The Impression of Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane presents me with a charming mystery related to Charles Foster Kane, a great newspaper tycoon. The charisma is resonated and magnified through the unique narrative structure, which distinguishes itself from previous Hollywood films in a thorough manner and is widely recognized as a turning point in history of film-making connecting traditional films and modernist ones.

Citizen Kane impresses me from the way it organizes plots, a different narrative perspective and a mysterious protagonist. First, plots take the form of flashbacks rather than follow a traditional time order. Movies we have watched in this course, such as 42nd Street, tell an subjective and complete story, which generally speaking follow a chorological line. Conflicts involved have their origination, development, climax and end. Yet, this traditional method can never be found in this film. The director, Orson Welles, breaks such mode by displaying five flashbacks of Kane’s life discovered in Thompson’s investigation. These five flashbacks are Kane’s childhood, career, marriage, life in his middle age and later years in the respective view of five different people. Though the technique of flashback also appear in Sunrise, it’s the first time to use it as a main constituent rather than a mere decoration to make a film.

Second, Orson Welles tells Kane’s life not from an omniscient view or letting his audience experience it from a character’s view. He makes an innovative move by introducing an outsider who knows little about the protagonist, which builds up a enchantingly mystery over Kane’s last word until the last minute of this film. No specific answer is provided, and curiosity maintains. After an inquiry into Kane’s previous friends and acquaintances, audience finally realize that the only one who knows exactly what “rosebud” means died, leaving all sorts of guesses.

What’s more, it’s also creative to construct an obscure character of Kane. Conventionally, the main characters are of certain features which lead the development of the story. However, in this film, the audience can only view Kane from other people’s perspectives, such as in their memories or diaries. It is through different people’s narration of Kane that a complicated but subjective Kane appears, which to the largest extent expands the imagination of each audience. Each audience can develop his/her own understanding of Kane, which makes each film-viewer actively participates in the production of the film Citizen Kane. He is, and still will be an enigma which has already rooted in people’s mind through these flashbacks.

We can find trace of these features in parts of Kane’s childhood, his newspaper career and his love stories with two women. All is completed in a third person’s view, through Thatcher's written memoirs, Kane's personal business manager, Mr. Bernstein and his estranged best friend, Jedediah Leland. They put emotions and comments into their narration of the Kane they know without letting the audience connect with Kane directly and objectively. We are not provided with a fact but personalized stories of Kane. It helps to develop a much closer emotional connection with Kane and increase an impulse to actually get to know him. Yet, it is doomed to be something impossible since his death has already been informed at the beginning of the film.

In my view, if each classic movie symbols a different world, then Citizen Kane is a world of puzzle and mystery. Even after half a century, it still enchants people to enter into this maze, follow the interviewer’s step to discover a man’s life in multiple dimensions.


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