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The scene I've chosen to analyze is in fact viewed twice in the movie, since it's narrated through two different points of view. The opera house scene is inserted both in Leland's and Susan's narration.
The first time it is on screen, it is seen through Leland's point of view. The camera starts with the same big close up at Susan's face as it does on the her version, making a connection between the two scenes even before the spectator realizes what he's going to see: it's a strong image that makes us automatically connect both of them. The fuss around her before the show starts is also the same, but when the curtains open, the camera follows its movement up to the theatre's ceiling, where there are two men of the staff. The sign one does to another - making fun on the fact that Susan sings through her nose - summarizes what every spectator in that Opera House thought about it, even those who weren't able to demonstrate in front of Kane, since most of them were his employees. This fact is clearly shown when all the journalists, but Leland, write good criticism about the play to be published on the Inquirer. The two work men are the symbol of how Kane's pride had crossed the limits of self criticism, and how the opinion of the public he always claimed to control was now out of his hands, in spite all the efforts of the Inquirer to make Susan Alexander a big opera star.
The second time this scene is shown on the movie is through Susan's eyes. She is, at the moment of the narrative, a decadent performer, and she looks at that time with a certain nostalgy and melancholy. She tells about how Kane forced her to do what he wanted, using her as a thing he could model to achieve the image he wanted with the public. This sequence is longer than the other one, because in Susan's life it was maybe the higher point. The camera doesn't focus the play from the front, as it did on the first take, it looks to the audience from the back: it is as if every member...