While Citizen Kane may be overrated Welles is not, look to Othello, Touch Of Evil or The Trail. Yes he had a big ego but he truly is one of greats
Rodney – I’m saying Welles is sub-very good. He’s alright, not terrible, but not deserving of all the praise he gets ie the stuff JR pointed out.
Can we all just take a minute and acknowledge that JR likes Titanic?
People on this board are so conservative. I bet most of you couldn’t allow yourself to think of one bad thing about Welles. Ridiculous.
Nathan, come on — it’s silly to just come in and say someone as highly esteemed as Welles isn’t very good just because you personally don’t like his style. It’s arrogant. I don’t like everything he’s ever done. I’m not a fan of Touch of Evil, for example. I didn’t think his acting in the later years was all that interesting. But to say as a director that he’s not very good or sub very good or any of that shit like you’re some kind of an expert on cinematography instead of just a guy with a computer? It’s ridiculous. It’s like saying Da Vinci can’t paint — any fool can say it, but don’t expect respect unless you really prove it
Nathan, come on — it’s silly to just come in and say someone as highly esteemed as Welles isn’t very good just because you personally don’t like his style. It’s arrogant. I don’t like everything he’s ever done. I’m not a fan of Touch of Evil, for example. I didn’t think his acting in the later years was all that interesting. But to say as a director that he’s not very good or sub very good or any of that shit like you’re some kind of an expert on cinematography instead of just a guy with a computer? It’s ridiculous. It’s like saying Da Vinci can’t paint — any fool can say it, but don’t expect respect unless you really prove it
Nobody can deny that he was great in the technician aspect of film making ,he was actually one of the first american directors that used “depth in a scene”in his films. but that alone doesn’t make him a GREAT director.It’s ideas behind that beautiful cinematography and lighting and all the other SHIT that makes a film good and a director an auteur.
I’ll give you an example for that: Everybody is somebody’s fool. The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old so I guess I’ll concentrate on that. Maybe I’ll live so long that I’ll forget her or Maybe I’ll die trying.I think it’s from The Lady from Shanghai .and that’s the deepest dialogue Welles ever used as far as I can remember.I think you can get what I mean!!!
I don’t know how to respond to all of this without getting emotional and saying things I can’t take back. I guess for me, if not for Orson Welles, I would not be interested in filmmaking. It’s because of renegade’s like him that we even have a concept of making a film “independently.”
I keep trying to write more, but it keeps getting emotional so I will stop.
Nathan, I you are are entitled to your opinion. My question for you, however is this: who is a genius in your opinion?
And what, in Nathan’s opinion, does “great” mean?
“People on this board are so conservative. I bet most of you couldn’t allow yourself to think of one bad thing about Welles. Ridiculous.”
this mightbe the dumbest thing yet said on this thread. conservativism has nothing to do with this. are you fckng serious with that shit? nottomention, everyone who’s been attacking your godawful opinion has already conceded at least one welles film they’re not so fond of. your opinion is useless because it has nothing backing it up other than ‘i no like it’ + ‘others gooder’ = weetard.
“Can we all just take a minute and acknowledge that JR likes Titanic?”
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I have no shame in my cinema-whoreness. I am a junkie.
I am not 100% familiar with Welles entire body of work, but when I think of Kane, I think of the direction, the camera movement, the blocking and staging, the edit, the story of course. I am not sure who the FIRST PERSON on the planet to utilize these techniques, but I do know, that the techniques employed in Kane are alive and well today and extensively used by Scorsese, Spielberg, Tarantino and (Insert a dozen other masters). These are techniques considered standards in in the medium.
The use of cranes, the ramping in the edit room, the dolly pushes and pulls …. the incredible staging and blocking sequences, and yes, the long DOF created by Welles and Toland.
Welles overrated ? Not very good ? You seem to be in the minority.
When everyone in the room tells you you’re drunk, you probably are.
I don’t mind a minority opinion. I like a minority opinion, but I like it bold, thoughtful and full of intellectual brio. It does not do to just say I don’t like it and therefore the man who made it is no good. You have to tackle Welles on his own ground. There are many fine people who do not like Citizen Kane and that is their right; no one says you have to. But saying it’s bad or the director isn’t very good — well, that’s an opinion you kind of have to earn. Make me a believer. Give me examples. Tell me where it falls apart. Tell me why all those camera shots are meaningless. Tell me why a movie which moves me every time I see it moves you not at all.
Of course, this may be just an area where there’s no resolution. Bergman says “Citizen Kane” is boring. I cannot fathom how a person, especially one with so trained an eye as Bergman, finds it boring. It is probably not possible to convince someone a film is boring if you find it riveting. Still, if a film does not work for you, it doesn’t work for you.
In his defense, Nathan did express this in some degree; I just thought his objection was kind of feeble.
Let me REITERATE before people proceed to flame each other some more.
All good film is art in some form. Like musical composition, paintings, etc., art is in the eye of the beholder.
