Film Review - CITIZEN KANE

Review: Citizen Kane is – yes, still, even now – worth talking about.

Orson Welles’ singular triumph against all odds speaks for itself. What more can – or should – be said about it?

A common trope in the art of critique is to, when looking backwards at our most unendingly influential and resonant works, ask the question of, "what can be said about it that hasn't already been said." To gaze at the tremendous accumulation of excess on top of that dead and dusty thing, and ask whether or not it's really useful at all to throw your own little word on top of the pile. With the collective knowledge and wisdom of nearly one hundred years of thinking and talking and thinking some more about Citizen Kane, a particular sort of self-centered arrogance is required to believe that what you have to say about it is unique, insightful, or at all needed.

How else could one step into the atelier of expression and thought, cluttered with the thousands of statues of thousands of years, each someone immortalized in all their trite and trivial greatness, with anything less than the spirit – the inspiring delusion – of Charles Foster Kane himself?

That spirit, so infectious and emphatic, is Welles' gift to us. The biographical nature of Kane is one of the magic tricks Mr. Welles was ever so fond of: a slight of hand that obscures the autobiography at the heart of Kane. Like all magic, once the machinations of the trick are revealed, they lay bare and naked and carelessly arrogant in the open. Kane isn't William Randolph Hearst – how could he be? Welles has not lived Hearst's life, felt Hearst's feelings, experienced Hearst's Experiences. All the material Welles has, or will ever have, can only come from himself. Looking backwards, it seems impossible to imagine a hypothetical Welles project that isn't autobiographical, let alone quite possibly the most important auter work in history. Welles imagined Kane, Welles wrote Kane, Welles directed Kane, and Welles acted Kane. In every sense, Welles embodied his work, and, like Kane, that was always his uncompromising way.

For a film that was to start the career of a young Welles, its character as a sort of obituary to himself and his craft utterly haunts me. Citizen Kane has proven to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts: as Kane rebelled against the political machine, so too did Welles rebel against the entertainment machine. Citizen Kane is a film on Welles' terms, by Welles' rules. There are times where the line between Kane and Welles blurs entirely, and the ghost of the latter possesses the body of the former to speak through them totally and emphatically. "Here's a toast; to love on my terms. The only terms anyone ever knows" resounds as the autobiographical epitaph of a man written at twenty six years of age.

Citizen Kane would come to haunt Welles, too. For as long as he lived, he would never again "love on his own terms". Kane was a film to be burned, to be shredded, to be thrown away and destroyed forever. The resistance to its right to exist was a clear statement by the industry to be that destroyer. The offer made by Nicholas Schenck, on behalf of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to burn the negative of what would come to be frequently recognized as the greatest film ever made was, and is, an unconscionable act of violence that has not become easier to forget with time.

At numerous times in studying art and film alike, I've experienced a sort of disillusion-driven burnout, struggling to add any meaningful insight to something that already speaks for itself. When offering critique for Citizen Kane; the question may not be, "can I say anything worthwhile about Citizen Kane," but "can anyone ever say anything worthwhile about Citizen Kane." From a cynical perspective, one may view all criticism and analysis as necessarily reductive. All the meaning that the film could ever impart would lie within the immediate experience produced by the film. Recounting the impression a particular scene had on you in prosaic or even poetic text is a kind of translation, and all translation is similarly reductive. No matter how thorough the effort made, there is no such thing as a truly equivalent translation. Going from one mode of expression to another will remove nuance in both semantic and meaning. A painting of a man is not a man, and the word "man" is not the thing.

This paralytic anxiety over the loss of meaning and truth in the gaps between that truth and its reflections is, perhaps, ironically the most real and affecting truth at the center of Welles and Kane's esoteric deliberations. Those that seek to understand Kane are as reckless as those that try to understand Welles himself. There is not one moment that we are given access to who Charles Foster Kane really is. He is the rosebud - the mystery the narrative encircles, but never penetrates. We remain on the periphery of his life, seeing him as others saw him, at his highest, at his lowest, at his most spectacular and public. But to go further, to understand, to bridge that gap, requires an interiority we can never have access to. To understand Kane would necessitate living as Kane. To this end, a film is just as reductive of a translation for life as criticism is to film. For each reflection of the surface lying over whatever experiential, emotional truth that lies at the center of our lives, the more distorted and distant that original image becomes.

Can we hope for more out of life than to simply be seen by others? Will we simply be discussed, remembered, thought of? Or can we be felt, known, and truly loved? These are questions worth asking of film, and of ourselves. We certainly have a lot in common.

Welles and his collaborators, with RKO as his Inquirer, by all accounts created something that could not, and nearly did not, exist. The cinematography of Gregg Toland is just one of many miracles that brought Kane into existence. It is arrogant, it is indulgent, it is viscerally alive in its filmmaking with its blood still hot and its heart still beating as everyone in it and around lies cold and dead and buried. Even in its prescient melancholy, the excitement and ambition driving the production is felt in every novel, inspired shot – of which there are countless.

Above all else, Kane is an affirmation of creation. It reminds us that our interpretations are not simply reductive, but transformative. Citizen Kane must, in some ways, be more spectacular, more thoughtful, more important than anything real that inspired it. Our ability to freely create, as Welles did for one, brilliant moment, gives us the chance to add our own inimitable joy to anything at all. Welles, as auters often do, gives us the guts to do as we please. Of course adding one more word to this discussion is warranted. There will always be something left unsaid, as there will always be something more to say.

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