the film
... with just brilliant writing, the experimental director thinks outside the box during its filming, I assume. He created a deep focus shots that allowed the photograph of background with as much as the clarity as the foreground, mixing light and shadow for expressive visuals, and most of all, using editing as a tool of storytelling. In other words, he took a smattering of vocabulary, and turned it into the language of cinema. Citizen Kane came through uncut, unharmed and completely intact to serve as an indelible landmark on the medium of motion pictures. It is elivered in beautiful frames and haunting images. It is a masterpiece of film technique. The camera images are sharp, with clear depths of field. In keeping with Kanes disintegration and mysteriousness, the scrren is rarely bright. Instea, the film makes use of darkness and contrasts, almost to the point at times of blurring distinctions between people. Welles begin his film with a mock newsreel obituary announcing Kane’s passing, then basically repeats aspects of that same story several times over from different perspective maintaining a vague chronology. Rosebud becomes then elusive focal point for a newsreel reporter’s investigation into the life and times of Citizen Kane, an exploration which provides the plot framework for the film. At the films heart is the deterioration of Kane, the newly deceased newspaper magnate and millionaire. He begins well and then goes downward in a tragic sequence. It is through Thompson’s searches that the film presents the flashback accounts of Kane’s deterioration. The story is deliberately non-linear. It begin s with the death of the title character, and the story therefore not told from his point of view , but from the point of view of those who knew him best. The separate persons being interviewed, each contribute something different to the narrative because their experiences with Kane have all been unique as a result of these individual point of view the story is quite intricate. The film is so dominated by its central figure, the many symbols created strong statements about character. The most obvious is the symbolic meaning for the riddle of Rosebud- even though none, after the characters in the film is ever privileged to discover it. But in the end, the film reverses itself and we back out of the life and works of Charles Foster Kane the same way we came in: drawing back behind the fence and coming to rest on that stubborn wire fence and No Trespassing sign as the remains of a man’s life turns to smoke in the distance. This is the symbol that frames the film. These symbols suggests that even understand little about Kane, or anyone there are boundaries, we cannot pass, depth we can never reach. Even given all the well deserved praise to Wells as a director, he never seems to get his due as an actor. His embodiment of Charles Foster Kane gives a performance that combines gentle humor with grandiose theatrics, he creates a character of shifting moods and conflicting motives, yet always consistently believable. His cast was perfect and of major importance, they peopled Kane with this characters that would tell the story of once a great man who lost nearly everything. The gist of the movie is the quest for “What is rosebud? These are the klast words uttered in anguish by Kane in his last breath. Kane is like the most successful man of his time. He has all the fame, name, wealth and power. Now what will this man seeks. Still he yearns for something. And now a journalists sets out a journey to find out about Rosebud. His death, like his life is a bid event, and the paper he owned, The New York Inquirer , is desperate to unearth the meaning of his cryptic last word. Is it a woman he bedded? A horse he bet on? A beloved pet? Some long lost, unrequited love? At film’s end, the identity of Rosebud is revealed, but only to the film audience. It represents the all-time greatese motion picture ironies, and lead us to believe that, on somje level, Kane regretted not having asimple life, quie...