CITIZEN KANE: The Great American Film

Why would I ever write any kind of essay on CITIZEN KANE, a film that’s been analyzed to death and is considered to film what Shakespeare is considered to literature?  I actually have a good reason: in recent years, I’ve noticed more and more people seem to dislike the film, mostly because of its hype.  Supposedly Ingmar Bergman called it boring.  Now I happen to be a Bergman fan, but considering the dude made some pretty slow-paced movies, those are strong words!  I can understand why many might feel let down by the story.  The hype “Greatest Movie of All Time” implies that you are in for a great, sweeping GONE WITH THE WIND-style epic.  Instead it’s a smaller film about an unsavory character.  It also focuses a lot on the newspaper business, which may not seem very relevant to modern audiences.  My friend Zelda summed it up quite well:

“I think that at this point, the film is more appreciated by directors than it is by general audiences.  I know that what Orson Welles was doing with the camera, with angles, lighting, whatnot, was revolutionary - but I know this because I've been told this. As a plebian when it comes to such things, those aspects don't stand out for me as much, and I understand they're big factors in what make that movie a classic. Instead what I have is a puzzle of a story, which, while interesting, is not compelling emotionally enough for me to place it in my top films list.”

This is a fair point, so here is what I propose.  I will write a blog about Kane where I will not ONCE mention the technical breakthroughs of the film.  Forget about the cinematography, score, editing, etc.  I will simply analyze the film’s Story and why I feel that it is actually a very powerful and heartbreaking story.


[I'm not going to waste time summarizing the film.  I assume you know the story if you're reading this]
 
CITIZEN KANE can be summed up easily: it’s the story of a man who can never get over having been rejected by his mother and is incapable of feeling love. 

This point might only be fully clear on repeat viewings.  Mrs. Kane only has one scene in the movie, but we linger on her a bit, allowing her to dominate the scene.  After that she is only mentioned in passing.  Kane talks about her death on the same night that he meets Susan for the first time.  We never know exactly how Kane feels about her, and what exactly he is thinking when he tears the room apart is left to our imaginations, but we feel the weight of it.  We observe him cheat on one wife with the next and we’re not told why.  Yet when analyzing the facts, we do know why.  We also see him observe him alienate his friends.  On the surface this may seem to just be a petty drama, but only after we get the full story are we able to understand why this man so desperately needed to be loved.

Kane remains elusive; he is ultimately the protagonist of the Story, but he is always a mystery to us, and he is portrayed both positively and negatively.  This moral ambiguity applies to most of the supporting the characters as well.  If you notice, we remain on a last-name basis with almost every character in the film: Kane, Leland, Bernstein, Thatcher, and Thompson.  With Thompson it is taken a step further in that we never even see his face properly, making it clear that although we are following this reporter around, he is more a symbol than a character, and it is Kane’s story that should be our focus.  Developing the characters in this way makes them seem like regular people, occupying a story rather than starring in it.
 
Finally, there’s the issue of the ending.  Rosebud is obviously a MacGuffin and perhaps people were expecting some sort of big reveal.  The film has the confidence to end on a puzzle; Rosebud is revealed not in the style of a detective solving the case with a big “Aha!“ gimmick, but as a subtle artifact that rewards us for paying attention and makes us think about how it fits in.  Had the film ended in a different way, perhaps we wouldn’t be talking about it today, but the fact that only moments after Rosebud is revealed it is then destroyed are perhaps the saddest moments of the story and what have caused the tale to resonate.

I don’t think any film deserves the title “greatest ever made” because that’s obviously going to be subjective.  Here it is has perhaps done more harm than good.  If CITIZEN KANE were a novel, it would not be a great sweeping epic like War and Peace, which is perhaps what too many people expect.  It would be a very short and quiet novel.  It is about a person’s life, but it only observes it rather than embellishes it.  It is not a melodrama but a voyeuristic study.  At the end of the film, we see Kane’s entire lifetime reduced to boxes and boxes of scrap, and we are asked whether or not a man’s life can be summed up so simply.  Or maybe we know that such a collection of junk is all any of us will ever have.

"And That's For My Old Gaffer!"

Have you ever noticed how, in a film’s credits, the cinematographer is given a major billing while a gaffer is listed all the way near the bottom?  It made me realize that while most any cinematography-enthusiast in the world can easily tell you that the DP on APOCALYPSE NOW, one of the most visually interesting films ever made, was Vittorio Storaro, I don’t think any of them would know the name of the film’s gaffer!!  (Incidentally, it‘s Luciano Galli, who also gaffed LAST TANGO IN PARIS, and was a chief electrician on NOVECENTO).

I bring this up because in working on my new film HAVANA IN BUSHWICK, I’ve come to see the role a gaffer plays in a film‘s overall cinematography.  The use (or, in some cases, absence) of lighting plays such a key role in the shot composition and image clarity that, in truth, I feel that a camera operator and gaffer share equal importance in the role of Cinematographer.  And one thing a gaffer needs is breathing space to be his own artist!

I’ve always been open about the fact that I’m a writer more than I am a director and not really a visual stylist.  My first film, FIGHTING NIRVANA, is a very visually boring film.  Of course I want to improve and learn how to do everything, but I'm not there yet.  I just automatically tend to think of a script in terms of the story, not how to make it visually interesting.  My advice to any novice filmmaker out there is to give your crew semi-complete creative freedom in order for you to learn.  Of course, there are exceptions: your DP may not have talent worth shit and, without being given direction, will give you a film that looks like a badly-shot reality show (I‘ve been there).  But, assuming you have a crew with talent, as I would say for my team, give them room to shoot interestingly, make their own decisions, and experiment.  In a sense, they are actors too, and they are doing a little bit of improvising.

Both CITIZEN KANE and THE GODFATHER, two indisputable masterpieces, are notable in that their respective directors gave their cinematographers complete carte-blanche to do whatever they wanted.  Gordon Willis has claimed full authorship for the visual structure of THE GODFATHER TRILOGY, and Coppola confirmed this, saying the only creative input he had on the cinematography was just hiring Willis.  And Welles of course has cited his own ignorance in filmmaking as being what allowed him to discard conventions and do new things with Gregg Toland. 

In my own experience, you can have a film shoot where the director doesn’t get along with the cast, or with the producers, or with the composer, and still they somehow forge a masterpiece.  But the relationship between the director and the cinematographer MUST be good or a film will suffer.  And having a DP who will give you amazing shots, and a gaffer who’ll say “Hey, you know what, let me use a different color gel than I’ve used before” will strengthen your masterpiece all the more.  In the end, the quality of a film’s look is a reflection on its direction.