Sincere Q: What makes Citizen Kane great?
for starters, i don’t see soulessness or lifelessnes or clunky dialogue or amateurish characters. under the innovations is the story of a broken-hearted boy
There are many, many, many people who share your opinion Zach. And I feel like some people (probably not you, but some people) like to show off how they think Kane is overrated because they don’t like to “follow the crowd”.
Anyway, why exactly are the characters cardboard? I have never forgotten Bernstein’s speech about the woman in the white dress and how a fellow will remember all kinds of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. What a great bit that was!
the woman in the white dress and the dinner table scenes alone put this a notch above most films.
Toland’s work is number one for me, his framing and deep focus shots are top notch and have been much imitated since. Also the structure is fantastic, including the use of the Newsreel to help set the stage. Wise’s editing I feel is lost in all the talk about Toland’s cinematography.
My lone gripe with Kane in the melodramatic acting, but the technical work in the film trumps my qualms with the acting.
it suffers from overhype
if you had never heard of it and saw you would think it was the best film ever made too
but you go into it EXPECTING to see the best film ever made and you leave disappointed
Zach S., I’m with you. Completely.
The whole middle of the film is two-shots and three-shots of blustery, boasting, middle-aged men. Yakking, yakking, yakking. Where’s the thrill in that? No audience, old or young, will sit still for such plot development today. (Ditto in AMBERSONS ).
No, outside whatever filmic tropes it includes—- and yes, they are formidable at times— and mostly at the beginning— with everything borrowed from the Russians and French—- the movie is, for me, a snorefest.
@Alex Miller: Probabally because when we hear “best ever” we imagine something exciting. Sorry, no explosions in Citizen Kane!
“No audience, old or young, will sit still for such plot development today.”
I think that is part of the problem with today’s films, lack of plot development, the audience of today is used to just have shit thrown at us, instead of filmmakers respecting an audience enough to give us well-crafted stories.
First off Zach, I applaud your honesty to admit you “don’t get” what many cinephiles consider the best english language picture ever made. On this site in particular there are certainly a few folks who would consider such a statement cause for summary execution or at least a board flaming of monumental proportion.
Secondly, I’m afraid I can’t offer too much that hasn’t already been said above and more importantly what you have clearly run across in your studies of the film. It seems to me that something that all great movies have in common is a synthesis of all the various elements of film making (e.g.: script, performance, set design, etc) into something that transcends even the strongest of the individual parts. I would submit that you absolutely have this confluence in Citizen Kane; you listed many of the individual elements in your original post.
Thirdly, and finally, I guess I would say that it isn’t surprising that you would find some aspects of the film unsatisfying. No work of art appeals to every single taste and this is one that is nearly 70 years old. What was so remarkably innovative and even shocking to that first 1941 audience could easily seems passe or even trite to one raised on three generations worth of films that have so heavily borrowed, modified, and built upon Welles’ innovations. I myself revere the picture for it breath taking style and its brutal commentary on the emptiness that can lie at the heart of the American Dream but I don’t fault you at all for not being into it. Chocolate-vanilla; vanilla-chocolate-its all a matter of taste as long as you can appreciate what a wonderful confection it is.
It’s like saying what was so inventine about the first airplane….it barely flew for a few minutes and it didn’t even go that high
but the first airplane was a bigger jump than the F-22 ever was
I’d use the same analogy for Citizen Kane
Well, to start, Welles pioneered many of the camera angles and methods, i.e. worm’s eye and deep focus, that went on to become industry standard. “Rosebud” is perhaps THEE greatest spoiler in film history. As Rogert Ebert said, “Rosebud is the emblem of the security, hope and innocence of childhood, which a man can spend his life seeking to regain. It is the green light at the end of Gatsby’s pier; the leopard atop Kilimanjaro, seeking nobody knows what; the bone tossed into the air in ``2001.” It’s riddle has been part of the American lexicon since the film emerged. The story is dense and covers a lot of ground and manages to never dull you in the process as many an epic film can. Going back to the visuals of the film – they have never been equaled or surpassed in any other film. As for the protagonist for which the film is based, William Randolph Hearst, can you think of a more fascinating man to base a story on?
No audience, old or young, will sit still for such plot development today.
Speak for yourself. A gross generalization.
