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Article: Making History: Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection in Citizen Kane and Nixon
- Article from:
- Journal of Narrative Theory
- Article date:
- July 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Eastern Michigan University, Department of English Language and Literature Summer 2008. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Like its predecessor JFK, Oliver Stone's Nixon owes an obvious debt to Orson Welles's masterpiece Citizen Kane. The intertextual references and homages are manifold: a film-within-the-film initiates the narrative and a mock newsreel eulogizes the title character; Nixon's White House becomes a Xanadu-like fortress, isolated behind its imposing fence; a scene of marital difficulty unfolds across a long dinner table, Ã la Kane'?, famed breakfast montage; and more generally, Stone characterizes Nixon as a man who subsumes his private self to his public persona, who strives for greatness and throws it away because of his desperate need to be loved.1 Most significantly, however, both Citizen ...