Break: Technology
Orson Wells's classic film Citizen Kane is
a film about objects,
or one specific object, Rosebud.
In their 1979 textbook Film Art,
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson discuss Citizen Kane
in terms of its style. Bordwell and Thompson teach a pedagogy
of film analysis based on "[Kane's] characteristic and specific
use of specific film techniques" (221). Like Irmscher and Lanham,
then, Bordwell and Thompson treat writing (filmic writing) as
technique;
only here the mastery is with technological (that is, filmic)
grammar: focus, shot selection, editing, and sound. Bordwell and
Thompson teach the technological innovations Citizen Kane creates
for a developing film grammar and how students can come to recognize
these moments in their analysis.
The authors, however, leave out the everyday
grammar Kane himself creates out of objects in the film's
subtext.
In my mix, Wells's Citizen Kane spins against the stylistic
limitations composition and film studies place upon technology.
Film Art's discussion of Citizen Kane is,
after all, a discussion of film analysis, not film
as a model for writing. The DJ in me reappropriates
Citizen Kane to correct this lack.
Missing from Bordwell and Thompson is the question of Kane's collection of odds
and ends that by the film's finale we see burned away. Kane collected these
pieces as a step towards explaining the allusive meaning of his
life: Rosebud. Kane, in fact, attempts to be an early DJ,
trying to create meaning
through the collection. Eventually, Rosebud, too, is tossed on the fire, and all is lost. Kane has failed to put his collection
to work. He's failed to be a DJ. The lesson Citizen Kane teaches
the new composition program, then, is the integration of collections into
technology-based mediums. If we put technology to work as
a mixing machine, our collections can be employed to make meaning.