Current Forum: Session 2: Film Language in Classical Hollywood Cinema	Read 7 times 	
Date: 22-Jan-2001 23:59:58	
Author: CURTIS, CARL A. <cac7467@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: Parallel Structures 	
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       Before discussing technique, it is necessary to explain to the students that film conventions lend themselves to a codified system that allows a space for meaning. A formal structuralist 
approach analyzes, fragments, and reconfigures the film's formal constituent parts in order to speak about meaning, theme, plot and so forth. The parts allow film to be approached or "read" 
as if it were a language. Or, as Belton states:  “Classical Hollywood style becomes the means by which narratives are realized; it provides a formal system [of codes] that enables them to be told. Elements of style serve to shape the narrative. They function to ‘read’ it for the audience. They draw attention to, underline, and point out what it is that the audience needs to see or hear in order to see or hear in order to read or understand the scene.”
       Ironically, students seem surprised that film (or any art) can, and does, operate in this fashion (and, more surprisingly, often complain as if this "new" knowledge somehow impedes their enjoyment). 
       In any case, Citizen Kane provides a remarkable number of examples of these techniques: many have already been discussed on this discussion board and acknowledged by Belton and Bordwell. Here, I would like to discuss structural parallelism, "an important feature throughout Citizen Kane" (Bordwell). The process of analyzing the parallel structures (form) allows the disclosure or elaboration of the film's "meaning." The opening mise-en-scene (after the series of establishing shots working their way into the bedroom) is revealed through a close-up of the dying Kane uttering his last words, "Rosebud." In hindsight, the viewer realizes that Kane was remembering or reminiscing about his life and, more importantly, about what his life was unable to realize, the absence of maternal love and his corresponding abandonment. 
       But how does the viewer realize this? Is the viewer told this directly? Why does the viewer assume that Kane was remembering his life? 
       The answers to all of the above is that the structure demanded such an interpretation. After the ambiguous utterance, Kane's life is examined, or, more accurately, it is remembered and 
"catalogued" through a series of flashbacks--the same flashbacks we can assume Kane experienced on his deathbed. This parallel structure organizes events and classifies them according to significance. This flashback structure is itself mirrored by a sub-structure of individual remembrances of Kane's life, which organize and place themselves like pieces of Susan's puzzle (structure). These individual remembrances repeatedly enforce 
the importance of memory. Burnstein, for example, tells the reporter that "a fellow would remember things that you would not expect a fellow to remember" and recounts how "a month hasn't gone by" that he hasn't thought about a lost love. Here the structure or device lends itself to Kane's memory of abandonment by his mother: "his mother, he always loved her." Also 
mirroring this structure, Leland, speaks of his acute memory as a "curse," which, arguably, could be applied to Kane, haunted by the absence, the missing piece, the lack of maternal affection, 
unable ever to overcome the trauma. By the end of the movie, it appears natural to assume that Kane was remembering something because the structure or system allowed or enforced such a 
reading. If the content were to remain the same and the structure changed, it would not be nearly as effective.