“No audience, old or young, will sit still for such plot development today.”
Well, definitely no audience with the attention span of a parking meter and a third grade reading level.
I’m so glad I’m not an “audience” and can enjoy people talking in movies.
Bazin:
“It is only with Citizen Kane in 1941 that the American cinema would in its turn break away from the classical style of editing to go over to the side of deep focus and long takes” . . .
“depth of focus reintroduced ambiguity into the structure of the image . . .obliged to exercise his liberty and his intelligence, the spectator perceives the ontological ambivalence of reality directly, in the structure of its appearances.”
Robert Carringer: [Kane] reflects “the Modernist period’s general preoccupation with the relativism of points of view.”
David Bordwell:
“Citizen Kane’s flashbacks are famous for juxtaposing events in the hero’s life to bring out ironies or dramatic contrasts.”
“The best way to understand Citizen Kane is to stop worshiping it as a triumph of technique. Too many people have pretended that Orson Welles was the first to use deep-focus, long takes, films-within-films, sound montage, and even ceilings on sets. … Kane is a masterpiece not because of its tours de force, brilliant as they are, but because of the way those tours de force are controlled for larger artistic ends. The glitter of the film’s style reflects a dark and serious theme; Kane’s vision is as rich as its virtuosity. The breadth of that vision remains as impressive today as thirty years ago. Citizen Kane straddles great opposites. It is at once a triumph of social comment and a landmark in cinematic surrealism. It treats subjects like love, power, class, money, friendship, and honesty with the seriousness of a European film; yet it never topples into pretentiousness, is at every instant as zestful, intelligent, and entertaining as the finest Hollywood pictures. It is both a pointed comedy of manners and a tragedy on a Renaissance scale. It has a Flaubertian finesse of detail and an Elizabethan grandeur of design. Extroverted and introspective, exuberant and solemn, Kane has become an archetypal film as boldly as Kane’s career makes him an archetypal figure”
I’m no big fan of Citizen Kane and find Bordwell’s celebration of it above to be shallow, wrongful thinking about how to judge a work of art. Nonetheless, Zach, for you to say yo don’t understand why people like it seems disingenuous. If you’ve read reviews like the ones Matt Parks posted excerpts from, you know why people like it. It’s up to you to ask yourself whether the reasons why people like it are good reasons for liking anything.
You won’t find any answers here, only within yourself.
A lot of my admiration for the film comes from the production side of things …
Considering they had such a low budget (for an epic of thise scale), that it was an artist let loose to do what he wanted, the experimentation with cinematography, the crazy tricks for the mics and camera placement … awesome break away tables and moving props during tracking shots … etc etc
That and as a film that I first started loving in Highschool it has a certain lasting appeal for me … I just RECENTLY accepted my love for the film at of an idiotic fear of being castrated for such a canonical love, but I can’t help it
In highschool starting sophmore year and going into the summer past senior i literally watched the film everynight to fall asleep to with a warm glass of milk (goes so well together)
But yes, a lot of my reasons are for being a filmmaker myself and a love for the art and the film feels, to me, like a celebration of that, and a crowning achievement in cinematography.
Best film of all time? Crazy question! I fully do not believe in best vs worst … only like vs dislike … if you to best and worst then that goes into right and wrong and who is anyone to say a choice in art is wrong? Though we all have full credit to say we disliked something ;)
Those are my reasons for thinking it’s great.
There will always be “Classics” that are preached about from the Stage, but it doesn’t mean they are for everyone; I certainly am not a huge fan of 2001, and I grow tired of people thinking Pulp Fiction is a masterpiece.
To each their own.
When I first saw Citizen Kane 20 years ago, I rented it with absolutely no expectations at all except for the fact that some old fart critic said it was a masterpiece, whooppdie-do, but low and behold the movie was life changing for me..but not for all the great experimental camera work for the time and lighting and all that technical stuff but I just really loved the storyline!! And it drew me in and held for the entire film and also the phenomonal freakin performance by Welles himself who had this amazing charisma and energy that just blew my freakin mind! I think that it IS truly a really great film and rightfully deserves all the attention it gets!
Oh and I totally felt the same way about 2001 and Pulp Fiction the first time I saw those “masterpieces”..yes i’m not afraid to say that, and that is my personal opinion.
