Reconsidering Kane
Dec. 10th, 2006 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77I've been meaning to go to Central Cinema ever since the place opened, a couple of years ago. It's kind of pathetic that I've never ventured out that way, before, as it turns out to be about a 30-minute walk or 5-minute bus ride from where I live.
Well,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jmargethe and I finally made it out there for dinner and a screening of Citizen Kane, on Friday. The theater is kind of hidden, just off of Union on 21st street, with modest signage off of the main drag. But the experience is well worth finding the place: the food's great, and the theater seems to make a real effort to give you a full-on nostalgia experience with your classic cinema.
Kane was for example preceded by a series of period shorts, including a Fleischer Studios Superman cartoon; the Looney Tunes flick "Falling Hare" (in which Bugs Bunny, is, uncharacteristically, the victim of another trickster ...); and a documentary about a 1945 newspaper strike (the one which famously prompted Fiorello LaGuardia to read the newspaper comics to the city's kids over the radio) that I thought richly deserved the MST3K treatment. As a setup for Kane, all of these contributed to a sense of period atmosphere, although I might nitpick by pointing out that most of these came out well after Kane's 1941 release.
Dinner arrived just as the feature film was starting--a little disconcertingly, in the dark. My salmon burger tasted great, but I was reminded of an NPR story from a year ago or so about a Parisian restaurant that simulates the experience of blindness by serving you dinner in the dark, so that you have to judge everything by texture, taste, sound. I'm just going to focus on the fact that it tasted great, OK?
jmargethe and I have both seen Kane lots of times, over the years, and we talked later about how every time that you watch the film, you tend to find your sympathies shifting somewhere else. I think that we both started out--years ago, on first viewing the movie--sympathizing most with Joseph Cotton's idealistic Jedidiah Leland, and feeling rather repelled by Kane's ballooning ego and the atmosphere of fawning sycophancy surrounding him. Years later, though, I found myself more conscious of Leland's bitterness, and more aware of the genuineness of the entirely unidealistic Bernstein's loyalty.
And I can't help but feel that it was callow of me to have once written off the title character as just some Progressive-era antique whom history had passed by (although he very much is that); after all, the film revolves around this man's sense of loss and the emptiness that seems to drive him insatiably toward more power, more love, more possessions, more disappointment, more loss. Welles' Kane seems in that sense emblematic of far more than just tycoons like Hearst or the politics of the early 1900s.
Anyway, I'm really glad that we went--now that I know how to get to Central Cinema, I'm sure that I'll be back. And I'm sure that I'll be watching Kane again in a year or so to see how it strikes me, by then.
Well,
jmargethe and I finally made it out there for dinner and a screening of Citizen Kane, on Friday. The theater is kind of hidden, just off of Union on 21st street, with modest signage off of the main drag. But the experience is well worth finding the place: the food's great, and the theater seems to make a real effort to give you a full-on nostalgia experience with your classic cinema. Kane was for example preceded by a series of period shorts, including a Fleischer Studios Superman cartoon; the Looney Tunes flick "Falling Hare" (in which Bugs Bunny, is, uncharacteristically, the victim of another trickster ...); and a documentary about a 1945 newspaper strike (the one which famously prompted Fiorello LaGuardia to read the newspaper comics to the city's kids over the radio) that I thought richly deserved the MST3K treatment. As a setup for Kane, all of these contributed to a sense of period atmosphere, although I might nitpick by pointing out that most of these came out well after Kane's 1941 release.
Dinner arrived just as the feature film was starting--a little disconcertingly, in the dark. My salmon burger tasted great, but I was reminded of an NPR story from a year ago or so about a Parisian restaurant that simulates the experience of blindness by serving you dinner in the dark, so that you have to judge everything by texture, taste, sound. I'm just going to focus on the fact that it tasted great, OK?
jmargethe and I have both seen Kane lots of times, over the years, and we talked later about how every time that you watch the film, you tend to find your sympathies shifting somewhere else. I think that we both started out--years ago, on first viewing the movie--sympathizing most with Joseph Cotton's idealistic Jedidiah Leland, and feeling rather repelled by Kane's ballooning ego and the atmosphere of fawning sycophancy surrounding him. Years later, though, I found myself more conscious of Leland's bitterness, and more aware of the genuineness of the entirely unidealistic Bernstein's loyalty. And I can't help but feel that it was callow of me to have once written off the title character as just some Progressive-era antique whom history had passed by (although he very much is that); after all, the film revolves around this man's sense of loss and the emptiness that seems to drive him insatiably toward more power, more love, more possessions, more disappointment, more loss. Welles' Kane seems in that sense emblematic of far more than just tycoons like Hearst or the politics of the early 1900s.
Anyway, I'm really glad that we went--now that I know how to get to Central Cinema, I'm sure that I'll be back. And I'm sure that I'll be watching Kane again in a year or so to see how it strikes me, by then.
