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Citizen Kane: from Hero to Isolation

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Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane, a movie that was nominated for nine academy awards and won the Academy award for best writing is considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made. In order to understand why Citizen Kane has been so beloved in the world of film because of how realistic it felt although being a work of fiction or as the French call it a film à clef (French for Film with a Key) one must pick apart the all the parts that make a movie successful from its actors, lighting, plot, etc. The movie Citizen Kane brings in the audience into the life of Charles Foster Kane who is the main focus of the story and gives information on his life via a parody of the old “March of the Times” newsreels that were commonly used in the …show more content…

Thatcher which will result to the removal of Charles from his childhood home and thus his parents as well. (Jaffe, Ira S)

Within Citizen Kane there are important themes that draw in the audience, themes that the audience can relate and even sympathize with which makes the human emotions within the film feel genuine and not acted out/scripted. The first theme is the difficulty of getting the true story of Charles Kane’s life. The audience can only gather so much on his life as Charles Kane himself is deceased and the only things left to gather on his life are newsreels, personal testimonies and manuscripts left by those who knew Mr. Kane and even these facts are mired by prejudices which makes their reliability shaky at best. The audience can also resonate in agreement to a line said by Mr. Thompson when a female reporter believes if he found out what Rosebud meant to Mr. Kane then he could find out everything of Mr. Kane’s life to which Mr. Thompson simply says “No, I don't think so; no. Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything... I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a... piece in a jigsaw puzzle... a missing piece.” (Thomson, David) Another theme which was more or less a first was criticism of the American Dream, when the audience watches Charles Kane’s early childhood where

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