Citizen Kane

Chris Auer

Philosophy of Film

05/09/2014

Dr. Langguth

Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane is considered one of the best films to be ever made and I agree with that. It’s a classic, you can’t hate on classics when they are good and even voted good. Citizen Kane is a drama and mystery genre film. The reason it’s a mystery because is because the whole film is about the newspaper man trying to figure out what Charles Kane meant by is last words “Rosebud”.

The director Orson Welles did a great job making this film, he uses the different types of techniques that you need to use to make a great film and he nailed it. The technique that he uses in his film that stood out the most in the film is indexing. When he zoomed in on Charles Kane’s sled at the beginning of the film and saw the word “Rosebud” written on it you knew right there that this meant something and then it came true when the newspaper man is trying to figure out what he meant by it when that was his last words. This type of indexing brought emotion to the film because you knew when watching the film that Charles was missing something is his life because he wasn’t happy even though he had so much power and all the wealth you can get.

The Director did a great job using the question and answering technique also known as the erotetic technique. This was a crucial technique that was used in the film because without it you would have never gotten the question of what did he meant by his final words “Rosebud”. If they didn’t ask this question in the film then the audience would have been lost and wouldn’t of fully understood what he meant by when he said “Rosebud”. When watching the film and at the end of the film they did a great job on answering the question of what did he mean when he said “Rosebud”. What I got from the film and what the answer I came up with was that I meant that “Rosebud” was his lost childhood.  

They used the second had resourcing very well in this movie they used other characters to explain the life of Kane and when they did you got a good sense of how he lived and that he wasn’t really happy with his life. Using different people’s perspective of his life really brought the emotional view into the movie because they came from his close friends and wife. When they were explaining his life to the newspaper man you kept thinking back to his childhood and that he was missing something in his life. You saw in the film that Kane tried to find love with everyone is the film but he never really could fully keep a healthy relationship due to his abandoned childhood that he never had or the childhood that he wanted but never got.

This film is a great film and really did a good job on following the genre of being a drama and mystery. With all the different techniques used in the film and how well Welles used them you can help but classify this film as one the greatest films of all time. At the end of the film you see his sled “Rosebud” being burned by the fire I feel like this was a great ending to the film because it closes it by basically saying that his childhood was burned to the ground when he moved with the wealthy gentleman and that when this happened all his dreams burned with it as well. His life that he wished for so much was burned what this all went down in the beginning. With my final words about the film I would highly recommend this film to anyone to watch if they are into the techniques and the aspect of how to make a good film because Welles did a phenomenal job directing it.