Citizen Kane
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Citizen Kane is debatably about a man who goes through life with money, wealth, power, and means of accomplishing anything that he wanted but in the end realizing he could in no way get what he wanted most. What he wanted was a childhood and his mother. At a very young age he was given to a trustee by his mother to take care of his well being. He resented his trustee, Walter Parks Thatcher, and did as much as he could to make his life difficult. The movies establishing shot is a very unwelcoming scene of a gate with a “No Trespassing” sign on it. The sign has a very large significance because the whole movie is about people trespassing into his life trying to figure out what his last word meant.
The camera cranes up and up through three different gates and then to a very dark deserted looking mansion. The gates could represent isolation and how no one has been able to enter this mans life and understand him. The fact that it cranes through three gates could represent the three stages of his life that we see. The mise-en-sence is very heavy with fog, a haunting reflection of the mansion in the lake, and run down looking landscape. Each cut has a very slow dissolve and gives the sense of more of a horror film. The only light coming from the mansion stays pretty much in the same position of the screen though each cut then finally to a medium shot of the window and the ledge and suddenly the light goes out and the picture fades into the room of a man in bed. A snowy film covers the screen and the audience sees a snow globe and it gives the illusion that the snow is from the globe but the camera zooms out and the snow stays. The camera moves to an extreme close up of the mans lips saying his dying word, “rosebud”, and