Citizen Kane Film Analysis

Citizen Kane (1941), directed by Orson Welles, is a story about a detective who follows the past life of Charles Foster Kane to solve the mystery of why Kane’s dying word was rosebud. Orson Welles is a well-known actor, screenwriter, director, and producer of radio, theatre, and film. In Citizen Kane, Welles co-wrote, produced, directed and starred in the film, a rare feat (powerpoint slide 18). This shows Welles had a lot of control over the project. It was his vision that made the movie how successful how it was. There were influential people like Greg Tolland, cinematographer, Herman J. Mankiewicz, the cowriter, and Bernard Hermann, the scorer. Each had their own task, but it was Orson Welles’ vision that gave them the direction, which is …show more content…
This movie is known for having some of the best cinematography ever. It combined the use of deep focus, tracking shots, high and low angles, and montages. While these techniques might have come from German expressionism, Welles was the first to implement them. In one of the scenes, Kane is a kid playing in the snow in the background, and in the front of the frame was Kane’s mother talking with a wealthy business man. Simultaneously, it is a tracking shot and deep focus shot. The camera follows the actors, and it has the foreground and background in focus. This is a famous scene and studied quite frequently. Under Welles’ guidance Tolland captured one of the best shot movies …show more content…
However, it is mostly a non-classical narrative because of its lack of character goals, ambiguity in closure, and non-linear storytelling. First off, the story is classical because it includes common techniques that were used in the past such as montages and mystery. Montages would be used to demonstrate great lapses of time in a short period. There was the beginning montage that was a news reel of Kane’s life, and there was an Opera montage of Susan Alexander, Kane’s wife. Both montages gave the audience a lot of information in a traditional cinematic format since the 1920s. Also, there was a goal for Jerry Thompson, a newsreel producer. He was supposed to seek out the meaning of Kane’s dying word “rosebud”. This give the audience a traditional suspenseful mystery to follow along with. The story is non-classical because it lacks character goals, despite Jerry Thompson. Kane never has any real goal. He has minor goals throughout, but they never lead to anything, such as wanting to be a politician and forcing his wife to be an opera singer. He has no moral code, and lives in isolation. There is no goal for Kane. He appears to the audience as a psychologically damaged