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Final Exam - Citizen Kane

Here are three short clips from Citizen Kane:

Here's your task:

Watch all three clips. Select one that you'd like to write about.

In a thoughtful, thorough essay, break down the clip - moment by moment, frame by frame. Identify techniques of cinematography, sound editing, film editing, and mis en scene. (Review your notes!) For each element, explain in detail what effect it creates for the viewer.

Your essay should NOT be a five paragraph essay. Instead, it should be organized chronologically by element, with many short paragraphs. Use specific terminology. (Use your note packets for reference!)

You will have one day in the IMC to prepare your essay. You will then have one day (90 minutes) in the IMC in which to write your essay. If you have any questions, address them with your instructor. Remember, your objective here is to demonstrate an understanding of how filmmakers use cinematography, sound editing, film editing, and mis en scene to manipulate an audience.

This is your final exam. It is worth 20% of your semester grade.

You may use an outline for the exam. You may not use your note packets or notebooks. You may not write out your essay in advance. All essays will be written in class on the day of the exam.

Good Luck. Have fun.

Citizen Kane Study Guide

Below you will find four different articles about Citizen Kane from three different authors. Read each and check in at the end.

CITIZEN KANE

REVIEW BY ROGER EBERT

``I don't think any word can explain a man's life,'' says one of the searchers through the warehouse of treasures left behind by Charles Foster Kane. Then we get the famous series of shots leading to the closeup of the word ``Rosebud'' on a sled that has been tossed into a furnace, its paint curling in the flames. We remember that this was Kane's childhood sled, taken from him as he was torn from his family and sent east to boarding school.

Rosebud is the emblem of the security, hope and innocence of childhood, which a man can spend his life seeking to regain. It is the green light at the end of Gatsby's pier; the leopard atop Kilimanjaro, seeking nobody knows what; the bone tossed into the air in ``2001.'' It is that yearning after transience that adults learn to suppress. ``Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost,'' says Thompson, the reporter assigned to the puzzle of Kane's dying word. ``Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything.'' True, it explains nothing, but it is remarkably satisfactory as a demonstration that nothing can be explained. ``Citizen Kane'' likes playful paradoxes like that. Its surface is as much fun as any movie ever made. Its depths surpass understanding. I have analyzed it a shot at a time with more than 30 groups, and together we have seen, I believe, pretty much everything that is there on the screen. The more clearly I can see its physical manifestation, the more I am stirred by its mystery.

It is one of the miracles of cinema that in 1941 a first-time director; a cynical, hard-drinking writer; an innovative cinematographer, and a group of New York stage and radio actors were given the keys to a studio and total control, and made a masterpiece. ``Citizen Kane'' is more than a great movie; it is a gathering of all the lessons of the emerging era of sound, just as ``Birth of a Nation'' assembled everything learned at the summit of the silent era, and ``2001'' pointed the way beyond narrative. These peaks stand above all the others.

The origins of ``Citizen Kane'' are well known. Orson Welles, the boy wonder of radio and stage, was given freedom by RKO Radio Pictures to make any picture he wished. Herman Mankiewicz, an experienced screenwriter, collaborated with him on a screenplay originally called ``The American.'' Its inspiration was the life of William Randolph Hearst, who had put together an empire of newspapers, radio stations, magazines and news services, and then built to himself the flamboyant monument of San Simeon, a castle furnished by rummaging the remains of nations. Hearst was Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates rolled up into an enigma.

Arriving in Hollywood at age 25, Welles brought a subtle knowledge of sound and dialogue along with him; on his Mercury Theater of the Air, he'd experimented with audio styles more lithe and suggestive than those usually heard in the movies. As his cinematographer he hired Gregg Toland, who on John Ford's ``The Long Voyage Home'' (1940) had experimented with deep focus photography--with shots where everything was in focus, from the front to the back, so that composition and movement determined where the eye looked first. For his cast Welles assembled his New York colleagues, including Joseph Cotten as Jed Leland, the hero's best friend; Dorothy Comingore as Susan Alexander, the young woman Kane thought he could make into an opera star; Everett Sloane as Mr. Bernstein, the mogul's business wizard; Ray Collins as Gettys, the corrupt political boss, and Agnes Moorehead as the boy's forbidding mother. Welles himself played Kane from age 25 until his deathbed, using makeup and body language to trace the progress of a man increasingly captive inside his needs. ``All he really wanted out of life was love,'' Leland says. ``That's Charlie's story--how he lost it.''

The structure of ``Citizen Kane'' is circular, adding more depth every time it passes over the life. The movie opens with newsreel obituary footage that briefs us on the life and times of Charles Foster Kane; this footage, with its portentous narration, is Welles' bemused nod in the direction of the ``March of Time'' newsreels then being produced by another media mogul, Henry Luce. They provide a map of Kane's trajectory, and it will keep us oriented as the screenplay skips around in time, piecing together the memories of those who knew him.

Curious about Kane's dying word, ``rosebud,'' the newsreel editor assigns Thompson, a reporter, to find out what it meant. Thompson is played by William Alland in a thankless performance; he triggers every flashback, yet his face is never seen. He questions Kane's alcoholic mistress, his ailing old friend, his rich associate and the other witnesses, while the movie loops through time. As often as I've seen ``Citizen Kane,'' I've never been able to firmly fix the order of the scenes in my mind. I look at a scene and tease myself with what will come next. But it remains elusive: By flashing back through the eyes of many witnesses, Welles and Mankiewicz created an emotional chronology set free from time.

