moive assignment

What are the first images we see and why?

How do they describe the world that we are entering?

What are the first images we see and why? How do they describe the world that we are entering?

� No Trespassing

� Chain Link Fence � what is the pattern of the fence? where do we see it again and again?

� The Bedroom Windows in Xanadu � Cathedral-shaped windows � Museum or mausoleum-like

� Cages � Filled with what?

What type of media introduces us to Kane?

� The Newsreel

� Kane’s Life is About the News

� What are Facts?

How does the mise-en-scène help to define the characters? Describe the homes in

which Kane lives.

� His Mother’s Home

� Growing up With Thatcher

� Susan and Kane’s Xanadu

� The Newspaper Offices

How does the mise-en-scène help to define the characters?

Kane’s Collections

� Statues

� Animals

� People

How does the mise-en-scène help to define the characters?

� What does the snow-shaker signify?

� Broken dreams

� Lost youth

� What does the mirror image tell us about Kane?

� Fragmented and complex character with endless interpretive possibilities

� Is he a communist? A Fascist?

� Is he selfish? Or does he just need to be loved?

� Is he cruel to his friends (Leland)?

� Why does he build an opera house for Susan in Chicago?

� Multiple images of Kane

� Like the story—mise-en-abyme:

� Story that can be told over and over without getting to the truth

Why does Kane “collect things?” What is he trying to retrieve that he lost?

� A Mother’s Love

� Recall the dialogue between Susan and Kane—to whom do they keep referring?

� Their mothers! “you know what mothers are like,” says Susan.

� Kane keeps trying to kill off the father, but in many ways becomes the very controlling, father-figure he so detests.

How does the mise-en-scène help to define the characters?

� Susan: How does she meet Kane?

� Mud splashed in his face; later she has ‘mud in her face’ when Gettys blackmails her and Kane.

What objects surround Susan? What does the mise-en-scène tell us?

� Jigsaw puzzles: always trying to piece together a story that can never be completed—his and her life

What objects surround Susan? What does the mise-en-scène tell us?

What creature is she likened to?

� The “songbird,” the “love-bird” caught in a Lover’s Nest (headlines)

� Kane creates little shadow-bird images (the rooster) on the wall for her—fore- “shadowing” things to come.

� Her bedroom wallpaper has little animals on it.

� She is caged in Kane’s gilded cage.

� When she tries to commit suicide we see a close-up of Susan’s face on the pillow, lighting creates shadows as if prison/cage bars across her face.

� The Cockatoo during the Butler’s recounting: bird’s screech sounds like her singing and talking

How does the mise-en-scène help to define the characters?

Proxemic Patterns and Costume

Proxemic Patterns

Kane’s mother sells him to Thatcher. Why is the long take significant here?

Kane Screams at Jim Gettys

Staircase, Mazes, Psychological Tension

Themes: Words

Themes: Words

� People’s use of words to re-collect their memories

� The impossibility of getting to the truth with words—the failure of using words to describe what we remember; memory fails. Words are imprecise in what they describe.

� Interpretation, people use different words to recall things; always different and complicated by people’s own relation to the historical moment.

� Newspapers (spin, bias, and gossip, a particular POV); The Newsreel that tells “the life” of Kane…does it?

� Images fail too: the movie is a “selection” of shots that gives a particular interpretation of an event….

Themes: Words

Kane’s Words

� His own declaration of principles is a failure, or at least, inaccurate.

� Kane’s dying word—Rosebud (will we ever really know what Rosebud meant to Kane? we know it is a sled, but…)

Other People’s Words

� Thatcher’s written diary begins the story of Kane

� Susan Alexander

� Bernstein

� Leland

Whose should words should we believe? Who should we trust?

� Bernstein?

� Leland?

� Thatcher?

� Susan?

� Kane?

Themes: Words and Trust

� “People will believe what I want them to believe.”

� Those in control of media (language, images) have, or think they have, the power to make people do what the powerful want.

Themes: Trust

� Trust: Financial arrangement established for children at early age—but at what cost? ‘Trust-fund’ babies

� Trust: Business arrangement, monopoly; all control in the hands of a single power

� Trust: to feel safe, loved, protected

� Aren’t all relationships a trust—family, marriage, business, friendship—financial relationships?