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Lesley Marx

13 May 2017

‘Framing Kane’:

The Cinematic Cubism of Orson Welles’s Magnum Opus

“In one of the tales of Chesterton, The Head of Caesar, I believe, the hero observes that nothing is more frightening than a centre-less labyrinth. [Citizen Kane] is just like that labyrinth.”

-Jorge Luis Borges, quoted in Joseph McBride’s Orson Welles (1972: 33)

“Rather than ask of a Cubist picture: Is it true? or: Is it sincere? one should ask: Does it continue?”  

–  John Berger in his essay ‘The Moment of Cubism’, from his Selected Essays (2001: 86)

“There but for the grace of God goes God.”

– Alleged on-set chatter about Welles, quoted by David Thomson in The Big Screen (2013: 159)

Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) is what I want to call an Unlocked Room Mystery. Its reputation – like those of Kane and Welles themselves – so greatly precedes itself by now that its hagiographic aura has become an impediment to any clear-headed analysis of its meaning – as well as of the manifold ways in which it investigates the meaning of ‘meaning’ in the first place. Of course, this has not stopped the many thousands of film scholars who over the decades, like so many academic Thompsons, have rushed in to provide their own inconclusive speeches on what ‘Rosebud’ and all its attendant ambiguities might really stand for. I am undoubtedly now one amongst their number, but I want to justify my own inquiry by casting it as an enterprising long-shot view of what Kane amounts to in itself and in the continuing history of cinematic ‘mediation’.

In brief, it is the first film to fully acknowledge its own subjectivity. This is not just to say that it acknowledges the viewer’s partiality as complicit in its narrative – both Soviet Montage Cinema and German Expressionism had demonstrated this realization decades earlier – but more that it seems to understand that even with Cinema’s voyeuristic power to enter into seemingly every ‘closed-off’ space in reality and the imagination, it still doesn’t come close to revealing the Truth of its subject-matter. And this singular epiphany is fascinatingly analogous with the creative breakthrough of the Cubist movement in Art thirty years earlier; both moments ultimately signifying a coming-to-terms with the need to express not the ‘nature of reality’ but the human failure to access a knowledge of reality in any conclusive, objective or total fashion. Hence Kane’s deserved reputation as both a summation and exemplification of Modernist Cinema. Welles’s film, however, requires not just a historicist celebration or an idolatrous commentary, but a love-and-hate letter on its own terms, and this is what I will henceforth seek to provide.

It should be made clear from the beginning though that this particular ‘failure to access reality’ has surprisingly little to do with the eventual identity of ‘Rosebud’. Rosebud, in fact, is not just a MacGuffin in the film but a red herring. Welles himself disavowed its use as a structural conceit,  even calling it “dollar-store Freud” on one occasion (Cowie, 1965), but it nonetheless bears an essential function as a bookending symbol of Kane’s fundamental lack of closure. It binds and frames the film’s investigation into Charles Foster Kane’s identity solely because Rawlston and the team of journalists behind the ‘News on the March’ newsreel conclude that their nine-minute exposition of his life fails to do justice to the real individual behind all his filmed achievements – “It isn’t enough to tell us what a man did; you’ve got to tell us who he was.” But this of course presumes that a substantial person does exist behind and beyond the sum of their actions, and even that they may be indicated as the signified content of a mysterious signifier like ‘Rosebud’. Kane’s last word naturally proves a dead-end for the commissioned reporter, Thompson, but it does inspire the flood of recollections from his surviving intimates such that it seems as if his life is flashing before our eyes after his death instead of before his own on his deathbed.[1]After finally giving up all hope that the surface mystery of the word will ever be solved, Thompson consigns it as just a ‘missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle’ that ‘wouldn’t solve anything’ before moving on to help his team finish their catalogue of Kane’s possessions.[2] Finally breaking from Thompson’s perspective, it is then revealed to us what Rosebud actually is, and the revelation proves him correct. The childhood sled is indeed an answer to who Charles Foster Kane was, but it is not the answer, as it shows that he lived and died in a melancholy nostalgia for his innocent, isolated childhood, but it gives no indication of how this memory ‘created’ the man he later became or determined the majority of his actions. It’s not that the jigsaw puzzle of his life is unfinished, it’s that even with all the pieces in our possesion the picture itself is not ‘complete’ and never can be, just as death never completes a life but only stops it in its tracks.

