Citizen Kane by Jorge Luis Borges
few days ago were held 70 years after the premiere of one of the masterpieces of cinema, we are talking about Citizen Kane by Orson Welles. Much has been written about this movie, but it is important that we now read the criticism that was Jorge Luis Borges in August 1941, published in the legendary No. 83 South Magazine.
Citizen Kane (whose name in Argentina is the citizen) has at least two arguments. The first, an almost banal stupidity, like bribing the applause of the very distracted. It is formulated as follows: a vain millionaire builds statues, gardens, palaces, swimming pools, diamonds, vehicles, libraries, men and women in the likeness of a previous collection (which is traditionally attributed observations of the Holy Spirit) finds that these miscellaneous and plethoras are vanity of vanities and all is vanity, at the moment death, long for a single object in the universe a sled due to the poor in his childhood he has played! The second is far superior. Koheleth joins the memory of the other nihilistic: Franz Kafka. The subject (both metaphysical and police, both psychological and allegorical) is investigating the secret soul of a man, through works he has built, in the words he has spoken of the many destinations that has broken. The procedure is that of Joseph Conrad's Chance (1914) and the beautiful film The Power and the Glory: Rhapsody heterogeneous scenes, not chronologically. Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of Charles Foster Kane man and invites us to combine them and rebuild.
forms of multiplicity, of the irrelevance, abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Foster Kane, in one of the last, a poor woman suffering luxurious and playing on the floor of a palace which is also a museum, with a huge puzzle. At the end we understand that the fragments are not governed by a secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances (corollary possible, anticipated by David Hume, Ernst Mach and our Macedonio Fernández: no man knows who he is, no man is someone). In one of Chesterton's stories - The Head of Caesar, I think - the hero observes that nothing is as scary as a labyrinth without a center. This film is exactly the maze.
all know that a party, a palace, a large company, a lunch of writers and journalists, a friendly atmosphere of frank and spontaneous camaraderie, are essentially horrible, Citizen Kane is the first film that shows some awareness of that truth.
The execution is decent overall, the vast argument. There are photographs of admirable depth, photographs whose final plans (such as the Pre-Raphaelites fabrics) are no less accurate and precise than the former.
I venture to suspect, however, will remain as Citizen Kane "endure" some films of Griffith or Pudovkin, whose historical value is not disputed, but no one is resigned to review. It suffers from gigantism, of pedantry, of boredom. It's not smart, it's great: in the most nocturnal and most German of this bad word.
