Citizen Kane Power and Faliure

A detailed Summary of Citizen Kane Power and Faliure

Citizen Kane, it gives us the kind of central character we are immediately interested in; given Welles' opening newsreel montage, Kane is interesting simply because he has to be. No one who led such a life could possibly have been boring; he was a powerful man who lost everything, and that fascinates us for the same reason it fascinates the reporters in the film -- we don't understand how it could have happened, how Kane could have fallen so far. He seems to befuddle everyone who knew him, exactly in the mold of most Shakespearean heroes: There was Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and now there is Charles Foster Kane. He is a Great Man, probably the closest 20th-century America could come to royalty, and that's also part of what makes him fascinating; a small man who falls from grace is of no consequence, which is why Shakespeare never wrote about Hamlet, the plumber of Denmark, or Othello, the hot-dog vendor of Venice. Kane was a king of his time, a man who seemingly had everything, and felt unfulfilled just the same.

Citizen Kane explores that conundrum. It puts us in the shoes of a deliberately faceless reporter, Jerry Thompson (William Alland, in a thankless-yet-critical role), attempting to discover what it was that made Kane tick.

Shakespeare might have put these characters on stage, and had them push and pull against his lead until the audience started to get some picture of what goes on inside the hero's head. But Shakespeare was a theatrical artist, and Welles, a veteran of theater, reinvents this idea by replacing outward theatrical indicators with subtler cinematic ones. Soliloquies are replaced by visual metaphors; Gregg Toland's cinematography consistently shows Kane's inner turmoil: He is in shadow when being dishonest, well-lit when earnest, frequently photographed from high or low angles, depending on the purpose of the scene. We see Kane at his political rally, standing under a huge poster of his own face and surrounded by signs emblazoned with his name; he stalks around his Xanadu palace, barely visible amongst the high ceilings and collection of trinkets; he walks past a hall of mirrors, not acknowledging his infinite reflections; and the presiding presentation we get is that of a man dwarfed by the monument he built to himself, a man who never recognized what he had, because he remained obsessed with what he didn't have.

The only thing we are sure of at the end of Citizen Kane is that we can never complete the jigsaw puzzle, that while we now know almost everything, we still know nothing. It frustrates, it fascinates, and it cannot be pinned down. Whatever would have made Charles Foster Kane happy, whatever would have given him his soul back, was something he could not gain by material wealth, and in the end, even he did not know what it was. If Charles Foster Kane, a much-proclaimed Great Man, cannot make that discovery, what chance do the rest of us have?

None of these characters could possibly be the center of that story. Their lives are all too closely tied to Kane's; whatever direction his life took had strong ripple effects in all of theirs. All of them, however, reveal central contradictions that mirror those found in K

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Approximate Word count = 1301
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Movies