This moment of anti-climactic revelation is doubly important though because it marks the first time since the film’s mordant opening that we have not been dependent on accompanying the experience of at least one of the film’s characters in their own search for a defining insight into Kane’s character. It is essentially Welles’s own directorial ‘coming clean’ moment, in which he confesses his own perspective on his protagonist – providing the solution he’s been withholding from us from the beginning – and showing that it too is just another partial view in the series of rememberances he’s curated. And in as much as Welles can be judged the presiding auteur of the film – so much so that his work on Kane directly inspired the Cahiers du Cinema critics in their formulation of the auteur theory[3]- it signifies a moment in which the film’s Author, it’s ostensible God, is shown as lacking knowledge of his own creation. Of course this only goes along with Kane’s repeated protestations of his own ignorance: “I don’t know how to run a newspaper. I just try everything I can think of.”  he jokes to Mr. Thatcher, and when Mr. Carter asks him his plans when he first enters The Inquirer’s offices he confesses “I don’t know my plans myself.” Presumably too if he did know his own character better he would avoid many of the ultimately self-inflicted tragedies that persistently punctuate his career. Thus Kane projects itself not just as a Rashomonian group eulogy but as an individual’s self-defining failure to reconcile the extremes of his own Whitmanian contradictions, not to mention his creator’s confession of his own impotent understanding. The truth of the subject is then held not by the viewer nor the artist nor even the subject itself.

What truth does abound is therefore incomplete and forever limited to the film’s human testimony, but it is nonetheless still substantial, hence the necessary comparison now to Cubism. Considering the extent of the scholarship on the subject, I can predictably only provide a partial description of an art movement premised on the principle of perspectivist partiality, but John Berger makes the task that much easier by offering these two key insights into the revolution of the visual sense it signified: “The totality is the surface of the picture, which is now the origin and sum of all that one sees.” (italics his, 2001: 85) and “Space is part of the continuity of the events within it. It is in itself an event, comparable with other events. It is not a mere container.” (2001: 86) In other words, there is no implication in the paintings of Picasso and Braque – the two signature exponents of the style between the years 1907 and 1914 – of a significant reality to their subjects beyond what is shown of them on the canvas itself. ‘The Grand Manner’, that had defined the technique of respectable painting since the Renaissance, had always insisted on the sovereignty and analytical clear-sightedness of the picture’s perspective, and therefore the infallibility of the viewer’s gaze in grasping the content within the frame. It could be said that the frame had previously functioned as a kind of proscenium-arch for the illustrated staging of reality, just as the screen had nearly always served to create a dramaturgical distance between the audience and the story in mainstream Hollywood Cinema before Kane.[4]But around the turn of the 20^thCentury, as noted by almost every historian or commentator on the subject, reality rapidly became far faster and more uncertain. The unprecedented acceleration of technological development, political instability, secular administration and personal insecurity – primarily in Europe and America, but really the world over – created an entirely new role for the figure of the Artist: as a freelance aesthetic revolutionary.[5]This character had its precursors of course in the Romantic movement and the innovations of the Impressionists (not to mention Courbet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Munch) but none of them made the same historical impact as the Cubists because only Cubism signalled the advent of an entirely new philosophy of sight. In a Cubist picture the artist could no longer pretend to create a convincing artifice of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional canvas. An object was the totality of all the ways the artist had of perceiving it. Thus the only ‘accurate’ picture of any object would include the changeability of the artist’s perspective as a feature of the object itself. Reality would be flattened into its constitutive fragments on a surface that mirrored the limitations of the artist’s vision.

If the Cubists produced what we can call, in a word, ‘unstable’ paintings, then it is clear enough to see that what Orson Welles created in Citizen Kanewas a singularly unstable film. Instead of fragments and collage, he substitutes flashbacks and montage. An analogous effect of ‘flatness’ is created by the plot’s morbid determinism – it is reality in all its dimensions, but deprived of the future’s uncertainty. Kane is always already dead, and no number of overlapping reminiscences will reverse his failures. The audience is ignorant only of the manner of his rise and fall, not the details of the story as a whole.[6]In discovering that manner, both Thompson and the audience come to realize that even the most direct and dependable reportage of a life – the collected testimony of his intimates – still leaves a liminal space for his concerted self to remain elusive. Some of Kane’s witnesses agree on some things – that he wanted love without having to give it in return, and that despite his riches his life was consistently defined by loss – but these insights appear so self-evidently true at certain times in the flashback sequences that they seem altogether prosaic when applied to the actual ‘living’ dynamism of the man himself in his moments of triumph and despair. It is perhaps the film’s most cunning implied paradox that the pursuit of an explanation for Charles Foster Kane’s life can be sparked only by the death of the one person who could provide any kind of definitive primary source on it: himself. In life, it seems, we do not need to entirely understand a person, we just need to have a good idea of what holds them together. In other words, totality, Kane implies, is a perspective that can only belong to the dead.

