Crowds, Power, and Transformation in Cinema

4. Crowds, Isolation, and Transformation in Welles’s: Citizen Kane

99 With Citizen Kane we turn to the most researched, interpreted, and annotated film in cinema’s brief history. Yet even for this picture, attending to crowds, power, and transformation illuminates some generally neglected issues. More strikingly, such ideas allow one to simplify and streamline much of the commentary that already exists ; that is to say, to achieve elegance and economy in the interpretation of its central images and themes. In the thousands of pages that have been published on Orson Welles’s first picture, some of what I observe has already been noted, but a Canettian perspective clarifies the internal logic of the film and relates its central themes and its celebrated style to each other with a directness that has been elusive.1 Let us examine a sequence that exemplifies many of the issues and techniques of Citizen Kane as a whole. At the apogee of his life and career, Charles Foster Kane (Welles) addresses a boisterous, confident rally of his political supporters, a rally attended also by his newspaper associates, his wife (Ruth Warrick), and his young son. The sequence begins with a close-up of an election poster featuring a likeness of Kane. As the camera tilts down to the speechifying man himself, it reveals that the image behind him is immense, twenty or thirty feet tall. Kane, in front of a dozen or so seated dignitaries , is standing on a stage. Welles then cuts to a long view—an establishing shot characteristically for this film placed in second position in the sequence. We see an enormous amphitheater, its main floor and balconies packed with people listening to Kane’s words. A series of medium and medium-close shots and reverse shots of the speaker and his listeners follow. The sequence ends with another long shot, the camera next to a lone man high 4 Crowds, Isolation, and Transformation in Welles’s Citizen Kane CHAPTER 4 100 above—a spectator whom the film will soon reveal to be the object of Kane’s execrations, “Boss” Jim W. Gettys (Ray Collins). Under “Aspects of Power” Canetti includes a discussion that precisely articulates the significance of the disposition of figures in this scene: “If there is a space between the standing man and those around him the effect he makes is enhanced. Particularly impressive is a man who stands isolated by himself, facing many others, but somehow detached from them. It is as though he, in his single person, stood for them all” (388). These insights describe both Kane’s effect and his intentions. Significantly, the only spectator standing above Kane, Gettys, is also the only one capable of threatening him. This three-minute sequence displays the oversized, overconfident tragic hero in his moment of greatest exultation, hubris, and—in accord with conventional tragic logic—vulnerability. Kane’s pronouncements express clearly his paradoxical combination of self-aggrandizement and sympathy for the underprivileged Kane ascendant Crowds, Isolation, and Transformation in Welles’s Citizen Kane 101 and underregarded. Stylistically, the vigor, assurance, and theatricality of camera work and acting typify Citizen Kane. The political festival portrayed in the sequence is bracketed, also typically, by private actions; it is preceded by Kane’s first encounter with Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) and followed by the confrontation in her apartment among her, him, his wife, and Gettys. The election rally sequence and its context highlight the theme of power and the characterization of Kane as a man often among but rarely a part of crowds and unable to sustain private relationships. Stylistically, the rally employs the conspicuous artifice with which the film draws our attention to its status as an artwork creating life through a fiction rather than revealing it by cutting a slice from factual history—the sort of slice that Citizen Kane imitates in its own fictional creation of the newsreel. Power has been widely recognized as a central theme of Welles’s film, as has Kane’s isolation. Less noticed has been the importance of crowds and crowd symbols. There are crucial connections , however, among crowds and crowd symbols, power, and the characterization of the hero. The apparent paradoxes of Kane’s loneliness, his desire to form and manipulate crowds, his need for love and his inability to offer it, his attraction to “decent, ordinary citizens” from whom he remains profoundly isolated by circumstance and temperament, and his love of power—all derive from the natural anxieties that...