricate and take some deep meditating and even then one may not be able to fully put together what they have just spent two hours watching. Citizen Kane, Rashomon, and Stories We Tell are three pictures that fall somewhere between these boundaries. All of these films deal with something that happened in the past and different people attempting to recreate the moment. The conflict in each of the films though, is that no one honestly knows what happened in the past. They just tell it from …show more content…
The plot of the film centers around a reporter named Jerry Thompson, who is searching for the meaning of Charles Foster Kane’s last words,” Rosebud.” Thompson travels to many of Charles Kane’s close family, friends, and employees and asks them to recall his life. This is where the film does not reach the complexity of the other two. Rather than displaying the many different viewpoints coming from each of the interviewees, Kane’s life is told in part by each one in chronological order. First, Thompson learns about Kane’s childhood through some old memoirs from Thatcher. He later interviews Mr. Leland from whom he discovers that Kane’s political career was ended after his affair with Susan Alexander was publicized. The telling of his life comes from many different people, but there is never a moment of difference. Viewers feel like they know exactly how Charles Kane’s life unfolded. While the movie definitely does have a great mystery to it as nobody really knew what the word “rosebud” meant, luckily, the answer is revealed at the end. When many of Kane’s personal items are being burned, the camera focuses in on the sled that he played with as a child before being sent from his home. In the middle of the sleigh read the mystery word. All it would have took was for someone to turn around and see this and everyone would have known the truth. The fact that the solution to the great puzzle of the movie is …show more content…
The film focuses on the life of Diane Polley, the mother of the interviewer Sarah Polley. Sarah travels to many who knew Diane such as her father, siblings, and her mother’s playmates and again, asks them to recall Diane’s life. Opposite to Citizen Kane, Stories We Tell displays the perspectives of each interviewee resulting in quite a few differences as people formulate their own memory as to the past. This is shown when discussing Diane’s emotions after realizing she was pregnant with Sarah. Johnny states that Diane was, “excited with the pregnancy as it was something new”, though Pixie claims, “she was definitely not elated.” Another example of two different memories is conveyed when Harry remembers that he put his arm around Michael at Diane’s funeral, whereas Michael asserts that he did not even know Harry was in attendance. There are tiny distinctions such as this one in each person’s story, but all the tellings run together in a seemingly smooth fashion. It never feels as though one person is being more truthful than the other as each have very similar pieces. Because of this, in the end it is possible to generalize a true and sensible hypothesis of what actually happened. This is what puts this film over the latter. Though spectators will never know exactly what happened in Diane’s lifetime as they truly know what the word “rosebud” meant in Citizen Kane, they can feel that the generated