Already a star in the theatre and on the radio, he was lured to Hollywood by RKO Pictures with the promise that he could make any film he wanted, without interference.
Astoundingly, Welles was only 25 when Citizen Kane was released. More important than the screenplay, though, was Welles’ own vivacity: no other meditation on failure, regret, and the cruelty of time has ever had such youthful exuberance.
#Does citizen kane use classical cutting or soviet montage movie
We then glide into the castle for a weird montage: a snowstorm, a snow globe, Kane’s mouth as he breathes his dying word, “Rosebud.” Two minutes in, and the film isn’t a horror movie anymore, but a surrealist experiment worthy of Dalí and Buñuel. We’re in gothic horror territory the castle could well be owned by Count Dracula. The film opens with Bernard Herrmann’s doom-and-gloom chords, and we see the jagged silhouette of a castle on a foggy hilltop. The cover of my Universal Cinema Classics DVD categorises it as a “mystery drama”, but an exhaustive list of its genres would take up the whole box. But rather than playing out like a conventional biopic, Citizen Kane is a jigsaw puzzle that pieces together multiple narrators and multiple perspectives. A fictionalised version of William Randolph Hearst, it’s this towering central character that gives the film its air of significance, as well as its continuing air of relevance: the parallels with Citizen Murdoch, Citizen Trump and Citizen Jobs are easy to spot. The reason it’s so vibrant is that its own director was learning those lessons too.Īlong the way, he was telling the life story of Charles Foster Kane (played by Welles), a press baron who has enormous wealth and influence, but doesn’t attain either the political office or the love he craves. Citizen Kane is an encyclopedia of techniques: a 114-minute film school which provides lesson after lesson in deep focus and rear projection, extreme close-ups and overlapping dialogue.
In 1946, a French cinema historian, Georges Sadoul, dismissed Citizen Kane as “an encyclopedia of old techniques”, and, while he was hoping to dent Welles’ reputation for groundbreaking innovation, he accidentally summed up the film’s geekish appeal. There’s nothing shameful about being the 67th finest motion picture in existence, of course, but it’s clear that the average movie fan doesn’t cherish Citizen Kane quite as much as critics, directors and students – that is, people who are obsessed by the nuts and bolts of how films are assembled. And, at the time of writing, the users of IMDB had put it in 67th place, reserving the winner’s podium for The Shawshank Redemption. Last year, it stalled at number 33 in Empire magazine’s readers’ poll (number one was The Empire Strikes Back). To be fair, Citizen Kane doesn’t head every greatest films list.
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