An Overwhelming Film - KANE reviewed by Jorge Luis Borges

[keats]

This review from 1941 is interesting on a number of levels which is appropriate given the nature of both the reviewer and his topic - How can any one not wind up throwing his Jujubes in the air at the references to labyrinths?

Here's the review translated into English:

An Overwhelming Film
Jorge Luis Borges

An Overwhelming Film Citizen Kane. U.S.A., 1941. Director, producer: Orson Welles. Script: Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz. Photography: Gregg Toland. RKO Pictures.

Citizen Kane (whose title in Argentina is "The Citizen") has at least two arguments. The first, of an almost banal imbecility, wants to bribe the applause of the very unobservant. It can be formulated in this way: a vain millionaire accumulates statues, orchards, palaces, swimming pools, diamonds, cars, libraries, men and women. Like an earlier collector (whose observations are traditionally attributed to the Holy Ghost), he discovers that these miscellanies and plethoras are vanity of vanities and that all is vanity. At the moment of his death, he yearns for one single thing in the universe: a fittingly humble sled he played with as a child! The second argument is far superior. It links Koheleth to the memory of another nihilist: Franz Kafka. The theme (at once metaphysical and detective- fictional, at once psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of the secret soul of a man through the works he has made, the words he has spoken, the many destinies he has smashed. The procedure is that of Joseph Conrad in Chance (1914) and of the beautiful film The Power and the Glory: a rhapsody of heterogeneous scenes, not in chronological order. Overwhelmingly, infinitely, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and to reconstruct them. The film teems with the forms of multiplicity, of incongruity: the first scenes record the treasures accumulated by Kane; in one of the last scenes, a poor woman, gaudy and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum. At the end, we understand that the fragments are not governed by a secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances. (A possible corollary, foreseen by David Hume, by Ernst Mach, and by our Macedonio Fernandez: no man knows who he is; no man is anyone.) In one of Chesterton's stories-"The Head of Caesar," I think-the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth without a center. This film is precisely that labyrinth.

We all know that a party, a palace, a great undertaking, a lunch for writers and journalists, an atmosphere of frank and spontaneous friendship are essen- tially horrible. Citizen Kane is the first film that shows these things with some awareness of this truth.

In general, the film's execution is worthy of the vast argument. There are shots with admirable depth, shots whose farthest planes (as in the paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites) are no less precise and minute than the closest. Nevertheless, I dare to guess that Citizen Kane will endure as certain of the films by Griffith or by Pudovkin have "endured"-films whose historical value no one denies but which no one is resigned to seeing again. Citizen Kane suffers from gigantism, from pedantry, from tediousness. It is not intelligent, it is genial: in the most nocturnal and Germanic sense of that bad word.

Sur no. 83 (August 1941)

[Glenn Anders]

Peter: I'm willing to cut Jose Luis Borges some slack because he came from another culture, and was writing from a distant place, in 1941. But as a review, it suffers from the same failings he attributes to CITIZEN KANE. His piece is diffuse, ideasyncratic, sketchy, and irritating. [Sounds like D.I.S.H., what I suffer from.]

I have never read a review of CITIZEN KANE, the picture itself, which succeeds in putting it down. Borges review is no exception.

He seems not to appreciate that the film is indeed essentially a jigsaw puzzle, and that the picture, if we had the last piece of the puzzle, is that of "A Great American" -- the kind of person we like to say represents "The American Success Story." In creating his story with such incredible skill, Welles has insured that Charles Foster Kane still stands for "The American" and Americans in general, 65 years after it was made. Perhaps for centuries into the future.

Borges apparently regards the picture's "magical" (genial) qualities as a drawback. Yet they are what help keep the film fresh.

He also does not appear to recognize that there is actually something in the center of Kane's labyrinth. Borges has simply overlooked or discounted it. What is there explains a life Kane never quite understood in the conventional terms of the philistine he was raised to become, the person he was at war with, the man he tried unsuccessfully to escape. And when he could not, tried to free others in his stead. He failed in that, too, as Susan Alexander Kane would attest to. What is at the center of Kane's childhood labyrinth stands for the loss of his mother who, even in her despair, might have given him what he needed to become fully human; in the way that Welles at a very young age knew that he had been crippled by the loss of his own mother.

Really, it is not vital that the loss mean the same thing to us, only that it meant something like that emotionally to him [to them?], and the impact of that realization is endlessly heartbreaking, if we have a heart to break.

Glenn

[ToddBaesen]

Glenn:

I agree with nearly everything you say.

The big exception being I found Jorge Luis Borges comments to also be instructive, and not the least bit irritating.

In fact, it's rather amazing to see Borges deducing such a great number of authors we know Welles certainly read and admired. From the book of Ecclesiastes, to Kafka, Conrad, Chesterton and even Preston Sturges. Or maybe they were just authors Borges admired, a list that also included Cervantes and H. G. Wells.

I guess it takes one genius to know another!

[Glenn Anders]

Perhaps, Todd.

I think it just as likely that various writers and artists would have been in correspondence with Borges about this extraordinary film. CITIZEN KANE created great buzz initially. Then, the War came, and afterward, the film was forgotten for ten years or so. All the influences you mention were either mentioned by Welles himself in general comment, or by the Mercury Players PR Office. He hung out at Sturges' Players Club, and look at the stories Welles chose to dramatize for the Mercury Theater on the Air, the Campbell Playhouse, or the Almanac: "A Time for Everything" (Ecclesiastes), "The Heart of Darkness" (Joseph Conrad), "The Man Who Was Thursday" (G.K. Chesterton). I don't find a direct reference to Franz Kafka though until much later.

Borges' review is certainly one of those pieces always brought up by those who want to disparage CITIZEN KANE.

Glenn