SPACE IN CITIZEN KANE
It could be argued that Charles Foster Kane's
dominant motivation throughout his adult life was to recapture A gentleman has come to visit the Kane family
but this is not unusual--his mother runs a boarding house, after
all. Inside
the house Mrs. Kane is preparing to sign papers which will separate the
boy from her by making the financier Mr. Thatcher Charles's guardian. Welles eschews the usual cinematic ploy of the shot-reverse shot, but
rather he uses a mobile camera and deep focus
photography to keep us continually aware of everyone, the three adults inside
the boarding house and young Charles outside in the snow, framed in the widow while playing a
Civil War game.
Just as his mother signs the document, the boy
is shouting "The Union forever!" _
Already
the boy is "captured" by the small window, just as he will be
restricted by his guardian Mr. Thatcher throughout the remainder of his youth. When the parents bring Thatcher out to meet
the boy for the first time, Welles keeps the
camera on To reinforce this triumvirate Welles places a
three-sided dinner bell on the post
between the mother and This
sequence is crucial if we are to understand at all--or at least
appreciate--Charles Foster Kane's subsequent actions, particularly his
rebellion against all that Thatcher stands for, and his unending quest to
recapture the love he felt for his mother. We may question Mrs.
Kane's motives and the soundness of her decision, but it is difficult to
doubt her love for young Charles and his love for her. After this
episode at the Kane boarding house, director Welles will choose to use space to
show emotional distance between his protagonist and others,
particularly those he has tried to love or befriend. As the breakfast montage
progresses, the couple is seen in a series of one shots: _
rather than as a twosome occupying the same
frame. In the
final scene of this montage, Welles places
husband and wife at the two extremes of the frame, the
camera near floor level, the ceiling bearing down on them; the white
expanse of the tablecloth stretches Most of the scenes between the second
Mrs. Kane and Kane focus on Susan's career as an opera singer and not on their
intimacy. Here, too, space is significant. We could say that the more
spacing within the frame, the greater the emotional distance between
Charles and Susan. As the
virginal Susan of their initial encounter gives
way to the tormented shrew, she often seems stuck in
some nether world that has little room for
others, certainly not for Charles. As Charles pushes her into opera, she
becomes more unhinged to the point that she attempts suicide. Director
Welles shoots her in stark close-ups or isolates her on stage, a naif in the
land of predators. The end of the marriage is announced well
before the actual breakup. Kane has built the cavernous Xanadu for Susan,
a living mausoleum that seems to have been conceived as space to fill, not as an
residence. Susan is put on the level of one of Kane's statues, a small
creature who has lost warmth a The shots that most dominate the later part of the film
are stark close-ups and darkened spaces shot with
Back to Top Trips
the
freedom he enjoyed playing in the snow outside his parents' boarding house. d
The artlessness and unrestraint of his boyhood games
will soon be contrasted with the programmed life he is headed for when his
mother signs the document that makes him a ward of the financier Mr.
Thatcher. This is perhaps too heavy a load for this brief sequence, yet
Orson Welles does much more than embed the Rosebud motif here: he uses
camera placement, framing and movement to suggest the small boy's pending
entrapment and helplessness. The security and strength his mother provides
will be forever beyond his reach, though never far from his thoughts. His
awkward and at times thoughtless and crass attempts to fill this void will mark
the rest of his life. 
Charles as the three adults hover around
him ,s cutting off his escape,
if you will. (This triangle is a 
variation of the
document signing shot as the
adults surround Charles even as he plays.) When Thatcher approaches Charles, the boy pulls away holding the sled between them, while his mother
holds him within the frame as he glares up at the man.
father to further emphasize young Charles'
powerlessness, placing him up against the right and lower _part
of the frame. 
Perhaps the most exquisite example of
this is the famous breakfast sequence in which we see the deterioration of
a marriage over the breakfast table. Still in the honeymoon phase of
their marriage we see the
loving couple shoulder to shoulder in an intimate two-shot, the camera
placed directly in front of them at eye level. 
between them and serves as a barrier to
us, the viewers. He reads his paper, she reads his competitor's. We need go no closer since it is only too
obvious that this is the end of their road together.
nd
even acerbity. When Susan does finally leave Kane the encounter takes
place, appropriately enough, in her rather cramped bedroom which resembles a
doll's house rather than a rich woman's living space. Susan is preparing
to leave, Charles blocks her path, yet he does not threaten her but pleads for
her not to go. Again the ceiling hovers above. The largest
object in this shot is neither Susan nor Charles, but rather the porcelain doll
on Susan's bed, a nearly exact replica of Susan herself. Though this may
seem rather heavy-handed, when I've shown this sequence to students, most
everyone ignores the doll in favor of the two protagonists. Our attention
is directed to movement, and it is only upon examination that we see what Welles
is getting at.
low-key
lighting: Kane as a bitter and lonely man, the looming Xanadu, the massive
hall with its walk-in fireplace. It's as if a vital life force has been
sucked out of the story and we are left with emptiness. Are we closer to
knowing what made Charles Foster Kane tick? The closing shot of smoke
rising from Xanadu and the no trespassing sign has certainly not stopped
generations of moviegoers from speculating, and certainly this was what Orson
Welles was after.