Both Kane's flickering, scratchy life and the audiovisual mechanics of cinema are extinguished by this gesture. Following that barrage of images and barking narration, the newsreel soundtrack drops in pitch as the projector is turned off. Picture the opening scene after the newsreel footage depicting Kane's meteoric rise to power and his plummet to disturbing isolation. It may be a tragic story about a Hearst-like figure and the morality of power plays on a political stage, but its formal construction, primary symbolism, and temporal deployment are governed entirely by when, where, how, and why someone uses their voice. Yet most of what isn't said is textually voiced through the human voice through its utterances, its presence, its power, its musicality, its breath. True to the mystery that propels the story, there is much that is not said in Citizen Kane. How perfect a film for studying the invisible, yet powerful, world of film sound.(2) How frustrating that film history and cinema mythology have muffled the sound of Citizen Kane in the quest to amplify its overly stylized imagery. Just as Orson Welles's career in innovative radio drama (1935-39) prepares the way for his first film (1941), the soundtrack of Citizen Kane precedes its image. Its beams of light, shafts of luminance, patterns of shadow are postpartum visualizations of vocal presences, melodic flows, sonorous atmospheres. Furthermore, Citizen Kane is not a priori a visual film. Yet if Citizen Kane is figuratively and literally about one's last word, it is also about the sound of that word and all the noise and silence that frame the sonic event-the preverberation and reverberation which holds that utterance center stage in the film's narratological auditorium. All that a person may do and say might adds up to naught-existence degree zero that disappears like the breath that carries the tragic neumonic of one's last word. As an unspoken logo on a burning sled at the film's end, it is finally opened as a deep well of futility, a pathetic frustration of the search for meaning. The enigmatic utterance of "Rosebud" is initially posited as an epicenter, a locus to the confounding behavioral nightmare that might have been Charles Foster Kane's life. The reporter seeks to uncover the meaning of the word "Rosebud," gasped by Kane after he collapses when his second wife Susan Oliver (Dorothy Comingore) walks out on him. A reporter (Jerry Thompson, played by William Alland) is assigned to unravel the mystery of this self-made man, instigating a series of interlocking flashbacks activated by Kane's colleagues remembering his achievements and failings. Media mogul Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) dies alone in a vast mansion after having built up a newspaper network. "Rosebud." Citizen Kane (1941) starts with a mystery that triggers its story.
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