So there will always be some people that find some directors or films to be not so great, when there is a majority that thinks otherwise. That’s just how it is. It doesn’t change the fact that Orson Welles represented the ideas of being an auteur and having total creative freedom, years before all the great directors struggled with studio interference.
Also, a lot of film critics and myself included, feel that Bergman was never able to understand how people felt Kane was so easily considered the best film of all time, when Bergman himself had an incredible life’s body of work that was somewhat overlooked compared to Welles. I’m not trying to criticize Bergman, but there are hints of a creative jealousy and Bergman was not the least outspoken person. I think they are both great film-makers in their own sense, but Bergman’s hatred of all things Welles seems a bit more personal than it is justified.
Agreed, David, as I noted upthread. The critic Stanley Kauffmann once said that Bergman saw film history as a pyramid and, make no mistake, saw himself at the top of it. It may well be after you’ve made Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal. Winter Light, Shame, and Cries and Whispers, you may find it frustrating that critics are still falling prostrate at the altar of Fatso. Life, as Bergman never failed to point out, can be very cruel…
Moderated
That is a nice quote you bring up Rodney, I hadn’t heard of that one yet but it definitely reinforces a lot of these notions.
NEH: I think whenever films or directors get a ton of praise, it’s always going to bring in those few people who like to berate others’ opinions without giving a reason-based opinion of their own. And because they may be in the minority, it gives them added satisfaction in voicing those opinions rather emphatically.
haha i got a thumbs down, whaddayaknow?
Welles did a lot of things first, but just looking at the films on their own, does he deserve to be lauded as the greatest director ever? Does he deserve to be among the top ten? Again, just looking at the films.
Welles’ editing: Can’t you at least entertain the notion that one could reasonably find it distracting?
I’m not leaning on Bergman. I found the quote amusing, and thank you to the people who posted it. But ad hominem arguments against Bergman don’t affect my position.
SHE: I wasn’t using the term ‘conservative’ in the way I think you think I was. What I mean is, their attitude toward film criticism is one of conservation of accepted opinions, rather than, e.g., investigation.
NATHAN: I think there are a few factors as to why people feel is a great director. If you look at his total body of work, he has about 4-8 (depends on the way you look at it) films that most cinephiles and film buffs would consider to be great works of cinema. Starting with Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, Othello, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight and you could argue for a few others.
The film that he had the most creative control over was Citizen Kane, his first big production as a director. If you look at other works during the era in which Kane was released, you will find that his experimentation with aesthetic and narrative structure is years ahead of its time. And even if you don’t find most of his films to be great, his films considered to be great have spanned over a 25 year career. How anyone could find Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil or Chimes at Midnight to be considered bad films baffles me.
He is also the only auteur that I can think of, that stars in most of his films and there is no one who can doubt his vocal range and strength as an actor.
Looking at JUST Citizen Kane, yes, I think he can be regarded as one of the greatest directors ever because he introduced so much, or at the very least refined it. It marked an advance in film language: lapse of time, composition in depth, etc. As for the editing, no, I do not see how it can be distracting because it’s so smooth, because it works so well, because it tells a great deal of the story within seconds. For example, the way the group photo from the opposition newspaper turns into a group photo for his newspaper — very quickly and conveniently showing how he hired the opposition staff. I do not see how the film could possibly be better edited.
NEH – I don’t know whom you’re implying down-thumbed your reviews, but in case it’s me: I haven’t thumbed anything either way. I haven’t even read any reviews on this site.
David: I know people put a high percentage of Welles’ films among their most highly regarded. But do YOU like them? The canon of accepted great films is probably a good place to start, but at a point one must make his or her own decisions.
Experimentation is definitely a worthy pursuit, and in Welles’ case it yielded a lot of fruitful results. It makes the films important, but not necessarily great.
The longevity angle is interesting. If anyone wants to plot out a timeline with Welles’ successes and failures I think that might be of interest to the board. Maybe the results will be obvious to those of you who are more familiar with Welles’ body of work, but I’m interested to see what the result will be.
I’m not the only one who doesn’t like Welles as an actor – some Welles supporters are with me on this one.
Moderated
NATHAN: Yeah I definitely actually like his films. I can’t really see how a lot of people can find the great ones to be bad. The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil or Chimes at Midnight are my favorite films of his, with Kane and Othello behind them.
“Experimentation is definitely a worthy pursuit, and in Welles’ case it yielded a lot of fruitful results. It makes the films important, but not necessarily great.”
The film, Citizen Kane, is great because of its art, because of its singularity AND because of its interest. I asked you a question you never answered — what, for you, makes a film great?
Here’s an answer I heard this week in something I read: a great film is a film I cannot ever imagine not seeing again.
Very subjective, but true. I’ve seen Citizen Kane a number of times and I want to see it many more. Why? Because it’s bottomless. Incandescent. I never get tired of it. It grabs me every time I see it. It always has so many things to show me and it never lets me down. I am confident that I’m not the only one who feels this way and there will be many more after I’m gone. So as far as I’m concerned the greatness is unquestioned.
