Nope, I still don't get it

[dreamshark]

Since it showed up in my house in a red envelope, I decided to try watching "Citizen Kane" again and see if I could figure out why so many people think it's the best movie ever made. I still don't get it. Yes, it is visually stunning and I guess it introduced a lot of technical innovations to modern cinema. That certainly makes it important and worth watching.

But for my money the Best Movie Ever has to have more than technical flash. Like believable characters, or a compelling story, or emotional resonance. I don't see any of those things here. The characters are shallow and their motivations are murky (explain to me again why Kane decides to finish the mean-spirited review started by his former best friend and then... publish it? WTF?).



And as for the Central Mystery of the movie - Mr. Kane is alone in a room behind a closed door when he dies. He utters his famous parting comment, then the snow globe drops out of his hand, slowly bounces to the floor and shatters. And THEN the nurse opens the door and enters the room. So how did anybody know what his last words were? Remember, he's not living in a 50's tract house with hollow core doors. He lives in a castle made out of imported stone and huge slabs of oak, with rooms so gigantic that he and his various wives seem to have trouble hearing each other when they're in the same room. Even if the nurse had her ear pressed to the door it's hard to imagine that she could have heard him talking to himself.

Oh, yeah. "Rosebud" is the name of the sled. Or more likely the name of the company that made the sled. Whatever.

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I wondered how they knew his last words too. My best guess is that he had been saying it more than once.

But he's looking at the snowglobe as he dies. You see the nurse reflected in the shards and the snow. The next time you see snow is a couple of scenes later when Kane is a child. It's snowing and he's... holding a sled. In five minutes you have the answer to the central Mystery, and you don't know it.

I grew up around newspaper characters something like that. Perhaps this is why it resonated for me. Everybody wants to get rich and famous, but what do they leave behind? The theme is more than "money won't buy you happiness", it's "what defines your life?" He could have bought a million sleds, but didn't. Kane was a driven man: he never got what he really wanted because he never knew what he really wanted. He learned his lesson too late; a tragedy all around.

How were the commentaries?

BTW, "Rosebud" was what Hearst called his girlfriend's clitoris.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Right. Visually stunning and technically innovative. I have no argument with that. But I don't think it's very well written. Perhaps the visual tricks show us Welles' attitude towards his characters, but what we the viewer actually LEARN about the characters is so fragmentary and contradictory that it doesn't mean much. At least not to me. I'm not primarily a visual person.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

"How were the commentaries?"

I actually watched 15-20 minutes of the first commentary (by Peter Bogdanovich). It was mostly about the images and technical innovations. This was interesting and did increase my appreciation for some of the visual techniques. For instance, in the montage of images at the beginning as the camera moves through the chain link fence and towards the castle, the angles switch all over the place, but the single lighted window is always in about the same position on the screen, sort of reeling the viewer in.

I also learned that the framing sequence "News on the March" was a dead on parody of "The March of Time," a newsreel series produced by Time magazine. That sort of thing was probably appreciated a lot more by audiences of the era. Now it's just another detail appreciated by scholars and people over the age of 80.

"BTW, "Rosebud" was what Hearst called his girlfriend's clitoris."

And how did Orson Welles know THAT? Never mind, I don't want to know...