Citizen Cane

I found this movie to be the hardest one to blog about yet. The music seemed to play an interesting role. In the movie Citizen Cane, there seemed to be a lot more diagetic music then we've heard in most of the movies. For example, Susan, the singer, contributed greatly to the diagetic music with her opera singing which appeared several times throughout the movie. The movie also had a few instances where diagetic music mixed with the underscoring background music like when Susan's opera signing mixes with the orchestrial underscoring from the previous scene. The begining also causes a problem. In the first couple of scenes, their is a newsreel that has much underscoring in it. However, after the newreel ends, it pans to a group of people who were watching the newreel, so the underscoring in the newreel is really diagetic music since the people watching the newreel also heard it. The music from the newreel is clique since it sounds like most of the music one would hear when viewing a newreel of the time period.

The underscoring in the movie acts in a certain way. In the movie there is little underscoring. However, underscoring is most typically present during transitions between scences and is typically just a short score. The underscoring does not seem represent a full orchestra, but a smaller orchestra. The underscoring also has a waltz theme in many of the scenes. For example, during the montage scene with Kane and his wife at breakfast, the music represents a waltz. However, as the montage changes, the waltz also changes. As the scenes show the couples deteriorating relationship, the music represents this by becoming less romantic, and more darker and angrier. And while the underscoring is typically in between scenes, it also appears to help propel the action and mood of the scene forward. For exmaple, their is a romantic feel to the music when Kane meets the "singer." And when she leaves him towards the end, the music has a sad, lonely feel to it. The music also represents Kane's sad, lonely life at the end when we discover that Rosebud is his sled from his childhood. The music has the desperate, hopeless feel to it that I felt as I watched the last scene.