Frame grabs from this scene

Film Analysis

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.