Scene Analysis: Mrs. Kane

The action of this scene primarily takes place inside the Kane's house in Colorado.The establishing shot begins in a descent into the snow using a long shot, it sets the location for the scene. As the Listology (2013) review describes, “The scene is nostalgic and artificial, the exteriors visually trapped in a false boundlessness with the surrounding sky above Charles appearing like misted glass. It seems as if we are enraptured in Kane’s lost childhood, essentially inside the snow globe that represents Rosebud”.The scene begins with Charles playing in the snow, this is a long take that shows Charles alone and isolated from the rest of the characters. This almost predicts the future for Charles in the rest of the film.The camera then enters
Kane's point-of-view through the window. She calls to her son from inside the house, and the window creates a frame around the him playing in the snow. As Charles plays , Mrs. Kane is in the process of signing him over to Mr. Thatcher. As Mrs. Kane sits to the foreground of the shot we see that she is an important character in this scene as this pattern continues with her always being at the foreground of the shot. This film technique indicates to us that she is the person in the scene with the most power as she sits closest to us. The camera pulls backwards into his mother’s boarding house, through the window and the dining room, making Charles diminish in size and distance while still the focus of the shot. The low-angled shots reveals the ceiling, showing more extreme foreground and background. As Roger Ebert (2004) points out in his article “In almost all movies before Citizen Kane, you couldn't see the ceilings in rooms because there weren't any. That's where you'd see the lights and microphones. Welles wanted to use a lot of low-angle shots that would look up toward ceilings, and so Toland devised a strategy of cloth ceilings that looked real but were not. The microphones were hidden immediately above the ceilings, which in many shots are noticeably low.” The deep focus used in the scene includes all of the characters, both at the table,as Mrs Kane and Mr Thatcher are, and
His father still remains in the background and is over powered each time he goes to speak he is interrupted by Mrs.Kane more dominant of the two. Charles in his anger and as a last act of rebellion attempts to hit Thatcher with the sled, a metaphor for the ensuing conflict between his life with Thatcher and his lost childhood, and his final attempt to angrily hold onto his parents as he realises he is going away from them. The camera cuts to a close up of Mrs Kane which moves down to Charles as the non-diegetic sound climaxes at the moment it focuses on Charles face.This is the climax of the scene as it is inevitable that Charles has lost and that he will be leaving his family and going with Mr Thatcher. The scene dissolves from the closeup of Charles which yields to closeup of abandoned sled “Rosebud” indicating the end of Charles childhood. The scene ends with the sled left abandoned, a visual metaphor for the abandonment of Charles by his parents. As we hear a train in the background we know this is the end of Charles