The "Rosebud" Enigma: Rethinking American Montage in the Classical Age of Cinema

Abstract

This essay aims to explain how the parallel montage operates in the early stage of American cinema, and then to argue how the novel montage technique in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane manipulates various layers of the past that the witnesses of Charles Foster Kane's life revive from their memories, and thereby, his montage technique evokes a possibility of new thinking. Citizen Kane exemplified how the lack of a central subjectivity led to the question of indiscernibility in all different layers of the past. Each sequence of the film remained a fragment to others, because Kane's death at the beginning of the film already made it impossible to totalize all the sequences of Kane's life with one and the same sensory-motor schema. Thus, even though all the facets of the past were placed in a chronological order, it was impossible to bind these facets in terms ofa single totalizing point of view.Citizen Kane manipulates various layers of the past that the witnesses of Charles Foster Kane's life revive from their memories, and thereby, his montage technique evokes a possibility of new thinking.

Citizen Kane exemplified how the lack of a central subjectivity led to the question of indiscernibility in all different layers of the past. Each sequence of the film remained a fragment to others, because Kane's death at the beginning of the film already made it impossible to totalize all the sequences of Kane's life with one and the same sensory-motor schema. Thus, even though all the facets of the past were placed in a chronological order, it was impossible to bind these facets in terms ofa single totalizing point of view.