1104 Citizen Kane

Discuss releases by Criterion and the films on them. Threads may contain spoilers!
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aox
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Re: Citizen Kane

#76 Post by aox » Fri Aug 19, 2011 9:17 pm

The Simpsons destroyed Citizen Kane for me. But that's OK.

Simpsons>Citizen Kane

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Citizen Kane

#77 Post by matrixschmatrix » Fri Aug 19, 2011 9:34 pm

Honestly, it's least spoilery spoiler in the world. It's hard to imagine someone who would be watching Kane at the edge of their seat, breathlessly awaiting the revelation of who or what this "Rosebud" is, isn't it? It's not like Psycho, where the things everyone knows at this point are meant to come as a shock.

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colinr0380
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Re: Citizen Kane

#78 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Aug 20, 2011 6:26 am

I remember watching Psycho in the best conditions - late at night with no prior knowledge at about ten or eleven years old. It had quite an impact, although perhaps the big mid-film twist would have had even more impact if I had been more aware of the convention at the time that main characters are generally supposed to live through the entire film, or if they do die, they mostly do so at the end!

Jonathan S
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Re: Citizen Kane

#79 Post by Jonathan S » Sat Aug 20, 2011 7:52 am

When I was about 12 in the early 1970s, I watched Citizen Kane with my mother one Sunday evening when the BBC showed it as Film of the Week. But it ran past 10pm, the time my parents always left the house for the pub, and she asked me to make a note for her of who Rosebud turned out to be. Beer came before art for my mother. Still, she was willing to try any serious film. Some years later, when I was at university, I suggested she watch the BBC broadcast of Renoir's The Rules of the Game. She did, but while ironing.... (like me, she was almost totally reliant on English subs!)

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MichaelB
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Re: Citizen Kane

#80 Post by MichaelB » Sat Aug 20, 2011 9:52 am

colinr0380 wrote:I remember watching Psycho in the best conditions - late at night with no prior knowledge at about ten or eleven years old. It had quite an impact, although perhaps the big mid-film twist would have had even more impact if I had been more aware of the convention at the time that main characters are generally supposed to live through the entire film, or if they do die, they mostly do so at the end!
I still can't believe I managed to watch Les Diaboliques without any prior knowledge of its plot - and on the big screen, too.

On the other hand, I was fully aware of Citizen Kane's big secret in advance - but it made no real difference.

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colinr0380
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Re: Citizen Kane

#81 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Aug 20, 2011 5:32 pm

I had Diaboliques big twist ruined by watching one of the series of five minute 'Close Up' programmes that the BBC screened during the Century of Cinema celebrations throughout the whole of 1995, which involved celebrities talking about their favourite films. After all this time I can't exactly place who spoiled the ending, but it was definitely a British MP of some sort! *shakes fist*

EDIT: I've just found the piece on a VHS tape and it was Denis Healey! ("the most frightening thing in the whole of cinema...the shock was with me for months, even years afterwards")
Last edited by colinr0380 on Fri Apr 06, 2012 12:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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domino harvey
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Re: Citizen Kane

#82 Post by domino harvey » Sat Aug 20, 2011 5:42 pm

I had Les Diaboliques ruined by watching Les Diaboliques

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knives
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Re: Citizen Kane

#83 Post by knives » Sat Aug 20, 2011 8:37 pm

Surprisingly I've never had the classics ruined for my simply because I never really paid attention when they were ruined.

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Saturnome
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Re: Citizen Kane

#84 Post by Saturnome » Sat Aug 20, 2011 10:27 pm

Strangely enough, I notice only very rarely something in a film was in the Simpsons (or something similar) but when watching the Simpsons reference again, I see it. So to me, funnily enough, it's the other way around, classic films are enhancing the Simpsons (edit: ... though now that I think a bit about it, it's probably the point, they're not trying to ruin films... do they?), it's like something new each time. And the beauty of it is that the references are rarely the point of the joke, it's just staging for jokes that are funny by themselves (I dunno, but the whole Bobo episode is funny, it's just funny that Mr.Burns is sleeping next to boxes of unbreakable snow globes, the snow globe is just doing some sort of transition like in Citizen Kane, you don't feel like you're missing something when you haven't seen the film), though they do make references which are the joke (Like the Rain man reference in the casino episode, I couldn't understand what the hell was going on for a long time, until I heard about it).

Hail_Cesar
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Re: Citizen Kane

#85 Post by Hail_Cesar » Sat Aug 20, 2011 11:10 pm

What the fuck Rosebud is is the least interesting thing in that great movie in my opinion... The story of a film is always just an absurd reason to put in context the film language. That sled thing is so insignificant compared to the intelligence of the film structure...

Forget the "what" and ask yourself "why" and "how" when you watch a film.

