| Orson Welles, 1941, US, 119 mins
Cast: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore
Review by Mike Bartlett
The most significant DVD release of the year so far is that of the '60s BBC interview series, Face to Face . In it, journalist John Freeman grilled the glitterati of his day for half an hour under a harsh spotlight with the camera trained in merciless close-up on their faces throughout. The result was that the audience could “interrogate” the interviewee through observing their most minute reactions and trying to decipher the subject's “real self” from the clues so carefully extracted by Freeman. It struck me, watching the new print of Citizen Kane from the BFI, that this film is the precise cinematic equivalent: an attempt to understand a man's life through the words and pictures that have built up around him. Only, this time, the man under investigation is the same one asking the questions: Orson Welles himself.
It's often been suggested that Kane is a sly satire on William Hearst, the great media tycoon. And it's fascinating to reflect on just how topical it was. Art gets divested of its contemporary relevance as time goes by to the point where it becomes cosily “universal”. But Welles was right on the button with shots of Kane standing with Hitler and declaring that war will never come, sour reflections on recent American history in the form of the war over Cuba and the Wall Street Crash, and also Kane's efforts to become a New Deal-esque senator for the Democrats. But the intervening years since the film's release have also taught us that Kane is best read as a self-portrait – and an uncannily good one at that. For it was Welles' peculiar genius to offer an autobiography before the event .
He was only 25 when the film started production, a media prodigy with several successful radio and stage projects behind him. What is less well known is that his childhood background was similar to Kane's. He became the ward of a physician when his parents died, just as Kane becomes the ward of a wealthy banker, and this guardian was called Bernstein, the name Welles gives to Kane's business manager. But though this early life is sketched in, it's the future Welles is concerned with - the film opens with a man staring into a crystal ball. The life that unfolds before us in a tortuously labyrinthine narrative is that of a brilliant young man who, out of all the potential careers ahead of him, devotes himself to a quixotic cause: the running of a newspaper. Similarly Welles, whose interests and abilities took in magic, politics, oratory, finally settled on the magpie world of film, seeing it as the ultimate “train set” - a treasured toy like a childhood sledge. And the reason for both men's indulgence is the same – they want to tell the “truth”. Crucially, they are idealists.
But their idealism runs into something wholly inimical to it: success. These two young upstarts become lauded and rich. And this is where Citizen Kane takes off - Welles is predicting his own de cline . He maps the course of the inevitable hubris arising from achievement and shows Kane spiralling downwards into petty egotism, dirty little affairs, wrong turnings, eventual ruin and an empty afterlife as a once-famous giant feeding off the ghosts of fame as vampires live off other people's blood. Welles himself did go on to make other great films ( The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight ) but his reputation is undeniably that of a director who limped away from the studios into a messy exile of self-financed and often half-finished pet projects.
However, it's the way Welles brings this story to the screen that has drawn the most attention. And rightly so. We could talk about Gregg Toland's extraordinary deep-focus photography that holds several planes of action in view at once and allows for editing “within the camera” as opposed to conventional cuts. We could mention the superb (and often overlooked) sound design that rhymes the fading cadences of an opera singer with the whine of a dying filament in a light bulb. But we still wouldn't be anywhere near grasping the full scope of its technical achievement.
To do that, we need to appreciate what Welles was really attempting to make in Kane – an epic . Not just epic in terms of scale or large sets or the breadth of detail its script tries to encompass – though it is epic in those ways as well. No, epic in the literary sense of the word: a summation of all human knowledge and experience – art, politics, love, history. In other words, the artist's vision of the cosmos distilled into one work. The story itself concerns a man trying to exert complete control over his environment – over the flow of news and information, over the running of his society and over the affections of those close to him. And this is mirrored in Welles' own attempt to master the medium of film and harness all its potential to his own vision. Thus Citizen Kane is a compendium of forms – German Ex press ionism, newsreel, Griffithian grand narrative – and an encyclopedia of genres – melodrama, newspaper flick, social issue movie. Hell, there's even a musical number! While the opening is like a horror film, with one eerie window lit in a dark Gothic castle, and the picnic scene looks like something out of King Kong , just as Kane's gigantic staged rally reminds one of the great ape's theatre appearance in New York . As such, Kane was not so much original as a summation of everything cinema had achieved so far and therefore a pointer to its future.
But, of course, Kane's desire for total mastery eventually comes to naught; his various friends and acquaintances supply their testimony about his life and therefore have the final word. And this composite biography comes together through that other great ace up Citizen Kane 's sleeve – the script, co-written with Herman Mankiewicz. It's so effortlessly brilliant that many commentators have underrated its contribution to the film's success. Take one small example – the fact that Kane's paper is called The Inquirer and its rival The Chronicle. There, in a nutshell, are two different approaches to the writing of history: one proactive, asking questions and determining the truth, the other reactive, reporting known facts. When Kane's wife rebels against him and picks up The Chronicle at the breakfast table, it's not just a pithy piece of screwball comedy but a telescoping of the entire thematic trajectory of the film – the way Kane loses control over his own self-image and how this passes to those around him.
Though some have tried to pounce on the script's literary quality as evidence for undermining the director's claims to authorship, its dazzling structure, use of flashback and strain of ironic nostalgia are all Welles. Indeed, if one were to compare him to any other figure in the arts, it would not be to another filmmaker, but to a writer, Dickens. Think of Kane 's gallery of grotesques and larger-than-life characters, and of the oversized world they inhabit. In one scene Bernstein seems dwarfed by a chair which reaches beyond the top of the screen. And think of the outlandish conceit of a boy brought up by a bank and vast fortunes inherited from an unknown benefactor. It's Great Expectations all over again. In this sense, Welles seems the perfect bridge between the grand narratives of the past and the postmodern playfulness of the present, while Citizen Kane , though 70 years old now, will always seem like the ghost of cinema to come.
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