Why is citizen kane important

For the next two hours, I was to document the emotional journey of watching Citizen Kane for the first time. My past youthful exuberance for tearing down beloved cultural touchstones preceded me and led to a plea from my day-to-day editor, Justin Sayles. One hundred and nineteen minutes and an unintended nap later, there was no need for any searing takes. Citizen Kane is a story about many things—most acutely the gnawing pursuit of love and the dour possibility that, by design, most people in media are incapable of finding it.

For all of its grandeur, the story written by Herman J. Mankiewicz the Mank of Mank and Welles is simple. Charles Foster Kane, one of the richest men alive, dies alone. The only thing the motley crew can agree on is that the narcissistic Kane was obsessed with finding love, despite his inability to ever love anything besides himself. But watching the story of Charles Foster Kane—a character widely believed to be based on newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst—I felt that I was experiencing a bleak monument to the unchanging nature of both a man and, by extension, my profession.

Citizen Kane specifically details the newspaper industry of the s, but could just as easily be about any age. At one point, Kane looks at a photo of the most talented reporters working at his competitor, The Chronicle. The collection of minds took 20 years to build. The feeling that at some point or other most people in my generation were traded just as these men were elicited a chuckle.

Is it any wonder then that directors who adored Kane went on to make such films as The Godfather , Barry Lyndon , Scarface , and Goodfellas? There, Kane came in ninth place, one of only three sound films to place in the Top Along the way, it would top lots of other surveys as well.

In some senses, the debate over who actually wrote Citizen Kane slips in between these two extremes. By bringing the focus back to Mankiewicz, and suggesting that he was primarily responsible both for the script and for what made Kane so special, Kael perhaps hoped to do away with the idea of the all-powerful auteur once and for all.

He was a regular presence on radio, and later, on TV. Additionally, many of us consider later Welles titles like The Trial and F for Fake to be equal to, or greater than, Kane. Thus, the more films Welles made, the more the legend of Citizen Kane grew. And the further Hollywood itself moved away from the heydays of the studio system, the more Citizen Kane seemed to shine like a distant city on a long-ago hill. The poll has grown over the years, becoming more international and more diverse, and more titles are now available to us than have ever been before in the history of humankind.

The masterful Vertigo , savaged by critics upon its release in , had slowly clawed its way up the list over the years.

It was a runner-up in , eighth place in , fourth in , and second in , just five points behind Kane. But one thing seems sure. The idea of a consensus pick, and for that matter the need for any kind of consensus, is a thing of the past. Citizen Kane , the ultimate canon title, has itself become proof that canons are there to be exploded. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile.

The outstanding technical effect in the picture is in the conception of settings and the use of the camera. Gregg Toland is a trained cameraman and ace-high in his profession, and it is apparent that Welles himself was fascinated most of all by this department in movies—that many of the things done were first sketched in with the bold free-hand of his dramatic imagination.

The camera here loves deep perspectives, long rooms, rooms seen through doors and giving onto rooms through other doors, rooms lengthened out by low ceilings or made immense by high-angle shots where the ceiling seems to be the sky. Figures are widely spaced down this perspective, moving far off at will, yet kept in focus. The camera loves partial lighting or under lighting, with faces or figures blacked out, features emphasized or thrown into shadow, with one point of high light in an area of gloom or foreground figures black against brightness, with the key shifting according to mood, with every scene modeled for special effects with light batteries of varying function and power, gobos, barndoors, screens, what not.

There is nothing newer about shooting into lights than shooting into the sun, but there is, I suppose, something new in having the whole book thrown at you at once. Sometimes all this is fine and really does the job it is put to. Along with the wide action range, it is a relief from too much closeness and light, an effect of stretching. Half real and half fish, as in the case of mermaids, is always a thing to cause vague frustration; and too often here it seems as though they were working up a feeling of omen just for the ride.

This camera also likes many of the angles so thoroughly kicked around by the experimental films—floor shots, especially, where the camera gives figures height and takes away width, makes them ominous, or at least portentous in their motions. Add mirrors. And add the usual working tools of long, medium and two-shots, close-ups, dolly shots, panoramas. In the cutting there are several things noticeable.

One is the long easy sweep you can get when a scene of action is covered in one long-range set-up. Another lies partly in the method of treatment and partly in lack of care, and that is the time-and-place confusion which arises when you go smack from the first two-thirds of a sentence to the last third of the same sentence, spoken elsewhere years later. This is done time and again and you might call it jump-cutting or you might call it the old shell game as far as the audience is concerned.

Another thing about the cutting that goes altogether to the fault of direction is the monotony and amateurism of handling simple dialogue. Over and over there are the two faces talking, talk, talk, talk, then close-up of the right speaker asking, then close-up of left speaker answering, then back to two. Outside of getting your name in large letters, being a director consists exactly in knowing how to break this up, to keep interest shifting, to stress the reaction to a line more sharply than the face saying it.

Orson Welles was naturally entranced with the marvelous things the moving camera could do for him; and while much has resulted from this preoccupation, I think his neglect of what the camera could do to him is the main reason why the picture somehow leaves you cold even while your mouth is still open at its excitements. This stuff is fine theatre, technically or any other way, and along with them the film is exciting for the recklessness of its independence, even if it seems to have little to be free for.

There is surely nothing against it as a dramatic venture that it is no advance in screen technique at all, but a retrogression. The movies could use Orson Welles. But so could Orson Welles use the movies, that is, if he wants to make pictures. Hollywood is a great field for fanfare, but it is also a field in which even Genius has to do it the hard way; and Citizen Kane rather makes me doubt that Orson Welles really wants to make pictures.

You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser and improve your visit to our site. Part I: Citizen Welles Citizen Kane can be approached in several ways: as a film, as an event, as a topic of the times, etc.

Part II: Welles and His Wonders To make any sense about technical innovations in any one movie, one should, in an ideal state at least, have some idea of the general technique of making every movie.