Incomplete subjectivism, however, is not just a narrative strategy in the film. Most of the production techniques are in some sense geared towards a constant undermining of the audience’s expectations of the contents within each scene. Take Thatcher’s memoir’s final remininscence of meeting with Kane to administer his dire losses in the Wall Street Crash: the scene is done in one faultless shot, but the blocking and the camera-work make it feel more like three. First, Bernstein’s massive, mournful face reads out the bottom-lines of Kane’s disastrous contract. Then he drops the papers to reveal Thatcher’s Scrooge-like head observing from across the desk with a kind of sour schadenfreude. Then, after a moment, Kane interjects out of impatience, revealing that he’d been pacing just out of shot along the side of the room, waiting for both bureaucrats to finally get to the point. As he joins the conversation, he walks over to the distant opposing window which, like Xanadu’s fireplace, proves far grander than anticipated, dwarfing Kane into relative insignificance, before he pivots and returns to take a seat and face another of his failures. With each action, a previously closed frame is broken open by the reveal of an unnoticed character or a misapprehended detail.

And the restlessness of the mise-en-scene is matched only by the pervasive restlessness of the camera itself. This is particularly apparent in three scenes: firstly, when, after a quickfire montage of Thatcher’s responses to The Inquirer’s attacks on the Industry Trusts he manages, we get our first substantial look at Kane in his electrifying prime. The camera starts the shot behind Thatcher’s back as he reads out the last intolerable headline (“Galleons of Spain off Jersey Coast!!”)  before dropping the paper to reveal a nonchalant Kane sipping tea behind his desk, seemingly unfazed by his banker’s towering presence. As Thatcher first interrogates him and is then interrogated right back in his stead, the shot shifts to focus on the interjecting Bernstein and Leland, drops down to swoop in on their seated conversation, pulls in and swivels slowly to focus on Kane’s indignant expression, jumps back up again to show the young man towering over his former guardian, crosses the desk to catch Thatcher before he storms off, and finally settles on a medium shot of the pair’s final words as Kane lands his punchline of only having to close the place in sixty years at the current rate of revenue. Again, about six different shots are covered by just one tireless camera movement. Later, a more subtle trick is accomplished at the start of Leland’s flashback, as the set staging of Thompson’s left-facing diagonal interview scenes gives way very gradually to an imposing shot of the elderly Leland taking up nearly the entire left half of the screen while the right half dissolves into his memories, momentarily juxtaposing his present and past in the same moment of screen-time. And lastly, the scene of Kane’s campaign speech at Madison Square Garden is a riot of unceasing tracking shots and quick cuts to the diverse audience’s shared ecstatic reception. The most famous tracking shot in particular can almost stand in for Kane’s grandstanding for the rest of the movie: starting in the aisle leading up to stage-left, the camera simultaneously moves in and tilts up as it focuses on his sweeping gestures, bombastic declarations and valiant posture at the helm of his political career, with his colossal picture behind him becoming grander too by the second. All of these shots seem almost infected by the energy Kane radiates both in person and in recollection, requiring the viewer’s gaze to never stay entirely fixed on one arrangement of reality.

