67) Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane (1941)


Director: Orson Welles

Starring: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloan, Agnes Moorehead, Erskine Sanford, William Alland

This week in Introduction to Cinema we are looking at the idea of the film canon, so naturally we watched Orson Welles' masterpiece Citizen Kane.

After the death of media mogul Charles Foster Kane (Welles), journalist Jerry Thompson (Alland) tries to uncover the significance of Kane's last spoken word, "Rosebud", by interviewing the significant people from his life. Through the memories of those he interviews Kane's life is recounted, charting his rise to become one of the most influential men in America and his tragic decline to the point that he dies along in his mega mansion, Xanadu.

There are few films with as big a reputation as Citizen Kane. Widely regarded as the greatest film of all time, having held the number one spot in British film journal Sight & Sound's illustrious Top Ten poll every decade since the 1960s, Citizen Kane can be a very difficult film to watch. When you come into a film with high expectations you can often be disappointed. If you come into a film told it is the best film ever made, it is difficult not to have high expectations. The first time I saw Citizen Kane I thought it was good, but didn't quite get what all the hype was about, and definitely didn't think it was the greatest film ever made. However, this was the third time that I've seen it and I've found that each time I watch it I get more out of it and develop a greater appreciation for what is an amazing film.

Citizen Kane is an absolute masterclass in film technique. There are little things like the fact that Kane is always shot from a low angle to make him seem more imposing while Susan is always shot from above to make her seem weak, the shaky-camera footage of Kane in the opening newsreel to create the illusion we are peering through into his garden, and the movement of the camera from outside to inside through a window or a wall without seeming to break the flow of the camera movement. Then there are the more grand technical achievements; the incredible use of deep focus photography allowing for action to take place in clarity in both the foreground and background of a scene, the long takes and sweeping camera movements like the one in the opera house where we rise from the stage up into the rafters, and the bringing to life of a photograph of his newspaper's staff and the equivalent transformation of a shot of the front of Susan's apartment block into the cover of the newspaper. None of these techniques seem overly shocking to us now, but this film was made in 1941, nearly 70 years ago. When you compare the ambitious techniques employed by Welles with the cinematography of other films from the era it becomes apparent just how amazing an achievement Citizen Kane was.

As well as the stunning technical achievements, there is the narrative itself. The story of Kane's life is told episodically through the memories of the different people being interviewed by Thompson. Thus not only does the narrative jump back and forward in time, on occasion we see the same scene taking place from a different perspective. Welles is using quite a sophisticated non-linear narrative about 50 years before Tarantino made it cool with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

The cinematic techniques, the narrative style and even the story content combine to give Citizen Kane a very modern feel. When you consider all of this in the light of the fact that this film was Welles debut feature and he was only 25 years old when he made it, the achievement is almost sickening.

A first viewing of Citizen Kane also unlocks a number of references in The Simpsons. A number of the students in my tutorials commented on how so many of the scenes in the film were already familiar to them from The Simpsons. For example the episode about the three-eyed fish, "Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish", parallels Citizen Kane in Mr. Burns' run at office, while the episode where Mr. Burns searches for his childhood teddy bear Bobo, notably titled "Rosebud", is practically one half hour homage to Welles' film.

Citizen Kane is an absolute masterpiece of the cinema, but while it sits at the top of so many lists of the greatest films of all time, it is important to remember that those lists are generally prepared by film critics, filmmakers or academics, that is, people who have an interest in film that goes beyond enjoyment. A lot of the things which commend Citizen Kane as a film are to do with the technical achievement of the film and the context of its production, things that may not be obvious to your average movie watcher. But putting all the film studies stuff to the side, Citizen Kane is still a really enjoyable movie, and while you may not come out of it understanding why so many say it is the greatest film of all time, you'll still think it's pretty impressive.