One of the most mysterious and beautiful, haunting sights in all of cinema,’ is how the late, great critic Roger Ebert described it. And even those who have never watched Orson Welles’ monumental masterpiece about the rise and fall of the titular newspaper tycoon will be familiar with the shot: an ageing, broken Charles Foster Kane (Welles) reflected by parallel mirrors, into infinity.
It arrives deep into the film, after Kane’s mistressturned-second-wife Susan (Dorothy Comingore) has left him. For years she was just another trinket gathering dust in Xanadu, Kane’s Gothic castle strewn with artefacts from all around the world. ‘Forty-nine thousand acres of nothing but scenery and statues. I’m lonesome,’ she said, stirring the pieces of a jigsaw in front of a hearth the size of a Cadillac. But now it’s the once-dynamic Kane who’s lonesome, his (ad)ventures dwindling, his vigour faded, his influence dimmed, his friends estranged, his wife gone. After trashing her bedroom, he picks up a snow globe from among her possessions and walks woodenly past those mirrors.
It’s some visual metaphor, Kane diminishing before our eyes. It also, if you’ll excuse the pun, reflects one of the film’s central themes: that no person can be tidily summed up. ‘I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life,’ says the reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) as he hunts down the meaning of ‘Rosebud’, Kane’s final utterance. Throughout Welles’ picture, we get different people’s perspectives on Kane, and he emerges as arrogant, entitled, ruthless, devious
