From the mark of Kane to the artistic signature

Abstract

A costume beard masking most of his face—lending him the stylized appearance of an ancient Babylonian sovereign—Orson Welles, in the role of Gregory Arkadin (fig. 1), gives the petty criminal turned fortune hunter Guy Van Stratten an assignment with Oedipean echoes: “I want you to make an investigation and prepare me a report . . . all about Gregory Arkadin. . . . It’s me I want you to investigate. . . . Who was I? . . . That is my real secret . . . I do not know who I am.” In a dark projection room, their faces shadowed, a group of journalists is discussing a newsreel about the life and death of Charles Foster Kane. “How about it, Mr. Rawlston? How do you like it, boys? Well, seventy years in a man’s life. . . . That’s a lot to try to get into a newsreel. It’s a good short, Thompson, but what it needs is an angle. . . . It isn’t enough to tell us what a man did, you’ve got to tell us who he was.” The editor continues: “What were Kane’s last words? . . . Maybe he told us all about himself on his deathbed.” The film cuts to the speaker and a journalist in silhouette against the blank screen (fig. 2): “All we saw on that screen was a big American. . . . When Charles Foster Kane died, he said just one word—‘Rosebud.’ . . . Now what does that mean? . . . Find out about ‘Rosebud.’” The question of “who?” (as in the “Who’s there?” with which Hamlet famously opens, or Montaigne’s “Qui suis-je?”) and the enjoinder to get to the bottom of its mystery stand at the center of Orson Welles’s life and work. The most celebrated enigma in cinema— what “Rosebud” means and who Charles Foster Kane is—evokes the equally fascinating and enduring question of Orson Welles himself: Was he a genius or a fake, a failure or the fulfillment of the art of filmmaking? Of course, these are first and foremost questions for Welles himself—who, no less than his viewers, was fascinated by his own life and work, or