TECH ID: 00005987

H140 FIRST EXAM; ESSAY QUESTION #1

Editing Breakfast in Citizen Kane

Soon after Charles Foster Kane marries Emily, the woman of his dreams who is brought back from Europe like one of this statues, their marriage begins to collapse. The severity and intensity of this collapse is captured in one two-minute sequence, which remains one of the most striking examples of Welles's evocative and economical editing in Citizen Kane.

The sequence begins with a medium two-shot of Kane and Emily in relatively warm light. Their conversation is teasing and intimate, visually reinforced by a shot/reverse shot exchange of loving looks: he tells her she is beautiful, and when she complains about his having to leave for his newspaper office, he says he will call and change his appointments. That exchange is then followed by five more short shot/reverse shot pairs, and in each, the eyes of the couple grow increasingly suspicious and severe. The dialogue is progressively hostile and clipped, and the newspaper becomes both a visual and verbal symbol of their growing division. In the first scene of this middle section, she complains: "Charles, if I didn't trust you.... What do you do on a newspaper in the middle of the night?" In the third, Emily pleads with him to stop attacking her uncle, the President, in his newspaper. By the fifth, the overlapping dialogue prohibits Emily from finishing her sentence.

Emily: Really, Charles, people have a right to expect . . . .

Charles: What I care to give them.

Through the entire sequence, the changes in wardrobe and other aspects of the mise-en-scene also indicate that the passage of time is likewise a passage from emotional intimacy. Kane changes from a romantic tuxedo to a business suit. Their setting alters from an unobstructed and close space to an obstructed space cluttered with plants, flowers, and newspapers.

The succinct logic of the editing is then powerfully concluded with a shot/reverse shot and then another two-shot. In the shot/reverse shot, the eyes no longer meet or match, since they are now both reading separate newspapers -- he, his own (The Inquirer), she, the rival (The Chronicle). Formally balancing the opening of the sequence, the medium-long two-shot has much colder and darker lighting. The blocking places the two former lovers conspicuously at opposite sides of the frame.

The real time that this sequence describes is probably many years. Yet, through a rigorous and creative use of an edited space and the overlapping dialogue within that space, Welles depicts more than just the synopsis of a failed marriage. Linking the six encounters, appropriately, with flash pans, he also provides a succinct and cinematic articulation of one of Citizen Kane's many thematic meanings: how Kane's greatest desires seem to turn to dust almost immediately after he possesses them and how he consequently becomes a man always alienated in the great spaces that surround him.