SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Summary Plot Overview. Important Quotes Explained. Literary Devices Symbols. Sleds Two sleds appear in Citizen Kane. Statues Kane repeatedly fails in his attempts to control the people in his life, which perhaps explains his obsession with collecting statues and the appearance of statues throughout the film, since statues can be easily manipulated.
After a speech full of clenched and insincere bonhomie, the editor-in-chief brusquely asked us all to raise our champagne glasses — he did so himself, his arm extended. Moments are what we are left with in Citizen Kane : a pointilliste constellation of gleaming moments from which we can never quite stand far enough back to see the bigger picture in its entirety.
Kane and Susan begin to argue in their private tent while music and dancing begin outside, becoming more abandoned and maybe even orgiastic. The scenes of Kane and Susan together in Xanadu are eerie: an Expressionist bad dream, all darkness and weird perspectives, the couple marooned in the gigantic, sinister house, Kane prowling up to Susan while she morosely fits together a jigsaw.
It is subtle but still a sexy scene. It circles back to Rosebud: the anti-riddle of the anti-Sphinx. Another false trail. The remembered details of early existence — moments, sensations and images — have an arbitrary poetic authenticity which is a by-product of being detached from the prosaic context and perspective which encumbers adult minds, the rational understanding which would rob them of their mysterious force.
We all have around two or three radioactive Rosebud fragments of childhood memory in our minds, which will return on our deathbeds to mock the insubstantial dream of our lives. We only hear of it in the newsreel about Kane that begins the film — the brief roundup that we are invited to believe does not get to the heart of the man. But that is the last we hear of it. The fads in history were actually determined by the same laws which I employed as a dramatist. Kane was raised without a family. His parents were a bank.
Hence his failure with his wives. In making this clear during the course of the picture, it was my attempt to lead the thoughts of my audience closer and closer to the solution of the enigma of his dying words. In his waking hours, Kane had certainly forgotten the sled and the name which was painted on it. Casebooks of psychiatrists are full of these stories. It was important for me in the picture to tell the audience as effectively as possible what this really meant.
Clearly it would be undramatic and disappointing if an arbitrary character in the story popped up with the information. The best solution was the sled itself. Now, how could this sled still exist since it was built in ? It was necessary that my character be a collector—the kind of man who never throws anything away.
I wished the camera to show beautiful things, ugly things and useless things, too—indeed everything, which could stand for a public career and a private life. I wished objects of art, objects of sentiment, and just plain objects.
There was no way for me to do this except to make my character, as I have said, a collector, and to give him a great house in which to keep his collections.
The house was the womb. Here too was all the grandeur, all the despotism, which my man had found lacking in the outside world. Such was his estate—such was the obvious repository for a collection large enough to include, without straining the credulity of the audience—a little toy from the dead past of a great man. A few days after Welles issued this statement, a new Hearst-like magazine calley Friday , ran a picture story on Citizen Kane , in late January, , which contained totally fabricated statements, including a fake quote from Welles, as follows:.
The true inspiration for the name "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane could have come from actress Marian Davies, as implied in Mank. In Orson Welles' movie Citizen Kane , "Rosebud" is uttered by the character Charles Foster Kane on his deathbed, and subsequently becomes a MacGuffin plot device for the rest of the movie. Since Mank explores the writing process for Citizen Kane , it heavily implies that screenwriter Herman J.
Mankiewicz used "Rosebud" as a Hollywood insider joke on media mogul William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Davies. Citizen Kane follows the rise and fall of Kane, who is portrayed by none other than Welles. The film begins with the main character dropping a snow globe and dying after stating "Rosebud.
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