Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane is debatably about a man who goes through life with money, wealth, power, and means of accomplishing anything that he wanted but in the end realizing he could in no way get what he wanted most. What he wanted was a childhood and his mother. At a very young age he was given to a trustee by his mother to take care of his well being. He resented his trustee, Walter Parks Thatcher, and did as much as he could to make his life difficult. The movies establishing shot is a very unwelcoming scene of a gate with a “No Trespassing” sign on it. The sign has a very large significance because the whole movie is about people trespassing into his life trying to figure out what his last word meant.

The camera cranes up and up through three different gates and then to a very dark deserted looking mansion. The gates could represent isolation and how no one has been able to enter this mans life and understand him. The fact that it cranes through three gates could represent the three stages of his life that we see. The mise-en-sence is very