Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

2.1.2 Orson Welles
He may have only directed twenty-seven films, but George Orson Welles also
worked as a screenwriter, producer and actor. At the age of eighteen, Welles was already a
well-known actor in experimental theatre, and in the thirties, his New York adaptations of
Macbeth and Julius Caesar established his reputation. During this time he got seriously
involved in political activism through his journalism (as a reporter) and several radio
programmes. At twenty-five, Welles revolutionised the procedures of cinematic shooting
with hitherto untapped technical resources (new depth of field with pioneering light and
sound techniques and richness of composition). Possessed of all the innovations and the
advancements of the sound era, he borrowed many of them from his radio experience.
Welles’s extensive career in film is also usually associated with his disputes with major
studios which were continually imposing pressure on his work to guarantee artistic control.
Perhaps for this reason, many of his productions were sent back to be reworked, while
others simply never came to light. Yet, it was in 1941, when he was only twenty-six that
Orson Welles truly came to fame when he co-wrote, directed, produced and starred in
Citizen Kane, which has been admired almost universally as a major creative innovation,
making Welles a decisive auteur.
Welles expertly guides us through Charles Foster Kane’s life and career in Citizen
Kane and gives us the necessary clues about the mystery of the “Rosebud”. Owner of a
multimillionaire retreat property, almost like a kingdom, Charles Foster is a publishing
tycoon, as well as a political activist and extravagant art collector. One day, in his castlelike
mansion in Xanadu, Kane dies all alone, uttering the word “Rosebud”. Although the
film answers the central riddle, the true meaning of that Rosebud goes beyond any final
explanation or judgement about its complex protagonist. For Mankiewicz (the
screenwriter), Kane’s last utterance served to explain the course his life had taken. For
Welles, it was simply a dramatic device, the kind of faked argument that Hitchcock would
later call a “McGuffin”. Instead of resolving anything, the film’s ending offers a number of
contradictory conclusions.
Both Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten (in the role of Jedediah Leland) play major
roles in the film - Leland turns out to have scant ambition and his few attempts at moral
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