Wednesday, October 3, 2007

What makes Citizen Kane?

For this post I chose mise-en-scene. Not because I thought it would be the easiest, but because it could be the most important film technique in this film.

Let's take the lighting for instance. At certain parts of the film, the low key lighting hid Kane's face as to show power or the mysterious man behind the powerful newspaper company. Though creepy or scary, this shows us the type of person Kane is. Another Example of this is at the beginning of the film where all the reporters are sitting around doing nothing. All you can see is the sun rays shinning through the windows. You really don't know what to expect when you first see this scene. This could show that the reporters don't know that much about Kane themselves, which they don't.

Another example of Mise-en-scene is all of Kane's big house, statues, furniture, and other nick-knacks. Seeing this, stuff, you can tell Kane is at least somewhat wealthy without knowing what he does for a living. Personally, I think all of this stuff is a cover up to how lonely he really is. I think that if he had somebody to love or care for then he would care about them and not focus on collecting all that crap.

I think mise-en-scene has a lot to do with making movies and actually makes Citizen Kane the movie it is.

4 comments:

dandominates said...

i feel as though you make an excellent point when saying that you feel he has all of his over the top unnecessary possessions to help cover up the fact that he is not happy. this is a very solid theory and im impressed with you dave. nice use of the term "knick knacks" too by the way

black cat(sam) said...

i thought it was a great point with the low key lighting, we have been talking about it in class and how important it is. its nice to see you disscuss its importance outside of class as well. your so intelectual

PaddyC said...

The lighting did make the movie the way it is. The low key lighting made people look shady and bad. this was very well done

Awesometown Blogett said...

you sound smarter when you write.