Citizen Kane Film Techniques

Orson Welles’ undeniable masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941) is one of the most acclaimed and discussed films of all times, having also frequently been awarded with the title of “greatest film ever made”. The critics and audiences’ fascination with the picture is deeply linked to its acknowledged status of nonconformity and defiance towards the formal rules that made up the classical Hollywood cinema film style between 1917 and 1960 (David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson 1985). Effectively, its director and his associates, notably cinematographer Gregg Toland and screenwriter Herman J. Mankievicz, dared to challenge and to some extent revolutionise Hollywood’s strict cinematic codes, pioneering a wide range of technical innovations,
Therefore, the director’s extensive use of reminiscences and his drastic manipulation of plot time, although regarded as ordinary now, were considered almost “traumatic” for the age, since they disrupted the conventional linearity expected of classical Hollywood’s narratives. In order to accustom audiences to this new storytelling device, Welles introduced flashback sequences in the plot through well calibrated dissolve techniques and wipe transitions. It is also interesting to notice that, as Bordwell and Thompson point out, while the remembrances from the first part of the plot ‘tend to [quickly] roam over many phases of Kane’s life’, those from the latter portion of the film rather ‘tend to concentrate more’, and thus to develop in depth, specific moments of the protagonist’s last years (1993: 88 - 89). This is extremely important, as it means that Welles decided after all to conform slightly more to Hollywood’s narrative standard, increasing significantly the picture’s unity and consistency. However, the element that above all others gives cohesion to the whole plot is the “News on the March” newsreel, at the beginning of the film. Effectively, this device is particular important in Citizen Kane’s narrative structure, because it establishes beforehand the main events of the story, thus representing a useful
Each flashback sequence, embodies indeed a different point of view on Kane’s life and on his personality, depending on whether the character presenting it admired him (Bernstein), despised him (Thatcher), was romantically involved with him (Susan Alexander) or was one of his employees (Raymond). Therefore, although narrated with fair objectivity, all reminiscences represent a multitude of unreliable points of view on Kane’s life story, to the point that Herman Mankievicz, the movie’s screenwriter, baptised the film’s particular narration style “prismatic” (Mulvey 1992: 22). In fact, through the recourse of multiple characters’ accounts, the story ‘is narrated in such a way as to highlight the partial, incomplete nature of human understanding and perception’ (ibid.). According to this interpretation, the picture has often been labelled as a “memory movie”, since its structure mimics that of human memories, and since the majority of its plot consists in