So tell me YOUR standard for greatness and why Kane fails to meet it.
A great film has some kind of truth to it. Or it seems to come from a place of honesty. Art is made by humans, for humans. Great art is made for humans inasmuch as they are human. Not sure if anyone who isn’t already sympathetic to my way of looking at things will agree with me, or even understand what I’m talking about.
Maybe I shouldn’t even talk about art, things will get too hairy.
Fitzcarraldo speaks to me on that level. So does A Boy And His Dog. So does The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. They’re all very different films, but I find nothing inhuman about them like I do with Welles.
Now I’m talking about films ‘speaking’ to me, jeez. I hope this makes a little bit of sense. It’s more an instinct than a rubric.
It may be that what you’re trying to say is that it’s an exercise in pure style that just leaves you cold, which is somewhat the way I feel about Touch of Evil, admirable though it no doubt is, as well as certain Kubrick films. I don’t however see it as in any way lacking humanity or vitality, as I think it has all those qualities to spare, but more than anything it’s supremely entertaining for the same reasons I’ve said all along. Every scene is a wonder that explores all the possibilities of what film can do, and as a whole it’s a kind of essay on raw American energy, and the huge, ambitious but largely wasted life of a powerful man.
Another fantastic series of scenes in KANE is the three fades over breakfast when in about 10 seconds we get the entire disintegration of the marriage between Charles Foster Kane and his first wife. I can’t think of any other movie from the forties or before that has such breathtakingly exciting editing, and Eisenstein doesn’t count. Citizen Kane is the first truly modern film, imo.
Orson Welles is okay. I actually love him as an actor. He is one of the things that I really like about The Third Man, and a great plus to Start The Revolution Without Me…but this thread isn’t the place for that movie. So, as an actor I love him, but his films I find a little dull.
I will admit that there is some fantastic technical stuff in Kane. Great camera work, great editing and so on. One thing to remember though is that I am an Ozu fan. I love still cameras. I love slow editing. I am more for the picture itself than the editing or how the picture fits into a certain sequence.
There has been talk of Welles leaving people cold. While he doesn’t leave me cold (when he directs I mean) he doesn’t leave me with anything really. I don’t have a negative opinion of Welles after watching his work, I just haven’t ever received that emotional punch from his films. To bring up Ozu again, his films give me that emotion. Everyone has different films and different styles of film making that speaks to them more than others do.
Also, I admit that I still have a lot of Welles yet to see. My opinion of him may change for the better yet.
I suffered a crisis of faith when I read Pauline Kael’s ‘The Citizen Kane Book’. – One of my hero’s trashing another.
Then I read it again and realized that she LIKED Citizen Kane but was offended at Welles’ claim to have written the screenplay. She was defending Herman Mankiewicz who, as a writer, she admired. She was defending the truth. And I had to come to terms with the fact that – as much as I admired Welles, he was not everything he claimed to be. And, from what I’ve read, he left a lot to be desired as a human being.
Welles was not a writer. The story of Kane is all Mankiewicz and, as Welles said “There was nothing to edit. It was shot the way it was written and taped together” (I’m paraphrasing).
Welles was not a film-maker. Most of the innovative techniques in Citizen Kane are due to Greg Toland’s lenses and ‘deep-focus’ depth of field.
Welles was a radio actor and it may be the techniques he developed in that field that Nathan W dislikes. Personally, I like his voice and his delivery. His performance in Compulsion (and Moby Dick), is electrifying, even if he did use a prompter, and his narration of The Magnificent Ambersons is moving and sublime.
What he brought to Kane was his acting troupe (The Mercury Theatre), his theatrical directing skills (as seen in the ‘the breakfast scene’ and others), and himself. He fell in love with cinema (“the best toy train set a boy could ever want”) and went on to make The Magnificent Ambersons which realizes his budding film directing skills.
He spent the rest of his life trying to raise enough money to make his films. Chimes At Midnight is a triumph and much of Touch Of Evil is superb.
Welles, if nothing else is endlessly fascinating. I’d like to see a thread that discusses the meaning behind the fact that his first 2 films are based on the idea of someone getting “Their commupance” (as Welles obviously did), and 3 of them discuss man ‘Following his nature in the end"…I’d find that more interesting than this silly sniping.
saying welles was not a filmmaker seems absurd to me. suggesting that he wasn’t the true auteur behind “kane”, but rather toland and mankiewicz were, seems absurd too. did toland direct the actors? did mankiewicz oversee the construction of the film from pre to post production?
J.R. Hudson
How many fuckin Oscars did Titanic won?
Which movie won the golden palm in 04? (WHO WAS THE PRESIDENT JURY!!!!!!!!!? )
How many oscars Fellini won?
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Titanic. I unashamedly love.
F9/11. Perhaps the French letting us know Bush is an idiot ?
Fellini. How many has Scorsese won ? Thank god for the make up comsmetic for Departed.
But what does this have to do with the price of tea in china ?