The slightly manic cinematography also serves the purpose of simply making the movie faster. Citizen Kane has a lot of material to get through, and even though it declares from the offing that a man’s life can not be adequately condensed into a relatively swift biopic, that doesn’t stop the film itself from trying. To this end, it employs many innovative, interdependent techniques in its editing and its soundtrack. Overlapping dialogue being the most prominent among them, and though Welles imported it to the screen, along with the cast, from his Mercury Theatre, it had of course already featured in Howard Hawks’s work, including the brilliant His Girl Friday (1940) from just the previous year. As it did for Hawks, the technique in Kane achieves a lovely comic effect – especially in the first scenes in The Inquirer as the indignant editor, Mr. Carter, is left utterly tongue-tied – but Welles expands it further into a device for emphasizing the film’s underlying fragmentation. The breakfast montage, young Kane’s last snow day and the newsreel team’s wrap-up of the Rosebud mystery all prominently feature it, as all three show a general descent into disappointment and failed communication.[7]Speaking over another character is, after all, perhaps the surest sign of a lack of empathy, of a failure to see things from their perspective. Kane also employs a series of famous match-cuts that at first inspire a feeling of disjunctive confusion in the viewer and then become increasingly clever audio-visual punchlines. Kane’s entire childhood and adolescence after his adoption by the bank is passed over in the instant gap between Thatcher’s wishing him a Merry Christmas at 6 years old and a Happy New Year just before he turns 25. The six years between Kane’s first night at The Inquirer and the day he hires the entire acclaimed staff of its main rival, The Chronicle, are contained in the duration of the flash of the camera taking the exact same picture that he first directed Leland and Bernstein to admire in The Chronicle’s window. The complete disintegration of his first marriage is shown in about three minutes through a series of short scenes emphasizing his and Emily’s increasing distance and distaste for each other at the breakfast table. And most bravura of all, his clapping at Susan’s first private concert for him becomes the crowd’s applause at Leland’s canvassing speech for his campaign for the Governorship, which in its turn cuts mid-sentence to Kane’s triumphant harangue of ‘Boss Jim W. Geddys’ before a roaring crowd. The private man convincingly becomes the public figure in a matter of seconds and in just two cuts. All of these quickfire sequences implicitly bear a tremendous feeling of bathos. Due to the constraints of memory and the film’s brevity, most of Kane’s significant experiences are only indicated through short-lived sketches, with full scenes saved for only the most stage-worthy confrontations.[8] This constant expository fragmentation also makes its own point about the limitations of any life’s final appraisal: memory is not at all continuous but plays out in interconnected flashes, linking one extreme of happiness to another of despair in the space of an instant.

These examples go on to demonstrate a general principle that intimately links Kane’s style to its substance: the ‘richer’ and more intelligent the film’s formal techniques, the poorer is our definitive knowledge of Kane himself, just as Kane’s own inherited wealth serves to permanently impoverish his experience of love and the nature of his own choices. “If I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man” he tells Bernstein and Thatcher in old age, and it is this remark more than any other that perhaps sheds the clearest light on ‘Rosebud’. Though Welles and his co-writer, the seasoned Hollywood pro Herman Mankiewicz, had speculated about naming the film, far too simply, ‘American’, Kane’s story is ultimately a far cry from the typical narrative of the American Dream. He is born in Colorado into a rural obscurity much like Gatsby’s or Lincoln’s, but the wild accident of his coming into the inheritance of “the world’s 6^thlargest private fortune” prevents him from pursuing his own transcendence of his upbringing and stops his childhood right in its tracks. The irrationally limitless material wealth of the Colorado lode almost exactly replaces his mother’s unconditional love, and Kane seems forever afterwards to seek to be worthy of its burdensome pressure.[9]His name becomes synonymous with value long before he has done anything at all to justify it, and he reacts to this material presumption of his importance by using his wealth to force society into ascribing him a reputation worthy of his means.  As editor of The Inquirer he declares his populist liberal principles at the same time as he fully buys into the corporate-tyrannical logic of ‘making the news big enough’ by expanding its headline. He runs for Governor on the ballot of ‘the sacred cause of reform’ whilst grossly hoarding his wealth in the form of an endless collection of paintings and statues. In short, to use Marx’s terms for a moment, his madly excessive and unearned exchange-value (money) convinces him that he can directly purchase a use-value (inherent meaning) for himself to match, and thus all his hysterical dynamism and enigmatic tendencies constitute an attempt to ‘make up’ for his own good fortune.[10]This, of course, he can never achieve, because he can never go back to see the man he would’ve become before being ‘Charles Foster Kane’. And the newsreel team and the audience itself plays into this paradox perfectly by continually assuming that he always held the secret of this private person behind his public façade. Instead, ‘Rosebud’ implies that Kane too was in search of his self until the moment of his death.

