there is a man, a certain man...

I'm a huge White Stripes fan and their song "The Union Forever" makes a whole lot more sense now. Jack White: 1. Jenna: 0.

In a weird way, I honestly thought the most striking part of this film was the way the reporter, Mr. Thompson, was portrayed. When you consider that he was really the conduit for the entire story and thus crucial in some small way, his deliberately minimal status is rather surprising. His face was barely shown, and even then, never in direct light. In almost every scene he appeared in, he was in the foreground, yet not the focus of the shot. In contrast, Kane is the more powerful figure even when he is in reality dead and present only in the recounted stories of his friends and associates, dominating every single scene he appears in, to the best effect when he is finishing Jed’s review: Kane’s head in the foreground is larger than the entire figure of a standing Jed. I agree with Prof. Vaught that this movie was an absolute triumph of style: every single shot seemed effortlessly perfect, although the amount of effort that must have gone in to Orson Welles' debut film must have been considerable indeed. The incredible impression of a sheer vastness (*cough* Deleuze *cough*) that Welles managed to create in multiple shots was impressive, to say the least: Xanadu and its grounds seemed endless, the halls in the building itself limitless, and the collection of art and statues after Kane’s death stretched on for apparent miles. Yet I never got the impression that Kane was ever dwarfed by any of this; on the contrary, it made his persona seem all the larger for the space.

I think I already knew that "Rosebud" was his childhood sled due to the massive number of Internet "100 Best Films of All Time" lists that put Citizen Kane as number one, and then spoil the ending, and I almost wish that Orson Welles had pulled a page out of Quentin Tarantino's book, Pulp Fiction briefcase style and not ever told us what Rosebud was (had Kiss Me Deadly come out before Citizen Kane?). Thompson's lines about a single word being an inadequate description for one man's life would have seemed a lot weightier that way without some kind of homage to simpler boyhood days in the snow that I think seems a tad heavy-handed in its attempts to stamp a final message on the picture...rather like the rat on the balcony at the end of The Departed (yeah, I said it). As it stands, I’m not entirely sure if a coherent meaning really coalesced out of the film.