Analysis Of Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane (1941) is the debut work of Orson Wells and is considered as a turning point of the way of making movies. The technical innovations, due especially to the director of photography Gregg Toland who introduced the depth focus, the choice of a character that stress the ambiguity of the American dream and the narrative structure that develops itself through flashbacks, is what brought the movie to reach the definition of “The best movie ever made”. The first scene of Well’s Citizen Kane represents the motif of the whole movie: it is the cause which leads Thompson to start the investigation about Kane’s life in order to discover the meaning of his last word, “Rosebud”. The scene opens with a shot in which we see a sign with the words “NO TREPASSING”. The …show more content…
From the beginning the music follows each shots and the movements of the camera. In this shot what is reached is a point dramaturgically created by the music: there is a gradual increase of the intensity of the music which suddenly stops in the same time that the light goes off. After few seconds in which the viewer is wondering what is going on, the music and the light start again. This shot and the combination of music and light have a functional meaning: enter the bedroom of Kane. Now the source of light comes from outside and what we can see in the darkness of the bedroom is the shape of a man lying in bed, a mistery sorrounds his shape and his face is not visible. The snowstorm contributes to create a sense of doubt. In the next shot we understand that the image of the snowstorm is used as a link to introduce the glass glob. The fast zoom out of the glass glob represents the object as really fundamental: altough the viewer won’t discover untill the end what this object embodies, his attention is drawn to it. The zoom out is a way to express this object as a source that metaphorically represents Kane’s unsolved internal conflict