But I totally agree with the statement, To each their own.
Yeah everyone always praises the technical side of it but I enjoyed the characters and the tragic story.
What does your first movie look like?
I agree with OP. Compared to Rick from Casablanca Citizen Kane is like the waste water that accumulates at the bottom of a trash receptacle, refuse not even fit for garbage.
Take that tripe of a byword “rosebud” and compare it to the scene at the nightclub in Casablanca:
“What nationality are you?”
“I’m a drunkard.”
“That makes Rick a citizen of the world.”
And even minor characters like Lazlo have great lines:
“It is perhaps strange that we both should be in love with the same woman [but] since no one is to blame, I demand no explanation.”
The cast of Kane is best described as dull eyed, mouth gapers, to the last man. Best to leave this to the professional critics to find their “themes,” those which plumb the profoundest profundities of that fundamental human essence, that basic innate desire to plumb profundities.
First of all, if you don’t dig a film, you don’t dig a film. Pure and simple. But it is amazing that KANE is still inspiring filmmakers today. I know that because I’m one. I saw CITIZEN KANE when I was about 13 years old and it literally changed my life. Seriously, my life can be described in two different phases: what I knew and felt about cinema before I saw KANE and what I knew and felt about cinema after I saw KANE. But that’s me. It doesn’t have to be that way for anybody else.
The thing I think people forget mostly about films that are praised like this one, is that a major reason it tops so many prestigious lists is because of it’s INFLUENCE. Since the greatness of any kind of art is mostly subjective, the one thing that many people use to determine that greatness is a piece’s breadth of influence in it’s particular field. In the case of CITIZEN KANE, the reason it is considered “the greatest” is because it has influenced so many filmmakers. Of course, there are other academic reasons it’s great, as many have pointed out, but when watching a film that is so widely considered great, but it doesn’t seem all that great to you, you have to remember that a large part of it’s status comes from it’s influence.
What makes Kane great? Well, let’s start at the beginning, or as the film has it the ending, as the movie sets up its end before it really begins. The movie opens with an image of card stating its a Mercury Theater production, then proceeds to a shot of the title, Citizen Kane, in bold capital letters of white outlines on black without music or sound before cutting to the, now famous, No Trespassing sign. A series of images and edits slowly take us towards a mansion deep in the background of the early shots, we proceed through grounds in disrepair towards a single window with a light shining in it. These cuts are kept in balance by the window holding roughly the same position on screen which allows for a sort of rhyming in the shots, even as they have variation such as showing the mansion upside down in the reflection in the water in one. All the while there is a melancholic dirge-like tune playing as an accompaniment to the visuals, music that is dark but with just a hint of hope or upbeat attitude as the note rises near the end of the theme before dropping back down again, this gives way to a slightly more melodramatic finish once we reach the window and the light we have been following as a guide is extinguished. The music cuts out and for a second all is black until another, dimmer, light is switched on in the room and the music comes up once again, slightly different than before.
We then are taken inside the room where we see a figure in a bed, presumably the end goal of our travels, but before we get to see this person, the screen fills with what appears to be snow, then a house, a small house can be seen through the snow, a quick pull back shows that the house is actually a snow globe being held in an almost limp hand presumably belonging to the person in the bed, just as we adjust to that information, there is a cut to an extreme close-up of a mouth and we here the first word in the film “Rosebud.” From that the film cuts to a different angle of the hand holding the snowglobe just as it releases it and it falls to the ground and shatters. In a reflection in the shattered glass we see a nurse come in, this nurse who covers the person with a sheet showing the entire opening was one that took us to the last moment of someone yet unknown, someone who has just passed away. Thus the beginning of the film becomes an ending and that ending lays out everything we will need to know in order to follow the film and gain an understanding of it. This is why I’ve laid it out in such detail, the beginning is the ending and we will follow the film backwards in a way, needing to connect ideas or images presented earlier to others presented later that may have proceeded them chronologically. It also sets up the ideas of the film being fragmented, being reflections and indirect views of what goes on and even more directly. What was whole had been shattered both in the sense of a simple visual metaphor for the man’s life, and for how we will try to put the pieces back together in order to understand that life. It also signals that we will be confronted with a different way of viewing, one that will demand our attention in a unique way asking us to focus on things that we may not do otherwise.
