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“No trespassing” warns a sign at the beginning of Citizen Kane, and the camera dutifully proceeds to climb up the fence and to plunge us into the forbidden domain and into fiction. The transgression appears as an eloquent metaphor of Orson Welles's position when beginning his first film, at a moment when there seemed to be no barriers for the young genius admitted to Hollywood and given full powers. A new and fascinating domain was opening up to him after a career in the theater and the radio that, marked by the sensational and even the truculent, can be more soberly defined in terms of its familiarity with Shakespearian characters (concerning whom we may note their larger-than-life qualities that lead to catastrophe and punishment).
Citizen Kane (the first film made by Orson Welles—released in 1941, at a moment when the United States was divided on the question of joining the war against the Axis) was at once understood as a political transgression, as a critical portrayal of press tycoon W. R. Hearst who supported Hitler through his newspapers.
Transgression is also a dominant theme in the narrative world, both in the general design of a film that sets out to discover the secret of a powerful man1 and in the nature of the secret itself. What is the origin of Kane's empire? Why did he collect such an amazing quantity of objects? “Orson Welles the magician will reveal all,” the film seems