The film I have chosen is Citizen Kane, 1941, directed by Orson Welles. I have chosen a scene that is towards the end of the movie and shows Charles Foster Kane’s reaction to his wife breaking up with him. The film aspect I will be focusing on is the Mis en scene.

The scene begins with Charles foster Kane’s wife walking out of the room then the camera shows us where she has come from, we see Kane in the distance standing at a doorway, he is at least 20 metres away from the camera. Welles uses a lot of deep space to emphasise how much Kane has distanced himself away from his wife which was the result of their break up. Bordwell and Thompson state that ‘a director creates a deep-space composition by making the foreground quite large and the background plane quite distant’ (Bordwell and Thompson 2013: 148) which is exactly what Welles did.

Once it cuts to Kane, he turns around and walks towards the bed, there is a low angle shot depicting that the character has Authority which we can also tell from the costume, he is wearing a suit which shows he may be working, …show more content…
Everyone is dressed very formally to show they are in a working environment however we also see a few women dressed as what we see as maids so as the audience we know who is labelled as important and vice versa. Kane then proceeds through the crowd of on looking workers and we see that the shot is a lot wider and is the point of view of the crowd to connect the emotion of the crowd with the audience. We then see Kane leave the frame but only to re appear in the mirror which clearly establishes the distance that Welles is trying to create between the audience, other characters in shot and