The movie is filled with bravura visual moments: the towers of Xanadu; candidate Kane addressing a political rally; the doorway of his mistress dissolving into a front-page photo in a rival newspaper; the camera swooping down through a skylight toward the pathetic Susan in a nightclub; the many Kanes reflected through parallel mirrors; the boy playing in the snow in the background as his parents determine his future; the great shot as the camera rises straight up from Susan's opera debut to a stagehand holding his nose, and the subsequent shot of Kane, his face hidden in shadow, defiantly applauding in the silent hall.

Along with the personal story is the history of a period. ``Citizen Kane'' covers the rise of the penny press (here Joseph Pulitzer is the model), the Hearst-supported Spanish-American War, the birth of radio, the power of political machines, the rise of fascism, the growth of celebrity journalism. A newsreel subtitle reads: ``1895 to 1941. All of these years he covered, many of these he was.'' The screenplay by Mankiewicz and Welles (which got an Oscar, the only one Welles ever won) is densely constructed and covers an amazing amount of ground, including a sequence showing Kane inventing the popular press; a record of his marriage, from early bliss to the famous montage of increasingly chilly breakfasts; the story of his courtship of Susan Alexander and her disastrous opera career, and his decline into the remote master of Xanadu (``I think if you look carefully in the west wing, Susan, you'll find about a dozen vacationists still in residence'').

``Citizen Kane'' knows the sled is not the answer. It explains what Rosebud is, but not what Rosebud means. The film's construction shows how our lives, after we are gone, survive only in the memories of others, and those memories butt up against the walls we erect and the roles we play. There is the Kane who made shadow figures with his fingers, and the Kane who hated the traction trust; the Kane who chose his mistress over his marriage and political career, the Kane who entertained millions, the Kane who died alone.

There is a master image in ``Citizen Kane'' you might easily miss. The tycoon has overextended himself and is losing control of his empire. After he signs the papers of his surrender, he turns and walks into the back of the shot. Deep focus allows Welles to play a trick of perspective. Behind Kane on the wall is a window that seems to be of average size. But as he walks toward it, we see it is further away and much higher than we thought. Eventually he stands beneath its lower sill, shrunken and diminished. Then as he walks toward us, his stature grows again. A man always seems the same size to himself, because he does not stand where we stand to look at him.

A Viewer's Companion to 'Citizen Kane'

 BY ROGER EBERT

"Rosebud." The most famous word in the history of cinema. It explains everything, and nothing. Who, for that matter, actually heard Charles Foster Kane say it before he died? The butler says, late in the film, that he did. But Kane seems to be alone when he dies, and the reflection on the shard of glass from the broken paperweight shows the nurse entering the room. Gossip has it that the screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, used "rosebud" as an inside joke, because as a friend of Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies, he knew "rosebud" was the old man's pet name for the most intimate part of her anatomy.

Deep Focus. Everyone knows that Orson Welles and his cinematographer, Gregg Toland, used deep focus in Kane. But what is deep focus, and were they using it for the first time? The term refers to a strategy of lighting, composition, and lens choice that allows everything in the frame, from the front to the back, to be in focus at the same time. With the lighting and lenses available in 1941, this was just becoming possible, and Toland had experimented with the technique in John Ford's The Long Voyage Home a few years earlier. In most movies, the key elements in the frame are in focus, and those closer or further away may not be. When everything is in focus, the filmmakers must give a lot more thought to how they direct the viewer's attention, first here and then there. What the French call mise-en-scene--the movement within the frame-- becomes more important.

Optical illusions. Deep focus is especially tricky because movies are two-dimensional, and so you need visual guideposts to determine the true scale of a scene. Toland used this fact as a way to fool the audience's eye on two delightful occasions in the film. One comes when Kane is signing away control of his empire in Thatcher's office. Behind him on the wall are windows that look of normal size and height. Then Kane starts to walk into the background of the shot, and we realize with surprise that the windows are huge, and their lower sills are more than six feet above the floor. As Kane stands under them, he is dwarfed--which is the intent, since he has just lost great power. Later in the film, Kane walks over to stand in front of the great fireplace in Xanadu, and we realize it, too, is much larger than it first seemed.

Visible ceilings. In almost all movies before Citizen Kane, you couldn't see the ceilings in rooms because there weren't any. That's where you'd see the lights and microphones. Welles wanted to use a lot of low-angle shots that would look up toward ceilings, and so Toland devised a strategy of cloth ceilings that looked real but were not. The microphones were hidden immediately above the ceilings, which in many shots are noticeably low.

Matte drawings. These are drawings by artists that are used to create elements that aren't really there. Often they are combined with "real" foregrounds. The opening and closing shots of Kane's great castle, Xanadu, are examples. No exterior set was ever built for the structure. Instead, artists drew it, and used lights behind it to suggest Kane's bedroom window. "Real" foreground details such as Kane's lagoon and private zoo were added.

Invisible wipes. A "wipe" is a visual effect that wipes one image off the screen while wiping another into view. Invisible wipes disguise themselves as something else on the screen that seems to be moving, so you aren't aware of the effect. They are useful in "wiping" from full-scale sets to miniature sets. For example: One of the most famous shots in Kane shows Susan Alexander's opera debut, when, as she starts to sing, the camera moves straight up to a catwalk high above the stage, and one stagehand turns to another and eloquently reviews her performance by holding his nose. Only the stage and the stagehands on the catwalk are real. The middle portion of this seemingly unbroken shot is a miniature, built in the RKO model workshop. The model is invisibly wiped in by the stage curtains, as we move up past them, and wiped out by a wooden beam right below the catwalk. Another example: In Walter Thatcher's library, the statue of Thatcher is a drawing, and as the camera pans down it wipes out the drawing as it wipes in the set of the library.

