Making History: Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection in Citizen Kane and Nixon

Like its predecessor JFK, Oliver Stone's Nixon owes an obvious debt to Orson Welles's masterpiece Citizen Kane. The intertextual references and homages are manifold: a film-within-the-film initiates the narrative and a mock newsreel eulogizes the title character; Nixon's White House becomes a Xanadu-like fortress, isolated behind its imposing fence; a scene of marital difficulty unfolds across a long dinner table, à la Kane's famed breakfast montage; and more generally, Stone characterizes Nixon as a man who subsumes his private self to his public persona, who strives for greatness and throws it away because of his desperate need to be loved.¹ Most significantly, however, both Citizen Kane and Nixon are structured around sequences of flashbacks that disorder and reassemble the films' timelines, forgoing linear chronology to chronicle the lives of their characters. Neither film treats these temporal dislocations as mere stylistic devices; instead, Welles and Stone fracture their cinematic timelines to depict the twentieth century as a period of tremendous changes in the experience and social organization of time, and to reveal some of the conflicting political, economic, and cultural forces that motivated those changes. They also illustrate the subjective nature of historical narrative, showing how the same forces that affect the experience of time govern its subsequent representation. Together, these films advertise the ability of narrative, especially cinematic narrative, to reorder time and reshape history.

Nevertheless, despite their similar narrative structures, Citizen Kane and Nixon posit radically different models of time and history. The characters of Citizen Kane, most notably Kane himself, attempt to manipulate time for a variety of purposes, some of them quite contradictory: they seek to commodify it through purchases, accelerate its consumption through business practices, arrest its passage through fetish objects, or even reverse its direction—at least in memory—through nostalgia and through the postmortem inquiry that structures the film. Yet the time of Citizen Kane remains defiantly chronological, thwarting all attempts at recovering the past. Nixon, on the other hand, for all its considerable stylistic and thematic debts to its predecessor, is guided by the free-associative transitions of memory, not the framing narrative of an investigation; its cascading flashbacks imply that time and memory cannot always be made to conform to a chronological organizing narrative. Nixon dismantles the ostensibly inviolable scale of chronology as it argues that history is a manipulable human construct, a retrospective narrative rather than an objective record. While both films call attention to the power of narrative to shape history, it is ironically Nixon, the film that represents actual historical figures, that pushes the bounds of credulity the farthest, reminding viewers that it too is simply another work of historical fabrication. Unlike Citizen Kane, which subjects its characters to an absolute and inescapable chronology, Nixon suggests that, if we cannot reverse or revisit the past, we nevertheless have the power to reshape it retroactively through memory and narrative.

Citizen Kane: Time Commodified and Time Lost

Citizen Kane's examination of the material forces that influence our experience of time has long been overshadowed by its dramatic structural rearrangement of its own timeline. When Peter Wollen asserts "it is not the theme of time—youth, memory, age—that is of any interest, but the devices used to organize time within the film" (262), he underestimates both the significance and the scope of the film's engagement with time (although he certainly does not overestimate the importance of its formal play). Gilles Deleuze has called Kane "the first great film of a cinema of time" (Deleuze 99) not simply because of its stylistic ornamentation but because, he argues, it represents all of the conflicting, paradoxical states of experiencing time—not only past and present, but physical and mental or objective and subjective time as well (Rodowick 93).

But the temporal tensions and paradoxes of Citizen Kane extend far beyond its suspension of objectivity and subjectivity. The film also reconciles contrasting modes of experiencing historical time, addressing material concerns as well as phenomenological ones. The film's narrative mission to decipher...