No Trespassing Film Analysis

James Naremore writes about Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane as a “powerful example of film art” in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Wells opens the movie with a similar way that he ends it. The audience gets the view of a large fence, with a castle that looked “like the home of a sorcerer”, and on the fence, a “No Trespassing” sign. All awhile, there was eerie music playing in the background as the camera began to move over the fence and zoom towards the castle in the distance. This and the eerie music made for an unsettling beginning. By using techniques of zoom and editing, Wells continually allowed the audience closer to the immense castle in the background. This gave the idea that we as the audience may be getting an almost “backstage” look at something secretive, something that other people do not get the chance to look at. Now in the beginning of the film, where it begins the story of Kane’s life, we find ourselves at the house in which Kane was first raised. He is playing in the snow as his mother and father is talking to the bank employee (Mr. Thatcher) about the bank adopting young Charles and taking him away to raise him. Wells …show more content…
Using the basic cuts between scenes, Kassovitz can make it seem that we are jumping through time, to different times of the day and even areas, like a store’s windows being smashed and the store being looted followed by a man being dragged away by police. This style of editing gave a sense of the chaos that has ensued. The sense that the scene is constantly shifting, from the looting of a store, to the flipping of a car, to the police beating down a rioter, to rioters running away from the line of riot police ready to take charge. This editing allowed the audience to almost experience the madness that the protesters and the riot police were committing, either trying to stand up for justice or trying to maintain the