Invisible Furniture Moving. In the early scene in the Kanes's cabin in Colorado, the camera tracks back from a window to a table where Kane's mother is being asked to sign a paper. The camera tracks right through where the table would be, after which it is slipped into place before we can see it. But a hat on the table is still trembling from the move. After she signs the paper, the camera pulls up and follows her as she walks back toward the window. If you look sharply, you can see that she's walking right through where the table was a moment before.

The Neatest Flash-Forward in Kane. Between Thatcher's words "Merry Christmas" and "... a very Happy New Year," two decades pass.

From Model to Reality. As the camera swoops above the night club and through the skylight to discover Susan Alexander Kane sitting forlornly at a table, it goes from a model of the nightclub roof to a real set. The switch is concealed, the first time, by a lightning flash. The second time we go to the nightclub, it's done with a dissolve.

Crowd scenes. There aren't any in Citizen Kane. It only looks like there are. In the opening newsreel, stock footage of a political rally is intercut with a low-angle shot showing one man speaking on behalf of Kane. Sound effects make it sound like he's at a big outdoor rally. Later, Kane himself addresses a gigantic indoor rally. Kane and the other actors on the stage are real. The audience is a miniature, with flickering lights to suggest movement.

Slight Factual Discrepancies. In the opening newsreel, Xanadu is described as being "on the desert coast of Florida." But Florida does not have a desert coast, as you can plainly see during the picnic scene, where footage from an earlier RKO prehistoric adventure was back-projected behind the actors, and if you look closely, that seems to be a pterodactyl flapping its wings.

The Luce Connection. Although Citizen Kane was widely seen as an attack on William Randolph Hearst, it was also aimed at Henry R. Luce and his concept of faceless group journalism, as then practiced at his Time magazine and March of Time newsreels. The opening "News on the March" segment is a deliberate parody of the Luce newsreel, and the reason you can never see the faces of any of the journalists is that Welles and Mankiewicz were kidding the anonymity of Luce's writers and editors.

An Extra with a Future. Alan Ladd can be glimpsed in the opening newsreel sequence, and again in the closing warehouse scene.

Most Thankless Job on the Movie. It went to William Alland, who plays Mr. Thompson, the journalist assigned to track down the meaning of "Rosebud." He is always seen from behind, or in backlit profile. You can never see his face. At the movie's world premiere, Alland told the audience he would turn his back so they could recognize him more easily.

The Brothel Scene. It couldn't be filmed. In the original screenplay, after Kane hires away the staff of the Chronicle, he takes them to a brothel. The Production Code office wouldn't allow that. So the scene, slightly changed, takes place in the Inquirer newsroom, still with the dancing girls.

The Eyeless Cockatoo. Yes, you can see right through the eyeball of the shrieking cocatoo, in the scene before the big fight between Kane and Susan. It's a mistake.

The Most Evocative Shot in the Movie. There are many candidates. My choice is the shot showing an infinity of Kanes reflected in mirrors as he walks past.

The Best Speech in Kane. My favorite is delivered by Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), when he is talking about the magic of memory with the inquiring reporter:   "A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since, that I haven't thought of that girl."

Genuine Modesty. In the movie's credits, Welles allowed his director's credit and Toland's cinematography credit to appear on the same card--an unprecedented gesture that indicated how grateful Welles was.

False Modesty. In the unique end credits, the members of the Mercury Company are introduced and seen in brief moments from the movie. Then smaller parts are handled with a single card containing many names. The final credit down at the bottom, in small type, says simply:  

Kane...............Orson Welles

Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

Citizen Kane

A Film Review by James Berardinelli

**** out of **** stars

When it comes to Citizen Kane, one question eclipses all others: Is it the best film ever made?

For years, I have avoided writing a review of this movie, intimidated perhaps by its immense reputation. Having missed the 1991 fiftieth anniversary revival, I had only seen Citizen Kane on the small screen, and it didn't seem right somehow to discuss a picture of this magnitude without viewing it at least once in the manner originally envisioned. Well, some five years after I started writing reviews, the opportunity arose at a small film festival. This review is the result of that screening.

Citizen Kane has been lauded as the greatest motion picture to come out of America during the black-and-white era (or any era, for that matter). It also represents the pinnacle of Orson Welles' film making career. For, although Welles lived for more than forty years following the release of Kane, he never succeeded in recapturing the brilliance or fulfilling the promise of his first feature. Some maintain that his cut of The Magnificent Ambersons was more powerful, but the studio took the film away from him, slashing more than 40 minutes of footage. And, while Welles' Shakespeare movies and A Touch of Evil contain elements of brilliance, they are not on the same level as Kane. It has been argued, most forcefully in Thomas Lennon and Michael Epstein's 1996 documentary, The Battle Over Citizen Kane, that Kane not only started Welles' directorial career, but nearly ended it.

The movie opens with an unforgettable image of a distant, fog-shrouded castle on a hill. It's a classic gothic shot, and goes a long way towards establishing Citizen Kane's mood. We quickly learn that this place, called Xanadu, is the dwelling of America's Kubla Khan, Charles Foster Kane (Welles), a one-time newspaper magnate who could have become President if not for an ill-advised extramarital affair. Xanadu, in the words of the faux newsreel that gives a brief history of Kane's life, is the "costliest monument of a man to himself." Any resemblance to The Ranch, William Randolph Hearst's real-life San Simeon abode, is not coincidental.

