Historical context late 1930s & early 1940s

1. Historical context late 1930s & early 1940s • The New Deal • class politics • the masses or the workers • the rise of Fascism • impending war • “yellow journalism”

2. Welles • Success of War of the Worlds • panic • Interest in the power of media to shape popular perceptions and sense of reality • Leftist - - suspicion of large-scale corporate power. • Populism = Fascism? How does the media speak to and/or represent the people? • Contradictions and ambiguities in the message of the film.

3. “Prismatic” narrative • Ingenious juggling of time & perspective • Wide-angle, deep focus, long take

4. Time in Citizen Kane • The film plays with contrasting forms of telling history. • Different modes of story-telling, provide us different experiences of time’s passage. Compare newsreel with personal reflections. • Montage sequence vs. Sequence shots

5. Citizen Kane &Various Types of Time 1. Personal time: one man’s bio, portrait 2. Historical time: the shape of history, historical events, one of history’s big players 3. Narrative time: story 4. Cinematic time: comparison of the above • Keep track as you watch

6. The Sequence Shot “decoupage in depth” An event “seized by the camera as blocks of reality”

7. The Sequence Shot • Shot in “real time.” Long take -- maintains real time. • Maintains the integrity of space • This technique has a special capacity for revelation. Constantly unfolding ambiguity. • Image remains available for multiple readings. Image can be engaged in a variety of ways. Available for multiple readings.

8. Things to look out for • Camera seems draw into space • drawing us into narrative, into history • space=time • Camera= inquirer, roving, moving inwards, probing, often met with frustrations and obstacles • Identify the sequence shots. What do they allow for? Make possible? • What is gained from deep focus? • Note the three planes of interest (Naremore)

9. The film’s take on how we assign meaning to public lives? Read onto a celeb’s life events. • Attitude toward the public sphere, the general public, the working class. • Why does the film leave certain key questions unanswered? What is it trying to say with these enigmas? Why might it choose to take this approach to knowledge in this period?

10. Naremore argues that this film continually reminds us that we are we are watching a film and not reality itself. • How might we connect this -- the film’s self-reflection on itself as cinema -- to the larger politics questions posed by the film? Or to what we take to be the film’s message?