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CITIZEN KANE

Symbolism

     
Orson Welles' highly acclaimed Citizen Kane..makes extensive use of symbolism. One of the opening shots of the film shows the decayed elegance of
Kane's immense estate, Xanadu. In the course of the film,the audience learns that Kane has spent much of his lifetime building and furnishing this
contemporary palace--thus, Xanadu becomes a symbol of his ponderous yet empty "success."  The snowflake paperweight and Kane's old sled, "Rosebud,"
come to symbolize the normal childhood that he was denied; the acres of objets d'art with which he surrounded himself are symbolic of the beauty
that was conspicuously absent in his own life. (Source, page 125,  The Celluloid Literature, 2nd Ed.)

Camera Technique: Deep Focus

For example, during the scene in Citizen Kane when Charles Foster Kane is signing away his fortune,
he stands and walks away from the camera toward a bank of windows and then returns. At the beginning
of the scene the windows look as though they are a normal distance from the floor. However, as Kane
walks toward them, we realize that the windows are actually more than six feet from the floor. When
he stands in front of these now enormous windows, he is absolutely diminished. Through the use of
deep focus, Orson Welles is able to keep everything in the shot in focus and illustrates just how
defeated and broken Kane is at that moment. The technique (deep focus and mise-en-scene)
MAKES the meaning (Kane's admission of his insignificance) in that scene in the same way irony
or simile or sound devices do in literature.  (from English Teachers Companion blog post)

 

Visions of Light (documentary, 1992)

In this shot from Citizen Kane, director Orson Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland want to indicate that the object being debated over and signed away is the boy (young Kane) himself, but they want to do so visually and with subtlety.  The bright white document—the contract that seals Kane’s fate—is in the middle of the frame below the other bright white spot, also in the center of the frame, which contains the boy himself playing in the snow.  By placing these two aesthetically similar segments of the image in proximity to one another the filmmakers are urging viewers to notice them and in turn to consider their connection. By using shot composition, lighting, and deep-focus cinematography, Welles and Toland are creating a visual bridge, as well as a thematic link, between the boy and the papers that will forever change his life.

Filmmakers can also make use of an extended depth of field, called deep focus, as an aesthetic device
to enlarge our perception of depth. In deep focus, all objects from close foreground to extreme
background are seen in equally sharp focus. Orson Welles's Citizen Kane was celebrated for its
expressive use of deep focus effects. In one scene, for example Kane and his wife Susan are in
their enormous living room. Despite the vast distance between them the deep focus photography
keeps both figures in sharp focus suggesting that their separation is not only a physical but also an emotional one.
(Source: http://www.britishcouncil.org/argentina-literature-reading_a_film.doc)

Camera Angle: Dutch Angle (tilted)
This is achieved by tilting the camera slightly, it can convey a sense of urgency or fear to a scene
especially when it illustrates a characters reaction.
(Source: http://library.thinkquest.org/29285/filmmaking/st5.html)

   


Camera angle: Low

The low-angle setup was dominant in Orson Welles's CITIZEN KANE to suggest the titanic dimension of the
tycoon protagonist. To permit the frequent use of the low-angle, Welles had to build his sets complete with
ceilings, and the omnipresence of ceilings in the background is one of the many unusual features of CITIZEN KANE.
By merely shifting camera angles, a director can suggest not only the ups and downs in a character's fortune
but also the attitude an audience should adopt toward any personality or action in the film.
(Source: http://academic.sun.ac.za/forlang/bergman/tech/glossary/c.htm)

  

Editing: Dissolve
 

the image dissolves to a stained glass window in Xanadu, Kane's palacial hideaway. We are trained to view such dissolves as nothing more than a way to go from one scene to another, to show that time is passing. In a pavlovian manner, we turn off our brains and wait for the next scene to come along. But note the progression of the dissolve imagery, and how it bolsters and comments on the scene: Note how scales of justice evolve from Susan's right eye, and an omniscient / masonic eye evolves from her left. Note the other images in the window, the bird, the book, the chalice; note the fractured nature of those images, their religious nature, their secular nature. It is a jigsaw puzzle. Weeks could be spent contemplating this one moment, this incredibly labyrinthian knot in the thematic web of "Citizen Kane." There are countless other examples of this sort of imagic weaving, or "piping", throughout the film, that only a very few critics or analysts have ever truly touched on. Source: www.flatlandthefilm.com/news.php?CurrentPage=15

Lighting
    
Lighting was also an important aspect of Citizen Kane. In this shot, (left) the strong backlighting is used to make the character in front appear as only a
silhouette and therefore anonymous to the viewer. The smoke that fills the room helps to show the light beams coming from the projectors as well
as the lamp on the table. This use of lighting can also be seen in the image (right) in which the high-contrast lighting creates a foreboding atmosphere. 
(Source:  http://www.takegreatpictures.com/citizen_kane_cinematography.fci)

The film Citizen Kane took this issue of lighting in film a step forward based on the expressionist work of the twenties and on the fact that they
couldn't afford expensive props. Many of the scenes were cast in shadow to hide half empty sets. The unintended effect was to give the film a
uniform dark feeling of constant foreboding that couldn't be conveyed in dialog or even music. With the use of camera angles that had never
been used before such as in one memorable scene in which Charles Foster Kane is filmed from below but lit from the sides he is made to look not
sinister as lighting from below would do but larger than life in a bloated over stuffed way, again making the character look too full of himself in a
way no words could. Source: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/movies_and_the_mind/44027