Within moments of the film's eerie, visually-stunning opening, Kane is dead, uttering the word "Rosebud" as he hunches over. His death, like his life, is a big news event, and the paper he owned, the New York Inquirer, is desperate to unearth the meaning of his cryptic last word. Is it a woman he bedded? A horse he bet on? A beloved pet? Some long-lost, unrequited love? The truth, which isn't revealed until the closing scene, represents one of the all-time greatest motion picture ironies, and leads us to believe that, on some level, Kane regretted not having led a simple, quiet life.

After showing Kane's death, Citizen Kane presents a ten-minute "newsreel" that details the man's larger-than-life accomplishments. Then, as a reporter (William Alland) from the Inquirer digs into Kane's past to learn the meaning of Rosebud, the mogul's history is unraveled through a series of extended flashbacks that represent the sometimes-overlapping, non- chronological accounts of five eyewitnesses. As the story unfolds, we see Kane, aided by his closest friend, Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotton), build a nationwide newspaper empire out of one small paper with a circulation of less than 30,000. To do so, he displays equal parts ruthlessness and generosity, willing to lose 1,000,000 dollars a year to win the circulation wars. His New York Inquirer specializes in bold, splashy headlines that don't necessarily represent the truth. By the time he marries Emily Norton (Ruth Warrick), the President's niece, Kane is one of the most powerful men in America -- a public giant with designs on the White House.

Eventually, Kane moves into the political arena, but his bid for the governor's office crashes and burns when his rival, Boss Jim Gettys (Ray Collins), exposes Kane's affair with Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore). Following this failure, Kane divorces his first wife, marries Susan, then goes into seclusion in his unfinished palace of Xanadu. As the years pass, he becomes progressively more bitter and less approachable, until Susan, weary of Xanadu's isolation, leaves him. Alone and unloved, Kane awaits the inescapable hand of death.

The script for Citizen Kane, written by Herman J. Mankiewicz (with an assist from Welles), is a thinly-disguised fictional biography of publishing king William Randolph Hearst, who was 76 years old when the movie came out in 1941. And, while Hearst was offended by Welles' characterization of him, he was supposedly more angered by Kane's unflattering portrayal of his beloved mistress, Marion Davies (who is represented in the film by Susan Alexander). To add insult to injury, "Rosebud" was allegedly Hearst's pet name for Marion's private parts.

Kane is not, however, all Hearst. There's more than a little Welles in the character, and, when one examines the direction the film maker's life took after Kane, the similarities become more obvious. After peaking with Kane, Welles began an slow-but-inevitable descent into isolation, eventually dying of a heart attack in 1985. Like Kane, he was a vital, passionate figure in youth, but a sad, pathetic one at the end. (Who can forget the Paul Masson commercials?) In retrospect, Kane can be viewed as being as much a representation of Welles as of Hearst.

Back in 1941, Hearst exerted his considerable power and influence to destroy Citizen Kane before it opened. He failed, but, even though Kane saw the light of day, Welles' young career (he was only 25 at the time) did not escape unscathed. A smear campaign in Hearts' papers branded him as a communist. Kane, nominated for nine Oscars, emerged with only one (best screenplay), and "boos" could be heard whenever the film was mentioned during the ceremony. And, before Welles had completed post-production, RKO wrested control of his next picture, The Magnificent Ambersons, from him.

As a film, Citizen Kane is a powerful dramatic tale about the uses and abuses of wealth and power. It's a classic American tragedy about a man of great passion, vision, and greed, who pushes himself until he brings ruins to himself and all around him. Of course, the production aspect that makes Citizen Kane so memorable is Greg Toland's landmark cinematography. In fact, it's impossible to have a serious discussion about this film without mentioning this element.

The movie is a visual masterpiece, a kaleidoscope of daring angles and breathtaking images that had never been attempted before, and has never been equaled since. Toland perfected a deep-focus technique that allowed him to photograph backgrounds with as much clarity as foregrounds (note the scene where Kane's parents discuss his future while, as seen through the window, the child plays outside in the snow). There's also an extremely effective low-angle shot late in the film where Kane trashes Susan's room. The cinematography documentary, Visions of Light, devoted an entire section to Citizen Kane. If any other film has come close to the nearly-perfect artistry of this one, I haven't seen it. Anyone foolishly wondering how black-and-white images could be superior to color needs only to watch the first few frames of Citizen Kane to understand. Not only is it impossible to envision this picture in color, the very thought is blasphemous.

There's no doubt that Citizen Kane was far ahead of its time. Uncompromising, unsentimental drama of this sort was not in vogue during an era that was better known for titles like The Wizard of Oz Gone with the Wind, and How Green Was My Valley (which beat out Kane for best picture). In challenging Hearst, Welles forced a clash of egos that had wide-ranging repercussions. Yet, out of the conflict, Citizen Kane emerged stronger than ever. Would the film be as compelling if we didn't know how close it came to never being released? Or if we didn't recognize the parallels between the life of the main character and that of the director?

All of this brings me back to the question that I opened the review with: Is Citizen Kane the best movie ever made? Many critics would argue "yes" without pause, but my enthusiasm is more restrained. While I acknowledge that Kane is a seminal masterpiece, I don't think it's the greatest motion picture of all time. Even so, there's no denying the debt that the movie industry owes to Welles and his debut feature. Motion picture archives and collections across the world would be poorer without copies of this film, which will forever be recognized as a defining example of American cinema.

