Citzen Kane
...t of him, only material possessions that he might give a dog. His best friend, Jedediah Leland, was a detached observer functioning as a sublimated conscience remarks to the reporter that Kane never gave anything away: he left you a tip. In each case, Kane's character is described in materialistic terms. What Kane wanted - love, emotional loyalty, the unspoiled world of his boyhood, symbolized by rosebud, he was unable to provide for those around him, or buy for himself. The intriguing opening is filled with hypnotic dissolves from one sinister, mysterious image to the next, moving forward closer and closer. The film's first sight is a No Trespassing sign hanging on a giant gate in the night's foggy mist, illuminated by the moonlight. The camera pans up the chain-link mesh gate, which dissolves and changes into images of great iron flowers or oak leaves on the heavy gate. On the crest of the gate is a single, silhouetted, wrought iron K initial. The gate surrounds a distant, forbidding-looking castle with towers. The fairy-tale castle is situated on a man-made mountain, obviously the estate of a wealthy man. The same shots are repeated in reverse at the very end of the film. The initial and concluding clash of realism and expressionism suggests in a subtle way, the theme of Citizen Kane. The intense material reality of the fence dissolves into the fantastic unreality of the castle, and in the end, the mystic pretension of the castle dissolves into the mundane substance of the fence. Matter has come full circle from its original quality to the grotesque baroque of its excess. As each flashback unfolds, the visual scenario of Citizen Kane orchestrates the dialogue. A universe of ceilings dwarfs Kane's personal stature. He becomes the prisoner of his possessions, the ornament of his furnishings, and the fiscal instrument of his collections. His booming voice is muffled by walls, carpets, furniture, hallways, stairs the vast recesses of useless space. Gregg Toland's camera set-ups are designed to frame characters in the oblique angles of light and shadow created by their artificial environment. There are no luminous close-ups in which faces are detached from their backgrounds. When characters move across rooms, the floors and ceilings move with them. This technique which is highly unusual, tends to dehumanize characters by reducing them to fixed ornaments in a shifting architecture. The choice of camera position was an important factor in getting across artistic and psychological effects. To the photograph a person or object from below, distorts that object. It tends to elongate a person, making him seem more important. It also intimidates the audience, since it is in the inferior position of looking up. The scene gives an added power to the person on the screen. Kane is indeed bloated and enlarged by his material possessions, and in comparison, the audience feels very small. Yet it is precisely his excessiveness, which has distorted him and made him grotesque to our sensibilities. Kane is a selfish, greedy man, and his actions have distorted his life and appearance. The movie is a visual masterpiece, a kaleidoscope of daring angles and breathtaking images that had never been attempted before. Toland perfected a deep-focus technique that allowed him to photograph backgrounds with as much clarity as foregrounds. Such as the scene where Kane's parents discuss his future while, as seen through the window, the child plays outside in the snow. There's also an extremely effective low-angle shot late in the film where Kane trashes Susan's room. Sound montage is used extensivel...