Citizen Kane: Will the Real Kane Please Stand Up

Citizen Kane contains a fascinating backstory. How many groundbreaking movies have you watched that were made by a twenty-four-year-old who had never been to Hollywood before? Had never acted in front of a camera? Never directed or had experience with cinematography? This is the star, director, cinematographer, and co-writer Orson Welles. He was as young as a college graduate, yet he pulled off what many consider to be the greatest film of all time. 

The film was innovative pulling off compositions, camera moves, and narrative techniques that hadn’t been seen by most audiences before. While the movie is based on William H Hearst I think it fits so well with the character of Walt Disney. If I had to distill this movie down I think what Roy Disney said about Walt fits perfectly, “I’ve always said that if you get forty people in a room together and ask each one of them to write down who Walt was, you’d get forty different Walt’s.” Just like citizen kane ends with an iconic mirror shot of 40 different Kanes. Do we ever see the real Kane?