© 1996 James Berardinelli 

THE BATTLE OVER CITIZEN KANE

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/kane2/

It was a clash of the titans. William Randolph Hearst, the lord and ruler of San Simeon. And Orson Welles, the ambitious young man with a golden touch, who set out to dethrone him. It was a fight from which neither man ever fully recovered.

Long before Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was released in 1941, there was a buzz about the movie and the "boy genius" who made it. At a preview screening, nearly everyone present realized that they had seen a work of brilliance--except Hedda Hopper, the leading gossip columnist of the day. She hated the movie, calling it "a vicious and irresponsible attack on a great man."

Citizen Kane was a brutal portrait of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. When Hearst learned through Hopper of Welles' film, he set out to protect his reputation by shutting the film down. Hollywood executives, led by Louis B. Mayer, rallied around Hearst, attempting to buy Citizen Kane in order to burn the negative. At the same time, Hearst's defenders moved to intimidate exhibitors into refusing to show the movie. Threats of blackmail, smears in the newspapers, and FBI investigations were used in the effort.

Hearst's campaign was largely successful. It would be nearly a quarter-century before Citizen Kane was revived--before Welles would gain popular recognition for having created one of cinema's great masterpieces.

"Hearst and Welles were proud, gifted, and destructive--geniuses each in his way," says producer Thomas Lennon. "The

fight that ruined them both was thoroughly in character with how they'd lived their lives."

Orson Welles was just twenty-four when he took aim at William Randolph Hearst. The brash upstart was well on his way to claiming Hollywood as his own. A few years earlier, his infamous radio broadcast, War of the Worlds, had terrified listeners and won him the sweetest contract Hollywood had ever seen. With a reputation as a gifted radio and theater director, Welles' arrogance was founded on a track record of success and a lifetime of encouragement.

"Everybody told me from the moment I could hear that I was absolutely marvelous," Welles once told an interviewer.

Hearst was a 76-year-old newspaper magnate whose daring and single-mindedness had made him a publishing legend. The son of a wealthy mine owner, he too had been raised to believe he could have everything. He built his empire selling newspapers filled with entertaining stories that were often scandalous and, occasionally, pure fiction.

"We had a crime story that was going to be featured in a 96-point headline on page one," remembers Vern Whaley, an editor for Hearst's Herald-Examiner. "When I found the address that was in the story, that address was a vacant lot. So I hollered over at the rewrite desk, I said, 'You got the wrong address in this story. This is a vacant lot.' The copy chief that night was a guy named Vic Barnes. And he says, 'Sit down, Vern.' He says, 'The whole story's a fake.'"

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., remembers his father asking Hearst why he preferred concentrating on newspapers, with their limited, regional appeal, rather than spending more energy on motion pictures and their worldwide audience. Fairbanks recalls Hearst's reply: "I thought of it, but I decided against it. Because you can crush a man with journalism, and you can't with motion pictures."

Hearst began his empire with one small newspaper in San Francisco, then expanded to New York where, with flair and daring, he created the top selling of the city's fourteen newspapers. But he always wanted more, and eventually he controlled the first nationwide chain--with papers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Atlanta. Soon, an estimated one in five Americans was reading a Hearst paper every week.

Hearst's urge to acquire extended to art objects, mansions, and women. He owned eight homes, each stocked with priceless antiques and works of art, but spent most of his time in his California castle. Called San Simeon, the estate was on a piece of property nearly half the size of Rhode Island. George Bernard Shaw commented, "San Simeon was the place God would have built--if he had the money." Hearst's companion was Marion Davies, a showgirl whom he loved and propelled into Hollywood movies. Together they entertained Hollywood's biggest, best, and brightest; San Simeon became a social mecca for the stars.

Marion Davies was widely liked in Hollywood: straightforward, full of humor and charm. The battle over Citizen Kane was in large part a fight over her honor: It was said that Welles's treatment of Davies riled Hearst more than any other aspect of the film. Even Welles agreed that Susan Alexander, the Davies character, was unfair:

"We had somebody very different in the place of Marion Davies. And it seemed to me to be something of a dirty trick, and does still strike me as being something of a dirty trick, what we did to her. And I anticipated the trouble from Hearst for that reason."

Never one to shy away from trouble, Welles built his career on a streak of controversial productions--the more upset and swirl he could create, the better. His production of Macbeth was set in Haiti and employed an all-black cast...his Julius Caesar was reimagined as a contemporary drama about facism...and finally, his radio staging of War of the Worlds, about Martians invading Earth, caused so much terror and uproar it might have ended his career. But his talent and ferocious energy seemed to lift him above the fray, delivering him unscathed to his next challenge. When he graced the cover of Time magazine, he was only twenty-three years old.

Welles was the talk of Hollywood when he arrived. His contract demanded two films, but Welles demanded they be revolutionary. He cast about for months for a project, presenting two ideas to the studio, neither of which went into production. With the pressure mounting, Welles was desperate. "He did a lot of drinking," says Bill Alland, Welles' longtime associate. "He did a lot of chasing around. But he also did a lot of work." When Herman Mankiewicz, a Hollywood writer and friend of Welles who had been a guest at San Simeon, proposed the story of Hearst, Welles seized on the idea as his last best chance.

Producer John Houseman, who worked with Mankiewicz on the Citizen Kane script, recalls the creation and evolution of Charles Foster Kane, the character modeled on Hearst, which Welles himself would play. "We were creating a vehicle suited to a man who, at twenty-four, was only slightly less fabulous than the hero he would be portraying. And the deeper we penetrated into the heart of Charles Foster Kane, the closer we seemed to come to the identity of Orson Welles."

