At the beginning of the film, after Kane dies, Welles cut from the sombre darkness of Kane’s deathbed scene to the bright image of the flags that begins the “News on the March” newsreel. The loud voice of the announcer and high volume of the music that accompanies it compound the shock effect produced by the contrasting tones. Moreover, the juxtaposition of a dead man with images of flags and upbeat music creates the impression that no one much cares that Kane has died. Welles uses another cut at the beginning of the sequence in which Raymond recollects Kane’s outburst in response to Susan Alexander’s leaving him. A shot of Raymond is followed by a close-up of a shrieking white cockatoo flying away. The image associatively recalls Susan, whose voice has become shrill and harsh, before she too flies the coop, abandoning Kane (Bazin 1990, p. 59).
The editing of Citizen Kane is innovative in another respect as well— the imaginative way in which Welles constructs transitions to signal temporal and spatial gaps in the narrative. Because of its complicated narrative structure, the plot of Citizen Kane continually leaps forward and backward in time. Welles used standard, traditional transitional devices to signal these leaps, but embellished them to add psychological and thematic implications. A good example of the subtle psychological suggestiveness of Welles’s transition shots occurs at the end of the sequence in which Kane’s mother sends her son away with Thatcher. As he is playing outside his home with his sled, the boy is abruptly given the news that he is to leave home with Mr. Thatcher that very day. He does not take the news well. In the final image of this sequence we see a big close up of young Kane’s face framed by the body of his mother. He is glaring off screen in the direction of Thatcher, whom he has just attacked with his sled. Through a long-held lap dissolve, 12 the image of Kane’s face is superimposed onto the image of the sled, which is now covered with snow (Toland 1996, pp. 78-80).
Dissolves are a traditional way for a director to show the passage of time. In this case, the amount of snow that has accumulated on the sled and the sound of a distant train whistle suggest that a good deal of time has elapsed and that Thatcher and Kane are on the train to New York. But the lengthy lap dissolve superimposing the young Kane’s face onto the snow-covered sled has symbolic significance as well. It suggests that although the boy is on a train on the way to a new life, something of himself is being left behind. Another dissolve reveals the sled more deeply blanketed in snow, as if part of the boy will remain forever frozen and undeveloped as well. The abandoned sled stands in symbolically for the abandoned child.
