Citizen Kane as cultural touchstone

[Lance Morrison]

In Columbia, Missouri (where i live currently) at Stephens College there is a yearly film festival showcasing the filmmaking of women.
This is called the Citizen Jane Film Festival

http://www.stephens.edu/news/stephensevents/citizenjane/about.php

[Glenn Anders]

Interesting, Peter . . . .

I've always thought, from the early 1940's really, that the "Citizen" in CITIZEN KANE is a reference to the French Revolution, an event which was always being thrust into my young mind in those days, particularly from the background of many a Mercury Theater on the Air drama. Later, I learned that Welles was staging at the time his disastrous Danton's Death, about the fall of the great French revolutionary. Later still, I was led to believe that RKO Production Chief George Schaefer was given the jocular, droll honor of entitling the picture CITIZEN KANE -- another "inside joke" -- after "American" was abandoned. The contradictory scenes of Thatcher and the rabble rouser calling Charles Foster Kane "a Communist" and then "a Fascist" reinforced my notion of the title's origen. Charles Kane was willing to rebel against "anything you got," if it came in his way.

[Does that Congressional Investigation sequence and the shot of the "community organizer" have an eerie significance in our political climate of incivility and "tea-baggers" today?]

And of course, the first time we see little Charlie Kane, he is in rebellion against the Bankers (and "The Traction Trusts"?) who are going to take him away from his beloved Mother and sled. His passionately thrown snowball is the symbol of an American "rugged individualism" which will never entirely leave him.

. . . But it's true, I am going back now to "almost before the beginning."

Glenn

[Roger Ryan]

In my mind, the title CITIZEN KANE is meant to be an ironic comment on the fact that the character of Charles Foster Kane never held a position in elective office. The public was and is used to supposedly great men being bestowed with a title: "President", "Congressman", "Senator", "Governor", "Mayor", "General", "Major", "Pope", "Archduke" or "King" (yikes, KING KANE would have been a terrible idea for a film title!) and so forth. Kane achieved great power and persuasion without attaining a title or a political appointment; he was simply a "citizen". By using the term "citizen" as a title for Kane, the film suggests to the viewer that Kane is the type of man one expects to have a title while underlining the actual failure of his political aspirations.

To add to the cultural touchstone slate, last night's episode of the comedy COMMUNITY had a scene where a community college student showed a comically inept autobiographical film he had made. A fellow classmate responded, "Well, it's no CITIZEN KANE."

[The Night Man]

In my mind, the title CITIZEN KANE is meant to be an ironic comment on the fact that the character of Charles Foster Kane never held a position in elective office. ...By using the term "citizen" as a title for Kane, the film suggests to the viewer that Kane is the type of man one expects to have a title while underlining the actual failure of his political aspirations.

I think the irony can be extended to include the fact that Kane fancies himself a "man of the people", a defender of the working man, a simple "citizen" as it were, when, given his immense wealth and power, he is anything but.

[The Night Man]

I'm not sure if this will be of interest to you, keats, as this is not recent and only a reference to Welles apart from Kane, but I came across this while rereading Hugh Fordin's book on the Freed Unit at MGM, The World of Entertainment. Responding to MGM's concerns that there wasn't enough Gene Kelly in the Kelly-directed film Invitation to the Dance, Kelly wrote from London (where the picture was filming in 1953):

Let's assume for the present that there's not enough of me in the picture. Where and how do we cure this and get me another number without glutting the public with the sight of Kelly slowing it up like a dancing Orson Welles.