By RAY KELLY
It may not be as alluring as the authorship of Citizen Kane or meaning of “Rosebud,” but Orson Welles scholars have solved a Citizen Kane mystery that has confounded some since the film’s release 80 years ago: “What the heck is that thing in the back of Susan Alexander Kane’s bedroom?”
The 1941 film and production stills show a large, odd-looking item in the corner surrounded by dolls, stuffed animals and a bench with nearly a dozen throw pillows. After trashing the bedroom as Charles Foster Kane, Welles stands in front of the item, gazes into a snow globe and utters, “Rosebud.”
Author Harlan Lebo (Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey, The Godfather Legacy) said he was puzzled by the large prop when he combed through RKO production stills three decades ago in preparation for his book, Citizen Kane: The Fiftieth Anniversary Album.
“I have been trying to figure out the answer to this question since I wrote my coffee-table book on Citizen Kane in 1990,” Lebo said. “I’ve talked with everyone I can who has been involved in research on the film, several designers in Hollywood, and no one knew what it is. Up for consideration along the way was some sort of a speaker array or an arrangement of odd stained glass — nothing seemed right, and it looks like nothing I have ever seen.”
He added, “Given the extraordinary degree of detail and accuracy involved in planning and construction of the sets, we knew the object had to be something — we just didn’t know what.”
At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor — home of the largest repository of Welles papers in the world — a small team of programmers and artists at the university’s Duderstadt Center have been working to re-create one of the Citizen Kane sets in virtual reality for use as a teaching and learning tool. Faculty members including Vincent Longo, Stephanie O’Malley and Matthew Solomon have been poring over the bedroom set.
According to Longo, the team “chose Susan’s Xanadu bedroom for the pilot set of VR Citizen Kane because we had nearly a 360-degree view of the room from continuity photos taken during shooting. This allowed us to create a hi-fidelity model with minimal guessing.”
O’Malley, a 3D artist in the university’s Emerging Technologies Group and instructor in the School of Art & Design and Center for Entrepreneurship, has worked to recreate the bedroom assets in virtual reality. Lebo, a senior fellow at the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg, has consulted on the project.
“Harlan has been instrumental in assisting us identifying various components in the set as we revise some of the models this semester for accuracy, and it was through him that we learned of this mystery object that has perplexed researchers,” O’Malley said.
The university team weighed several intriguing possibilities.
“It was thought maybe the structure could have been a device used for simulating daylight when shooting the scene — this was one possibility presented by one of our colleagues, a professor in architecture, Mojtaba Navvab,” O’Malley said. “He studies lighting and acoustics in architectural spaces, so this made sense at first given the lighting in the room visible in the scene and the spherical nature of the structure, but this idea was ruled out when it became clear the round insets on the structure were solid and there were other lighting setups visible in the set photographs of Xanadu.”
She added, “We then thought it could have been a 1940s era Altec Lansing tar-filled horn. The structure bares a striking resemblance to modern-day speakers, so for a while we considered perhaps it was a speaker arrangement or some kind of experimental instrument. Another colleague of ours, Ted Hall, one of our programmers here at the university, was able to find images of Altec Lansing speakers from the 1940s that look remarkably similar to the structure in Susan’s room… For a moment we thought perhaps a modified Altec Lansing speaker arrangement, or some experimental version of this, was what we were seeing situated in the back of Susan’s room. But this too, was ruled out, when it just didn’t make much sense in the context of the room.”
In the end, it was Lizzy Albinson, an undergraduate student majoring in Art & Design at the university, who finally solved the decades-old mystery: The bedroom set prop was a kachelofen — a tiled European-style stove used to heat a room.
“I’m actually newly acquainted with kachelofen,” Albinson said. “As I was pondering the mystery object, I thought the object was barrel-shaped and maybe held water and my dad suggested it was a water heater of some sort. I zeroed in on heat because that was a good reason to have this object fenced off in the corner.”
“We have an old iron wood stove at our house so I started looking for variations on wood stoves to see if any could match,” Albinson said. “I stumbled across an article Tiled Stoves, Winter Warmth that introduced me to the term kachelofen. Out of European tiled stoves, kachelofen seemed to be the closest match to the set piece.”
She added, “The kachelofen is a tiled stove intended to heat one or more rooms by capturing heat from fast-burning fuel (like wood) in the tiles and then slowly releasing the heat to the surrounding room. Tiled stoves seem to be fairly common but ones with such decorative tiles and ornate structure would only be found in very wealthy homes.”
Hall agrees with Albinson’s conclusion.
“I retract my hypothesis that it was a 1940s Altec Lansing speaker array — which I’ll be the first to admit never made sense in a room that size, with that tiny record player,” Hall said.
While the kachelofen may be unfamiliar to most Americans, Hall noted that Mark Twain spoke highly of the efficiency of these masonry room heaters in his posthumously published collection Europe and Elsewhere.
“Take the German stove, for instance … where can you find it outside of German countries? I am sure I have never seen it where German was not the language of the region. Yet it is by long odds the best stove and the most convenient and economical that has yet been invented,” Twain wrote. “To the uninstructed stranger it promises nothing; but he will soon find that it is a masterly performer, for all that. It has a little bit of a door which seems foolishly out of proportion to the rest of the edifice; yet the door is right; for it is not necessary that bulky fuel shall enter it… The process of firing is quick and simple. At half past seven on a cold morning the servant brings a small basketful of slender pine sticks – say a modified armful – and puts half these in, lights them with a match, and closes the door. They burn out in ten or twelve minutes. He then puts in the rest and locks the door, and carries off the key. The work is done. He will not come again until the next morning.”
So efficient and such a marvel, it’s no wonder that a world traveler and insatiable collector like Charles Foster Kane would have insisted on including a kachelofen when he commissioned the grandiose Xanadu — even if a room heater was unnecessary in a Florida Gulf Coast home.
“It is somewhat out of place given the film takes place in Florida,” O’Malley readily admits. “Matthew (Solomon) was keen to point out this is typical of the film, and that maybe viewers are meant to think this is ‘overflow from one of C. F. Kane’s collections — his attempts to buy centuries-old European culture, which (his wife) has attempted to conceal with her own additions, her love of kitsch, and her own penchant for accumulation’.”
Given the wealth and eccentricities involved, a kachelofen could be found in a palace that boasts “a collection of everything so big it can never be cataloged or appraised; enough for ten museums; the loot of the world.”
As for Lebo, he is quite satisfied the answer to the set piece question that perplexed him and other researchers has finally been found.
“To some it may seem like a small thing, but you know how it is when a mystery of any size is solved.”
Related content:
University of Michigan creating annotated digital ‘Heart of Darkness’
Harlan Lebo delves into differences between ‘Citizen Kane’ script, finished film
Orson Welles: The meaning of Rosebud in ‘Citizen Kane’
Help University of Michigan get Orson Welles into classrooms
____________
Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.