PARTISAN REVIEW
117
Kael offers no arguments in defense of her posItIOn; she simply takes
it for granted that we will see what she means. She enumerates a num–
ber of things that she liked and disliked about the movie, often add–
ing - gratuitously - that she had had the very same response when
she first saw the film thirty years earlier. "But, seeing
Kane
now, I
winced, as I did ,the first time, at the empty virtuosity of the shot near
the beginning when Kane, dying, drops the glass ball and we see the
nurse's entrance reflected in the glass." Or again, "Most of the news–
paper-office scenes looked as clumsily staged as ever.. . ." Kael rather
arrogantly assumes that we will be interested in her opinions even if she
doesn't bother to substantiate them.
This is not the place for a detailed critique of the film, but I do
want to suggest one way Kael's charge of shallowness might be answered.
It is true that there appears to be a certain superficiality in the por–
trait of Kane; he never comes alive as a three-dimensional, fully moti–
vated character. But part of what the film is saying is that a man like
Kane is not allowed a private life. His only identity is a public iden–
tity ; he is always aware of playing the role required of him. Beginning
with the newsreel documentary of his life, the film keeps moving in on
Kane, through four separate narratives, each somewhat more intimate
than the one preceding. But we never get quite close enough to see
Kane with the fullness and clarity fund in the standard omniscient
third-person film. What makes
Citizen Kane
distinctly modern is its self–
consciousness about the question of point of view. We see Kane always
as
others see him - a fact that Welles makes clear
visually.
A brief scene
of the solitary old man Kane wheeled around his estate is shot with a
handheld camera from outside the fence, and the shots themselves - a
rare intelligent use of handheld camera - subtly remind us that we are
at a journalist's distance from this man's life. Even the scene that may
seem to be the most intimate, revealing moment of the film - Kane's
destruction of his wife's room after she has left him - is complicated
when the camera suddenly pulls back to reveal that Kane is being
watched by the mansion's servants. Consciously or unconsciously, Kane
is always playing to an audience; the melodrama of the scene is deliber–
ately exaggerated. And that is why the burning of the sled at the very
end is so moving - not because "Rosebud" is the key to Kane's life, but
because it reminds us that there
might
be a secret hidden beneath his
public mask, a part of him that we can never know, that remains mys–
terious and inviolate, forever . hidden from the perpetually whirring
cameras. I don't think this is a brilliant or esoteric interpretation of
Citizen
Kane,
but it is a necessary beginning to any understanding of
the film. Yet Kael does not get even this far ; because she does not
look