But in the course of making Citizen Kane, Welles' huge ego and his youth would blind him to the extent of Hearst's power and reach; he tragically underestimated Hearst's ability to counterattack.

Indeed, Welles proved no match for the old man. Hearst threatened to expose long-buried Hollywood scandals his newspapers had suppressed at the request of the studios. His papers used Welles' private life against him, making blunt references to communism and questioning Welles' willingness to fight for his country. Major theater chains refused to carry Citizen Kane. Hearst's campaign to discredit Welles was ruthless, skillful, and much aided by Welles himself, who had never bothered to hide his contempt for Hollywood. When Welles' name and his film were mentioned at the 1942 Academy Awards, they were booed. Nominated for nine awards, Citizen Kane lost in every category except one. (Welles shared the award for best screenplay with Herman Mankiewicz.) After the Academy's repudiation of Citizen Kane, RKO quietly retired the film to its vault.

Citizen Kane was an American saga about a giant who brings ruin to all, including himself. As fate would have it, it is through this film that both men are remembered today. In telling the tale of these two flawed and fascinating men, The Battle over Citizen Kane also sheds light on the masterpiece over which they fought, the fiction that fuses them both: the enduring film character of Charles Foster Kane. 

Mr. Cowlin here again. Your task this week? In a thoughtful, thorough, multi-paragraph, two-page essay answer the following question:

Regardless of whether or not you actually liked Citizen Kane,
and taking into account some of the information you learned from above,

can you honestly argue that it wasn't the greatest film

we've viewed in class this semester?

Do not post your answer in the comments below. Include a few cited quotations from the above articles (with which you may either agree or disagree.) Hand in your essay on Monday. To review, here's a list of the films we've seen this semester:

• Psycho
• The Great Train Robbery
• High Noon
• No Country for Old Men
• Yojimbo
• House of Flying Daggers
• Jaws
• One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Blade Runner
• Memento
• The Maltese Falcon
• Le Jetee
• Fantastic Planet
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
• Triplets of Belleville

Triplets of Belleville Online Discussion

On this post you will find three reviews of The Triplets of Belleville and one news story about the director. Give them a read and then dig into an online class discussion. Use ideas, concerns, analysis, and criticism from the articles as jumping off points. Use quotations. This post will be left open all weekend, so you can contribute up through Tuesday class time.

The Triplets of Belleville

BY ROGER EBERT / Dec 26, 2003

Ebert Rating: ***½

"The Triplets of Belleville" will have you walking out of the theater with a goofy damn grin on your face, wondering what just happened to you.

To call it weird would be a cowardly evasion. It is creepy, eccentric, eerie, flaky, freaky, funky, grotesque, inscrutable, kinky, kooky, magical, oddball, spooky, uncanny, uncouth and unearthly. Especially uncouth. What I did was, I typed the word "weird" and when that wholly failed to evoke the feelings the film stirred in me, I turned to the thesaurus and it suggested the above substitutes -- and none of them do the trick, either.

There is not even a way I can tell you what the film is "like," because I can't think of another film "like" it. Maybe the British cartoonists Ronald Searle and Gerald Scarfe suggest the visual style. Sylvain Chomet, the writer and director, has created an animated feature of appalling originality and scary charm. It's one of those movies where you keep banging your fist against your head to stop yourself from using the word meets, as in Monsieur Hulot meets Tim Burton, or the Marquis de Sade meets Lance Armstrong.

Most animated features have an almost grotesque desire to be loved. This one doesn't seem to care. It creates a world of selfishness, cruelty, corruption and futility -- but it's not serious about this world and it doesn't want to attack it or  improve upon it. It simply wants to sweep us up in its dark comic vision. The movie opens in France, where a small boy and his dog live in the top floor of a narrow, crooked house. The Metro roars past on schedule, and his dog races upstairs on schedule to bark at it, and the boy's grandmother gives the boy a trike and eventually a bike, and soon he is the foremost bicycle racer in the world. Meanwhile, the Metro has been replaced by an elevated highway that shoulders the house to one side, so that it leans crookedly and the stairs are dangerous for the dog to climb.

The grandmother is a ferocious trainer. A little whistle seems welded to her jaw, and she toots relentlessly as the boy pedals. Then he is kidnapped by thugs who want to use him for a private gambling operation, and the key to his rescue may be the Triplets of Belleville, who were music hall stars in the era of Josephine Baker, so how old would that make them now?

The action leaves Paris for New York, maybe, although it is more likely Montreal, where Chomet lives. Doesn't matter so much, since there has never been a city like this. Jazz joints from the 1930s exist with noir hideouts and bizarre tortures. After a certain point it isn't the surprises that surprise us -- it's the surprises about the surprises. We take it in stride, for example, when the Triplets go fishing for frogs with dynamite. Wasn't it only earlier this week, in "Big Fish," that Ewan McGregor hunted a giant catfish with dynamite? No, what amazes us is that one of the exploded frogs survives and crawls desperately from a scalding pot in its bid for freedom.

I am completely failing to do justice to this film. Now you think it is about frog torture. I will get letters from PETA. What happens to the frogs is nothing compared to what happens to the grandson, who is subjected to Rube Goldberg exercise machines, and at one point, has his kneecaps vacuumed.

Nostalgia For a Land That Twirls In Dreams

By A. O. SCOTT

There are some works of animation that are notable for their realism, for conjuring imaginary worlds whose inhabitants -- the sea creatures in ''Finding Nemo,'' the witches and princesses in classic Disney fairy tales, the wide-eyed heroines of Japanese anime -- move in more or less plausible ways through fantastical settings. Others -- the cartoons of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones come to mind -- rewrite the laws of physics and the conventions of physiology to suit their own fanciful requirements.

