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In Orson Welles's classic film Citizen (1941), a key problem of historical knowledge is dramatically posed. An enigmatic and controversial man, Charles Foster Kane, has died in the grandiose, gothic seclusion of his unfinished palace Xanadu; his dying word is Rosebud. A journalist, facing the inadequacy of the official facts of Kane's life, begins a rigorous quest for the key to the code of its meaning. 1He seeks to identify Rosebud through a series of interviews and investigations in unpublished sources, carrying out the kind of work familiar to every practicing historian. Yet the sources do not speak. Kane's wife, colleagues, servants know nothing of Rosebud, although they create an increasingly consistent picture of a man obsessed by a compulsion to manipulate the masses, to purchase or coerce affection, and to use people as means rather than as ends. All the sources implicitly agree that Kane never revealed the seat of his power, the center of his mind. His enigma increased with the size of his pretensions; as his monuments to himself amass, as the documents of his life proliferate, the meaning becomes as spectral as Welles's photographic treatment of Xanadu. The final scene of the film takes place amidst the vast collection of objects amassed by Kane, a collection of never-uncrated objets d'art and neverdiscarded personal possessions. The journalist-researcher, having exhausted his sources, retires from the scene in defeat, sealing Kane's mystery. Surveying the enormous expanse of objects from Kane's acquisitive life, the camera indifferently records the evidence, hovering closer and closer to the objects themselves. These objects, the sources, the texts of Kane's life, do not speak from the gloom. Soon we see workmen burning the worthless items; they toss a small, crude sled into the fire. With loving attention, Welles's camera documents the bubbly evaporation, then flaming consumption, of the insignia on the sled the insignia which says Rosebud. The familiarity of Citizen and the gimmicked aspect of its conclusion and message should not blind us to its abiding relevance for historians

Consciousness · Discontinuity (linguistics) · Epistemology · Linguistics · Psychoanalysis · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy · Psychology · South Asian Cinema and Culture

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