(The only film I never spoil is Fat girl :P)

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knives
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Re: Citizen Kane

#86 Post by knives » Sat Aug 20, 2011 11:12 pm

Rosebud ties it all together though. i.e. What the last three pages have been about.

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Drucker
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Re: Citizen Kane

#87 Post by Drucker » Sat Aug 20, 2011 11:45 pm

The point is not that his last word was a sled. You could really interpret Rosebud a million ways, but I think the most important takeaway is that the more you unravel a mystery, the greater that mystery can become. Rosebud just happens to be the impetus to begin the search for meaning in Kane's life.

In the same way that with Touch Of Evil, where the original question (who planted the bomb) really becomes unimportant in the long run, Rosebud gets the ball rolling, and leads to a story so much more interesting than what a simple answer could have turned out to be.

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Re: Citizen Kane

#88 Post by Hail_Cesar » Sat Aug 20, 2011 11:59 pm

(At least nobody find out what it is...)

Well it sure keeps all together but I think the most important signification is that it has the same melancholic sentiment that the whole bergsonian philosophy of "time" in the film language.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Citizen Kane

#89 Post by hearthesilence » Sun Aug 21, 2011 2:17 am

Lately, I've interpreted "Rosebud" as meaning nothing and everything about Kane's life at the same time...

Think of the superficiality (or rather the emptiness) of his life, especially in light of the causes he takes on as he gets older. In the earliest flashback, as his future’s determined inside his parents’ home, he’s playing outside by himself, shouting political slogans he couldn’t possibly understand. When he grows up into a wealthy, powerful adult, he thinks he’s a crusader for the underprivileged, and he tries, but it’s not really what he is. As his first marriage grows cold, he tries to be the romantic again, but again, he overidealizes this affair – he even puts too much stock into Susan’s vocal talents.

Whether it’s something small, like trying to be the life of the party, or something grander like romance, professional ambition or reaching for something greater than his own personal interests, Kane never does anything that’s completely and naturally him, it’s always forced.

So when he mutters his last word, it feels like Kane's grasping at one more illusion. A lazy reading would suggest that it explains everything, being denied a normal, loving home as a child…but it sounds too easy, too simple, and I think Thompson himself would've agreed, even if he found the sled. So in that way, “Rosebud” doesn’t explain anything, because it’s just another lie. But, as a final act of self-deception, I feel like it sums everything up about him...

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colinr0380
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Re: Citizen Kane

#90 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Aug 21, 2011 7:30 am

I agree, he also seems sort of in the Gatsby vein in that moment with his final reaching out for the one thing he can never acquire, the chance to able to live his life over again after having failed to recreate his halcyon days over and over again in many different forms.

One of the reasons that the 'final revelation' does not really spoil Citizen Kane is that it is also used as an ironic counterpoint to the investigator's searches. As a member of the group says after the screening of the newsreel obituary at the beginning of the film: "It's a great story, all it needs is an end" - it is not important what that 'end' is to the investigators, just that it can bring Kane's story to a neat climax, an obviously manufactured one or not, and the film itself plays on this beautifully in using this element for its own climax.

I love the way that the investigator is sent out to look for a big story, finds all of the different perspectives on and gossip about the man's life - enough for a hundred articles, so much that he can pass over never having uncovered the mystery of Kane's final words (for me the most shocking aspect of the climax is not the Rosebud revelation but the uncommented upon firery destruction of all of Kane's 'useless junk' in a casual holocaust of memorabillia. The physical aspect of a man's life, no matter no grand and intended to last for the ages, all going up in smoke). It also seems an ironic comment on the way that people will immediately gravitate towards the most commercial aspects of a story, which may not be the most revelatory ones, and the way that the most famous person in the world can still remain a mystery. Also that maintaining the mystery, rather than understanding and therefore exposing it, eventually becomes the best way that the media has found to keep Kane's legacy going.

Except for the audience, who are placed in the most privileged (but also the most impotent - almost ghosts watching powerless to influence events) position throughout the film - from listening in on the final words through to the inside of the furnace!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Thu Aug 02, 2012 7:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Der Spieler
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Re: Citizen Kane

#91 Post by Der Spieler » Sun Aug 21, 2011 7:49 pm

Jonathan S wrote:When I was about 12 in the early 1970s, I watched Citizen Kane with my mother one Sunday evening when the BBC showed it as Film of the Week. But it ran past 10pm, the time my parents always left the house for the pub, and she asked me to make a note for her of who Rosebud turned out to be. Beer came before art for my mother
That's depressing.

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carax09
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Re: Citizen Kane

#92 Post by carax09 » Sun Aug 21, 2011 8:34 pm

Der Spieler wrote:
Jonathan S wrote:When I was about 12 in the early 1970s, I watched Citizen Kane with my mother one Sunday evening when the BBC showed it as Film of the Week. But it ran past 10pm, the time my parents always left the house for the pub, and she asked me to make a note for her of who Rosebud turned out to be. Beer came before art for my mother
That's depressing.
No, actually it's not. It's hysterical. I find it very sweet that she had you write a little summary...

