> From: Garion1000 <garion1000(a)gmail.com>
> Again, its not that important, I am just curious. Could maybe
> someone with a
> copy of the encyclopedia Britannica could look up Citizen Kane and
> see if
> it mentions Rosebud.
_Very_ interesting.
I don't think I can answer the question you were implicitly asking,
namely "how does the Britannica handle 'spoilers.'" Or perhaps the
answer is that the Britannica doesn't deal in plot summaries so
doesn't _need_ to handle them.
The 2006 DVD version has no article on Citizen Kane specifically. (!)
A search on exact phrase "Citizen Kane" gives these results:
“Citizen Kane” (film by Welles)
* major reference
* discussed in biography
* history of Great Depression
* innovations in directing
* production by RKO Radio Pictures, Inc.
* role of
o Mankiewicz
o Moorehead
* treatment of Hearst
The "major reference" is in a section of a long article about movies
describing the Hollywood studio system! It is mostly about
cinematographic advances in the service of Welles' vision:
Britannica says (about half snipped) "The most extraordinary film to
emerge from the studio system, however, was Orson Welles's Citizen
Kane (1941), whose controversial theme and experimental technique
combined to make it a classic. (blah blah) radically innovative use
of sound and deep-focus photography as it examined the life of
Charles Foster Kane, a character based on the press baron William
Randolph Hearst. (blah blah) complicated flashback structure (blah
blah) paradoxically revealing not greatness or might but pathetic
insecurity and emptiness. (blah blah) newly available Eastman film
stock (blah blah) plastic-coated wide-angle lenses opened to smaller
than normal apertures (blah blah) cinematographer Gregg Toland
achieved a photographic depth of field that approximated the
perceptual range of the human eye (blah blah) techniques of ambient
and directional sound that Welles had learned from radio. (blah
blah) functioning on several levels at once, the historical, the
psychological, and the mythic. Although recognized by many critics as
a work of genius, (blah blah financial failure no more Welles films).
In Welles' biography, all it says is "In 1940 Welles, on contract to
R.K.O., went to Hollywood and made the classic Citizen Kane (1941),
which portrayed the life of a newspaper magnate (suggestive of
William Randolph Hearst, who sought to ban the movie)"
Another mention, in an article about motion pictures, says "Different
scales are occasionally juxtaposed in a single shot to produce an
unmistakable dramatic or rhetorical effect. In Orson Welles's Citizen
Kane (1941) significant characters are repeatedly framed in the right
or left foreground while in the background an action takes place
which disturbs that character or which that character somehow
controls...."
No plot summary. No identification of Marion Davies. No
identification of "Rosebud" with a) a sled, or b) Davies' clitoris.
(Double-take) "Wide-angle lenses opened to _smaller_ than normal
apertures?"