The first example of what I mean by reversing our usual linear understanding of a film comes a moment later, after the shock cut to the News on the March title and music. There is a title card that tells us that the person who died was “Xanadu’s Landlord”. This is followed by some more writing giving the first lines of Coleridge’s poem; “In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure dome decree…”
Now these few words set off several connection if we reflect on what we saw just moments before. First is that in common usage the word Xanadu is used for a sort of paradise or utopia, but the images we saw of the estate moments ago were hardly that of a paradise. It was a run down, neglected world, filled with what may have been at one time delightful but is now rather decrepit and frightening. This irony establishes something of the troubles Kane will face and the worldview(s) he holds as the image or physical realities belies the dream. We also can note the Coleridge’s poem is famous for being a fragment, unfinished, as he was interrupted while writing it. It is considered a great loss to poetry that he was unable to regain his vision after having been confronted by a man on business. This too informs us of possible ways of understanding Kane’s life as is also made clear when one contrasts the line I quoted above; “In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure dome decree…” Kane then is being connected to Kubla Kahn, a character of, literally, fabulous power and wealth, but this:
is hardly a stately pleasure dome. A tiny and homely dome containing something that may or may not be the cause of much pleasure for Kane, likely both.
I won’t go any further in a scene by scene explication of the film since that would be incredibly time consuming and onerous and would also start coming close to demanding that things be viewed the same way I view them and that isn’t helpful. Instead I will simply give some other examples that are, perhaps, less remarked upon in the film of things that I find of value or even profound. I simply laid all this out to show how I approach the film and how I feel the film has given me reasons to look at it in this manner. I have to pause before giving more examples for the moment, but I’ll post this chunk for now and get add more in a while.
some great top chart classic movie have MYTHOLOGICAL touch. The Rules of Game, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, 2001, My Darling Clementine, Zorba in Greek.
Funny thing is, mythology deliever anywho from inspiration of brainstorming. Even more, mythology is absolutly classic.
Wow, I really like that Bordwell quote.
I probably shouldn’t write anything after that, but I just wanted to say I agree with the quote. When Bordwell mentions that the filmmaking serves Welles’ vision so well, I’d also point out that the namely the components of filmmaking (tours de force in its own right) come together in a seemless and integrated fashion—which to me is often a hallmark of great art. Indeed, if I’m asked to come up with cinematic examples of this, CK comes first to mind, and I can’t think of many other films that are better both in terms of excellence in the individual filmmaking components and the way the director intergrates these components.
some great top chart classic movie have MYTHOLOGICAL touch
I wasn’t aware Zorba the Greek is a “classic” movie….I suppose it’s obvious academics have no idea of my country’s true cinema and just pick what the Franco-American criticism decides to pick…
In addition to that, Mythology is Worldwide! One could argue Citizen Kane is inspired by Irish or Indian mythological elements, regarding its philosophical background or the anti-heroic motive (uummm, I’m rambling now, but…)
A brilliant explication, Greg. You promised more. I’d love to read the rest.
I would echo Uli’s praise of Gregg Toland, one of the great masters of American cinematography who died much too soon. It’s his work that gives Citizen Kane its distinctive look, one that had not really been seen before. I must also mention the prescient and cynical view of big media, which has become evermore pervasive and influential, mostly in deleterious ways. William Randolph Hearst, on whom Kane is based, basically started the Spanish-American war through his newspapers, or at the very least fanned the flames. The trumpeting of American media in the runup to the invasion of Iraq contains eerie parallels to the machinations of both Hearst and Kane. Citizen Kane contains a plangent and cautionary reminder of the fateful limits of wealth and power.
Zach S.
Hello all. I have seen Citizen Kane thrice, I’ve shed all my preconceived notions, studied the theory behind the film, read reviews, etc., and, in all honesty, I still cannot figure out why critics love it. I really, sincerely want to know why people think it merits its stellar reputation. I’m very curious, and I’d be happy for someone to prove me wrong. For me, even after all my studying, Kane feels like a soulless, lifeless effort dressed up in some gorgeous photography with a dash of technical brilliance. Its inventions are many, but all on the surface: a clever narrative with whiplash chronological leaps, deep focus photography, etc… But no soul, amateurish/cardboard characters, clunky dialogue, etc. Help?