''The Triplets of Belleville,'' the first feature film by Sylvan Chomet, surely belongs in the second category. Mr. Chomet's is a universe of sheer impossibility, where size, proportion and balance are ruled by the whims of his perverse pen and peculiar imagination.

Although that imagination has evidently been fed by sources as various as Betty Boop, Jacques Tati and European comic books, its products are too strange to be assimilated into any known tradition. ''The Triplets,'' which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, may be the oddest movie of the year, by turns sweet and sinister, insouciant and grotesque, invitingly funny and forbiddingly dark. It may also be one of the best, a tour de force of ink-washed, crosshatched mischief and unlikely sublimity.

The film's two lines of intelligible dialogue have been dubbed into English since it was shown, to rapturous applause, at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Its sensibility, however, remains irreducibly French, and it may confuse audiences used to the cuddly multicultural moralism that defines American feature-length animation.

The overture is a black-and-white spectacle: naughty, exuberant and a little creepy. It evokes Josephine Baker and Fred Astaire (eaten by his own shoes) and introduces the Triplets of the title, a trio of gangly, cloche-wearing scat singers. (They sing the movie's theme song, a swinging piece of nonsense likely to stick in your head for hours after you leave the theater.)

These celebrities turn out to be images flickering on a battered television set that belongs to Madame Souza, an old woman with thick glasses and orthopedic shoes who lives in a rickety building with her orphaned grandson, Champion. He is a gloomy, tubby boy who smiles only when his grandmother presents him with a tricycle, a gift that foreshadows his eventual transformation into a gaunt, sad-eyed Tour de France bicyclist with hypertrophied calves and thighs.

The story is too bizarre and wonderful to summarize, but it leads Madame Souza to Belleville, a Manhattan-like dream city populated by obese hamburger eaters, cretinous Boy Scouts, and a diminutive red-nosed French mafia chieftain. Belleville (not to be confused with the Paris neighborhood of the same name) is also the home of the Triplets, now ancient, who subsist entirely on frogs and frog byproducts and who make infectious music out of household appliances and carefully preserved newspapers.

''The Triplets'' is a similar collage of the found and the invented. Its style evokes a postwar France making its stubborn, eccentric way into the modern world, a nation of chain-smoking truck drivers and accordion-squeezing pop singers, presided over by Charles de Gaulle, whose beaked, chinless profile is mirrored in many of the film's faces, including Champion's. Mr. Chomet, who dedicated the film to his parents, clearly feels some nostalgia for the mixture of worldliness and parochialism that defined the bygone France. And it is possible to detect, in his view of the fleshy Bellevilleans, a whiff of Gallic disdain for the gigantism of American culture.

The twisting of cultural stereotypes has long been part of the cartoon heritage; think of the amorous Pepe le Peu, for example. In any case the tether that connects Mr. Chomet's imagined world with the real one is long and loose. He is a master of surprise, terror, silliness and sheer eccentricity, and this compact movie is stuffed nearly to bursting with astounding sequences: Madame Souza setting out in the moonlight, by pedal boat, in the wake of a giant ocean liner; her dog, Bruno, dreaming in black and white; one of the triplets hunting frogs with an hand grenade.

I could go on, and it is likely that before too long, bits and pieces of ''The Triplets'' will find their way into the cartoon lexicon. Best to see this curious and captivating film now, before some of its vivid strangeness fades into familiarity.

The Art of Noise

Kinetic French retro-toon and onomatopoeic Hungarian whatsit beat the curse of subtitles

J. Hoberman

published: Nov ember 25, 2003

Is there a way for foreign movies to avoid the curse of subtitles? Not with mime but with noise. The spirits of Mickey Mouse and Jacques Tati hover over the French-Belgian-Canadian animation The Triplets of Belleville and the Hungarian whatsit Hukkle; each is a splendidly eccentric first feature that triumphantly tosses aside dialogue in favor of a richly expressive audio mix. Finding Nemo and Looney Tunes: Back in Action notwithstanding, the year's most ingenious and original animated feature is the gloriously retro The Triplets of Belleville, written and directed by erstwhile comic-book artist Sylvain Chomet. The last Hollywood animation this good was The Iron Giant, and Triplets is similarly steeped in two-dimensional cartoon-ness.

The movie opens with a brilliantly executed pastiche of an early-'30s Fleischer Brothers Talkertoon—complete with scratches. A stretch-and-squeeze horde of funny-looking swells descends on an all-star variety show. Caricatured celebs performing for the rhythmically recycled audience include Django Reinhardt, Josephine Baker, and Fred Astaire (devoured by one of his tap shoes). The stars of the show, however, are the eponymous triplets whose infectious scatting provides an insinuatingly manic and vaguely scatological backdrop.

Chomet leaves the spectator wanting more. The cartoon disintegrates into static, as watched on television by old Madame Souza and her morose, sharp-nosed grandson Champion, sometime during the de Gaulle era. (Chomet himself was born in 1963.) Madame Souza, Champion, and their obnoxiously barking dog, Bruno, live in an isolated house that's been knocked askew by a railroad trestle. For their world, Triplets switches to a proudly sketchy storybook style.

