The Art of Citizen Kane

Orson Welles, along with cinematographer Greg Toland and writer Herman J. Mankiewicz, created in Citizen Kane a groundbreaking film in by how it uses film techniques. Montage, long takes, and matte shots were used before Citizen Kane. The complexity of the film takes us on a journey that goes in a full circle while drawing the viewer in. Welles created a fictitious story that is a mystery about a man who lived in the public but few people understood. Citizen Kane’s focus is on the title character whom is loosely based off of William Randolf Hearst, the media tycoon known for his yellow-journalism. We watch Kane start off idealistic, and then descend into muck-racking, politics, and scandal. The point of the film is to show this very public man in a more human light. Welles humanizes Kane, making him sympathetic despite his dictator like behavior. The story is told with an investigative reporter interviewing people who knew Kane in hope of finding the meaning of the word “rosebud.” While Welles weaves this story he artistically presents beautiful mise-en-scene to serve it.

Naremore writes, “Citizen Kane is fundamentally different from a film like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon: it doesn’t present seperate versions of an unknowable reality, but instead gives different facets of a single personality.”1 The story gives an energetic feel by jumping around time through the interviews. However, the flashbacks inside the film serve a linear function in the storytelling. Naremore continues “Kane’s biography is depicted more or less chronologically, through the memories and judgments of five characters who knew him at progressively later stages. We never have the feeling that these characters are distorting the truth... for all its interest in subjectivity and psychology, Kane has a rational structure; its a film about complexity, not about relativity.”2 In the bulk of the film we view Kane’s life in a chronological order, excepting the beginning when we witness his death; the reporter interviews people in Kane’s life who represent Kane at different stages of his life, from childhood to old age.

The screenplay Welles constructs with writer Mankiewicz is complimented by the visuals Welles creates with cinematographer Toland. Adding to the mystery of the film, and the surreality of Kane’s life. Naremore writes “Like Kane’s own newspapers, the camera is an “inquirer,” and the periodic frustrations it encounters (a door closing, a light clicking out, a sled being pulled away) are like teasing affronts to our curiosity.”3 Welles uses the visual component of cinema to further the mystery of the story in our search for the meaning of “rosebud.” The visuals add to this mystery and also our knowledge of Kane in the shots by mise-en-scene. Such shots are: the table sequence wherein Kane and his wife grow farther and farther apart through the passing of time, or Kane standing between his political rival and his wife as he has to choose to follow his career or his family, and the large windows shot in deep focus that bear over Kane as financial problems weigh over him. The mise-en-scene gives us insight into Kane we otherwise would not have as an audience.

Presented in reverse order is Kane and his wife, wherein over time we see them growing further apart via there placement around the table.


Many of the shots are unique in how they are composed.Using a deep field of focus Welles creates layered shots that allow the takes to go long. He uses matte shots to allow himself to compose objects and actors in front of a shot that could not fit in front of the camera. The scene where Welles as Kane is writing on the typewriter with Joseph Cotten behind him made use of this technique.



Here is the shot of WELLES being placed by a matte shot in front of Cotten.









In the film Welles uses what Rudolf Arnheim calls “the constancy of form,”4 meaning that he takes common objects and distorts them. Naremore recognizes this ability in Citizen Kane when he writes “The real significance of Welles’s work was not in its phenomenal realism, but in its defamiliarizing, ‘strange-making’ qualities.”5


Here is an example of the "strange making" qualities in which a snow glob is shown in an extreme close-up, wherein we can see the house on the side and in a reflection Kane's nurse entering in.






Andre Bazin argues that there is a dichotomy in cinema between films that use montage and those that use longer takes, which he calls “reality.”6 Welles masters the long shot in Citizen Kane, such as the shot of Kane’s mother and father debating the ethics of giving young Kane to a mentor while young Kane plays in the background. However, Welles also uses the montage in the film, apparent when Kane’s second wife’s performance are cut together with and newspaper headlines, and Kane’s face are all cut together. This montage alludes to the passing of time, but it also builds an psychological idea. As Sergei Eisenstein wrote, “The combination of two ‘representable’ objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.” 7

Welles draws upon film theory to enhance in telling his story. His gift as a filmmaker in knowing when to use techniques at the correct time. Welles and Toland masterfully compose their shots to give a heightened sense of emotion, bringing the film to a point of pure artistry. The filmmaking enhances the mystery and story, giving us an experience rather than just a story. Citizen Kane is a masterpiece because it weaves a complex and mysterious story that draws us in.

1 Naremore, James. “Citizen Kane.” Film Analysis, A Norton Reader. Ed. Jeffrey Geiger, and R.L. Rutsky. New York: WW Norton and Company, 2005. 348
2 Naremore, J. 348
3 Naremore, J. 346
4 Arnheim, Rudolf. “From Film as Art” Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford, 2009. 285
5 Naremore, J. 344
6 Bazin, Andre. “From What is Cinema” Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford, 2009. 42
7 Eisenstein, Sergei. “From Film Form” Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford, 2009. 15

(And my apologies for any formatting errors, I am having trouble copying the text from Pages into a blog form.)