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Der Spieler
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Re: Citizen Kane

#93 Post by Der Spieler » Sun Aug 21, 2011 11:07 pm

It sounds like Louie season 2.

Jonathan S
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Re: Citizen Kane

#94 Post by Jonathan S » Mon Aug 22, 2011 3:30 am

To put it in perspective, I should perhaps emphasise my parents left for the pub at 10pm no matter what they were watching (and this was long before home VCRs). If they were ready a few minutes early, they'd sit watching the clock with their coats on! I suppose it was their not wanting to drink (or spend) too much - last orders were at 10.30pm most nights.

A working-class family watching Citizen Kane on a Sunday evening now strikes me as a relic of the 1960s/70s, though I wonder if it was common even then. My parents had been caught up in the WW2 and post-war embracement of the arts (you see it in all the 1940s films about classical music, etc.) and self-improvement generally - they met in a Workers Educational Association class. My father tried his hand at various creative art forms, having been denied more physical pursuits by losing his legs at 18 in the war. So - although beer did come before art - art was still extraordinarily important to them.

And, returning to topic, Kane was very much regarded as an "art movie". My mother told me word-of-mouth about it was terrible on its first (UK) run in 1942. This is confirmed by film historian Leslie Halliwell, an exact contemporary of hers who grew up in the same industrial Lancashire town:
Leslie Halliwell wrote:When Kane played Bolton, Kane lost. I turned up at the Lido at 4.15pm on the Tuesday, only to find that owing to poor business it had been taken off on the Monday, and replaced by a reissue of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: Citizen Kane

#95 Post by Roger Ryan » Mon Aug 22, 2011 11:24 am

I am reminded of watching a broadcast of KANE on a local network affiliate in Detroit in the early 80s. The station attempted to fit the 120 min. film into a two-hour time block with commercials. Approximately 30 minutes had to be cut out - had I not already seen the film (and owned it on Betamax!), I wouldn't have realized that Kane was a newspaper publisher until about halfway through (yep, the the newsreel sequence was one of the ones to hit the cutting room floor). Apparently, the station scissor men still got their calculations wrong because at 10 p.m. the film simply faded out during the tracking shot over Kane's possessions; those watching never saw the furnace or the sled!

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MichaelB
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Re: Citizen Kane

#96 Post by MichaelB » Mon Aug 22, 2011 12:08 pm

Still, that's better than that Turkish screening of René Clément's Les Jeux interdits - when people rang the TV station to complain about it (I forget what the precise objections were), they obligingly abandoned transmission partway through.

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colinr0380
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Re: Citizen Kane

#97 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Aug 22, 2011 12:26 pm

Presumably turning it off early lets Forbidden Games end in an upbeat manner! I may have to try that tactic the next time the Sex and the City movie gets shown on the television and see if Channel 4 will have mercy on their audience.

Jonathan S
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Re: Citizen Kane

#98 Post by Jonathan S » Mon Aug 22, 2011 1:25 pm

Roger Ryan wrote:I am reminded of watching a broadcast of KANE on a local network affiliate in Detroit in the early 80s. The station attempted to fit the 120 min. film into a two-hour time block with commercials. Approximately 30 minutes had to be cut out -
In pre-home video days, Kane was released on 8mm in the UK twice, one time complete but also as an eight-reeler, abridged to about 75 minutes! (This was quite common with features on 8mm but few films would be as difficult to reduce as Kane, and it was issued by a company who were notoriously insensitive with their editing procedures.) I also recall a BBC transmission as part of a Welles season in the 1980s in which the final credits were accidentally omitted.

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manicsounds
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Re: Citizen Kane

#99 Post by manicsounds » Wed Aug 31, 2011 8:50 pm


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MichaelB
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Re: Citizen Kane

#100 Post by MichaelB » Thu Sep 01, 2011 6:33 am

Jonathan S wrote:
Roger Ryan wrote:I am reminded of watching a broadcast of KANE on a local network affiliate in Detroit in the early 80s. The station attempted to fit the 120 min. film into a two-hour time block with commercials. Approximately 30 minutes had to be cut out -
In pre-home video days, Kane was released on 8mm in the UK twice, one time complete but also as an eight-reeler, abridged to about 75 minutes! (This was quite common with features on 8mm but few films would be as difficult to reduce as Kane, and it was issued by a company who were notoriously insensitive with their editing procedures.) I also recall a BBC transmission as part of a Welles season in the 1980s in which the final credits were accidentally omitted.
I still have a super 8 print of Macbeth somewhere - presumably the shorter cut (at best).

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