Kane’s curse, therefore, is to lead a surface-life to match the surface-truth of a Cubist painting. He is the multitude of opinions about himself, including his own, but no opinion ever gains the authority to pass a final judgement on the meaning of his good fortune or his tragedy. In some ways, this is Cinema’s curse too. The medium gives us all the wealth of reality in its representative form. It abstracts the world into dynamic fragments of meaning and reconstitutes it into an unreal continuity. It reaches out to every boundary of human experience, like language, and finds expression for situations most audiences find unimaginable. But because it exists at just a slight remove from life it disappoints us by failing to provide the thing itself. As the synthesis of all the Arts – as well as all of Welles’s powers, as a broadcaster, magician, and theatre-maker – Cinema collectively stands for the impossibility Art itself signifies: to express the essence of life through the limited means that life itself provides.  As a one-man cinematic  movement, so to speak, Citizen Kane at least expresses brilliantly the nature of this problem, and in much the way Cubism expressed it at the dawn of Modernism. The film is, in my final reckoning, the story of how a man’s inability to know himself only reflects Cinema’s inability to know reality.

Word Count: 4087

Bibliography

Bazin, Andre. 1978. Orson Welles: A Critical View. London: Elm Tree Books.

Berger, John. 2001. ‘The Moment of Cubism’ in Selected Essays. Ed. G. Dyer. Pgs. 71-92. London: Vintage International.

Cowie, Peter. 1965. A Ribbon of Dreams: The Cinema of Orson Welles. A.S. Barnes and Company: South Brunswick and New York.

McBride, Joseph. 1972. Orson Welles. London: Secker and Warburg

Thomson, David. 2013. The Big Screen. London: Penguin Books.

Thomson, David. 2014. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film(Sixth Edition). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

 [1]“Kane is Welles, just as every apparent point of view in the film is warmed by Kane’s own memories, as if the entire film were his dream in the instant before death.” (Thomson, 2014: 1106)

[2]“The reporter, who stands for the audience, also stands for the artist approaching the contradictions of his subject-matter.” (McBride, 1972: 38)

[3]“All of us will always owe him everything”, declared Jean-Luc Godard.

[4]Even Thom Gunning’s celebrated ‘Cinema of Attractions’ still for the most part maintained a fixed, stage-like vantage-point on the show on offer, no matter how burlesque or enrapturing the content.

[5]The art history lesson here serves a second function in providing the backdrop for the history of Kane’s own life (1871-1941): who can blame him for being so mercurial when the world around him becomes nigh-on unrecognizable between the years of his birth and death? Considering too the 19^th-century nostalgia of Welles’s follow-up film The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Kane’s longing for childhood surely doubles as a particularly modern longing for an era without general change or self-revolution.

[6]“Welles’s use of time counterpoints Kane’s apparently powerful actions with the audience’s foreknowledge that these actions will fail and that he will remain as he was shown at the beginning of the two hours: destroyed. The events of his life as we will see them exist in a limbo of moral futility.” (McBride, 1972: 37)

[7]The technique also acts as a way of ensuring the perspectivist thesis of the film continues across multiple viewings, as the audience is very unlikely to catch all of the dialogue on the first (or even the second or third) go.

[8]We don’t feel like we’ve been given short-shrift by the narrative however because the scope and production-value of the News on the March exposition has already convinced us of the substance and grandeur of Kane’s life, and the repetition of certain scenes seen from different perspectives in different recollections – including Kane’s last photograph with his son and first wife, his batting away of reporters after his second wedding and, of course, Susan’s opera debut – all imbue us with the feeling that extra dimensions of depth have been added to the collective  memory of Kane’s life.

[9]This entrapment is hinted at throughout the film via an ingenious visual strategy: nearly none of the conversations between other characters don’t concern Kane in some way, but whenever he is included in scenes in which he is discussed his presence is usually shown through a frame-within-a-frame that boxes him into a prison of his own importance e.g. his play-acting in the window while his parents and Thatcher discuss the details of his adoption, his reflection between Leland and Bernstein in the ‘Charlie Kane’ number, and his seclusion at the back of the shot in the confrontation with Gettys in Susan’s apartment.

[10]In calling Susan “a cross-section of the American public”, and by the fact of her somehow not having heard his name (and therefore ‘not being alive’ according to the ‘Charlie Kane’ song), Kane basically confesses the nature of his attraction to her. Her very ordinariness implies an objectivity about her judgement of his value beyond his reputation that an electorate could never replicate.