CITIZEN KANE
In the most dazzling debut feature in cinema history, twenty-five-year-old writer-producer-director-star Orson Welles synthesized the possibilities of sound-era filmmaking into what could be called the first truly modern movie. In telling the story of the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of a William Randolph Hearst–like newspaper magnate named Charles Foster Kane, Welles not only created the definitive portrait of American megalomania, he also unleashed a torrent of stylistic innovations—from the jigsaw-puzzle narrative structure to the stunning deep-focus camera work of Gregg Toland—that have ensured that Citizen Kane remains fresh and galvanizing for every new generation of moviegoers to encounter it.
Phillip Kemp, World Film Directors, Volume I :
The soundtrack of Kane--as of his older American films, Macbeth excepted--is of a complexity and subtlety unprecedented at the time. Dialogue overlaps, cuts across temporal and spacial dissolves. Sounds are dislocated, distorted, deployed non-naturalistically to comment on or counterpont the visuals; voices alter in timbre according to distance, placing, or physical surroundings; music and sound are used across transtions, to effect narrative ellipses. (Phylis Goldfarb, Take One, October, 1972) quotes a sequence in illustration: "Susan singing in the parlor is heard withour a lapse, over the dissolve which moves us to the parlor at a later date. Then Kane's applause [for Susan] turns into light clapping heard behind Leland's campaign speech. Leland's voice, in turn, becomes Kane's, heard over the microphone in a large auditorium."
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Kane broaches themes that would recur throughout Welles' films, the irrecoverable loss of innocence and idealism, the loneliness of power, potential unrealized and talent abused, the fear of death. In Charles Foster Kane Welles presents the first in his gallery of brooding, unscrupulous predators, who nonetheless retain a small area of human vulnerabilty that arouses our sympathy.
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Dillys Powell observed that "there is no question here of experiment for experiment's sake; it is a question of a man with a problem of narrative to solve, using lighting, setting, sound, camera angles and movement much as a genuine writer uses words, cadences, phrases, rhythms; using them with the ease and boldness and resource of one who controls and is not controlled by his medium." Phillip Kemp, World Film Directors, Volume I
20 inspired visual moments in Citizen Kane
It’s this kind of dazzling invention that has made Orson Welles’s masterful debut so influential.
29 April 2016
By Leigh Singer
If you hold with Orson Welles’s gleeful endorsement that making a film is “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had”, then his feature debut Citizen Kane is the hi-tech, speeding locomotive that powered cinema into the future. Still regarded as an all-time great, its huge influence is matched only by its reputation as one of the most inventive and exuberant of movie masterpieces. Here are just some of the visual innovations led by Welles and his master cinematographer Gregg Toland.