The spidery lines and spindly figures suggest Ronald Searle. The characters might be stuffed with kapok. The palette is subdued and autumnal—goldenrod and ochre with a burnt sienna wash. Virtually devoid of dialogue, Triplets is a narrative contraption that concerns a narrative contraption— as well as an animated cartoon that never stops thinking about motion. Madame Souza's every step is emphasized by a clunky orthopedic shoe. Champion becomes a fanatical bicyclist. Subjected by his grandmother to a hilariously intense regimen, he never stops riding his bike—even once he's kidnapped by two mysterious men in black and taken away in an oversize freighter. The boat sits on the Hokusai Sea like a rusty flame as the unstoppable Madame Souza and Bruno paddle after it, dodging storms and whales, to arrive in the alt-New York (cum Quebec) of Belleville.

The bovine Statue of Liberty in the harbor presages an entire city of big-bottomed fatties. (Chomet's characters are typically based on a few visual ideas. The bad guys are menacingly modular rectangular blocks, a maître d' is  designed to bend over backward, and a timorous mechanic wears fake mouse ears.) Living below the alt-Brooklyn Bridge, Madame Souza is discovered by the triplets, ancient but still scatting. The crones bring her back to their sordid tenement—kids will love the details—for a meal of mucky amphibian stew. Champion, meanwhile, is being held captive in a subterranean nightclub where gangsters gamble on virtual bicycle races—as in an old movie, the background scenery is furnished by primitive rear-screen projection. Triplets ends with a chase within a chase—the liberated captives still peddling away—and a requisite serving of smash and crash.

All animation is obsessive; Triplets also manages to seem fresh. It's nasty but droll, cheerfully grotesque, full of non sequiturs as well as deadpan repetitions, never cute and the opposite of precious. In the grand finale, the old ladies infiltrate the joint as a noise orchestra, performing their hits on newspaper, refrigerator shelves, and vacuum cleaner. You have to see it.

Artisanal French Animator Says No to His Mouse and the Mouse

David Ng

Nov. 25, 2003

Last summer, Jeffrey Katzenberg declared that "traditional animation is likely a thing of the past." This week, the new French film The Triplets of Bellevilleprovides ample evidence to the contrary. A hand-drawn smorgasbord of caricaturized modernity told with minimal dialogue, Triplets rejuvenates the 2-D genre through an artisanal obsession with detail. "I was trying a lot to carry on the animation of the '50s and '60s," says writer-director Sylvain Chomet, citing Disney's cel-based classics as a primary influence. "I wanted to take the technique of 101 Dalmatians and tell a story that's maybe a little more adult."

A veteran comic-book artist, the 40-year-old Chomet doesn't hesitate when asked about his foremost passion: "I like to draw, and I don't want to spend my time in front of a monitor with a mouse." Tripletsdoes contain some digital effects, but the characters—spindly cyclist Champion, his elfin grandmother, and their neurotic mutt—were created entirely by an intimate team of sketchers. "I was directing them at the same time I was animating," explains Chomet. "I could show what I wanted by drawing in front of them." While Triplets contains copious references to Tati and Chaplin, Chomet insists his inspirations were more contemporary. For the eponymous trio of music-hall dames who rescue Champion from the Mafia, he wanted to combine "the idea of these old women carrying basketball players inside of them" with the bebop charisma of 'Round Midnight'sDexter Gordon.

As personal as anything from the Disney/Pixar axis is mass-produced, Tripletsonly grows in scope and imagination, especially in the unveiling of Belleville, an ur-metropolis that Chomet describes as "a cross between New York and Montreal, or Chicago and Montreal." Ironically, Chomet once worked at Disney ("I've never been paid so much to be so useless"), and the experience has clearly honed his subversive tastes. Triplets contains both nudity and gun violence—taboo subjects for the Mouse's target demographic. "In the States today, there's more creativity in TV animation than in the cinema," Chomet ventures, listing South Park and Ren & Stimpy among his favorites. "What surprises me is that while you won't show guns in an animated film, your kids are allowed to have them."

 Okay, ready, gang? Dig in!

Senior Final Exams

Welcome to the end of senior year. I hope your time in film class has been enlightening. You have just one more task to take care of before you go...your final exam.

Your task is to thoughtfully and thoroughly analyze a single frame of film. You should include everything we've learned this year: camera angle, mis en scene, color, contrast, staging...you know, everything. Use your notes. Go all the way. Too much is just enough. Along with the nitty-gritty film elements you've recorded in your notes, you may want to cover the following topics:

• What is the subject of the frame, and how do we know?
• What is the tone of the frame, and how do we know?
• What story is the frame telling, and how do we know?
• If possible, include the context of the frame as well as the minute and second the frame in the film occurs.

What frame should you use, and from what film? That is totally up to you. If you would like to capture your own frame, just be sure to either e-mail it to your instructor or print it off and turn it in along with your essay. Or you may select one of the frames provided below. Some are from films we have watched in class, some are from films with which you are familiar regardless, and some are from films you have never even heard of. The more familiar you are with the film, the easier the task is going to be, but the choice is yours.

A hard copy of your final exam essay is due AT THE START OF CLASS on Wednesday, MAY 30. You must personally turn it in. Emails will not be accepted. 

I've written an example of what I'm looking for. It can be found HERE. Here are some links to a few more examples crafted by past students:

• Fight Club
• Can't Hardly Wait
• Zombieland
• Shutter Island

And here some frames you may wish to choose from:

 Boogie Nights

 Cool Hand Luke

 The Descent

Gladiator

 The Grifters

 House of Flying Daggers

 The Maltese Falcon

 The Matrix

 Memento

Mississippi Burning 

 Pan's Labyrinth

 Pulp Fiction

 Rear Window

 The Shawshank Redemption

 Speed

 Sword of the Beast

 Touch of Evil

 Unforgiven

 Walk the Like

Return of the Dragon