Citizen Kane (1941)

“It’s no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want is to make a lot of money”

Citizen Kane’s story follows the rise & fall of a very rich man who tries to buy himself happiness, but it’s the film’s structure that really shows Orson Welles’ skill as a storyteller. He constructs a kind of oral history that bounces around in time about a man who’s already died, criticising media, politics & wealth in the process. It’s also an incredibly technical film. Almost every scene has a kind of practical effect like composite shots and matte paintings to create visuals that were unheard of in 1941. Welles & cinematographer Gregg Toland built theatre-like lighting rigs, and Toland designed a whole new lens to allow for incredible kubrick-level depths of field. In some scenes, the camera is at such a low angle, they had to dig out the floor to fit the camera.

Each scene is constructed to portray a kind of power dynamic, with characters towering above each other or being dwarfed by the scenery. Though people often focus on the meaning of Rosebud, I find they often miss the crux of the story. The tragedy of Citizen Kane isn’t that Kane fails to find happiness, or that the journalists fail to figure out what Rosebud means. The tragedy is that he remains a mystery to everyone who knew him. The empire of tabloid journalism that brought him so much wealth & power fails to grasp anything meaningful about the life of the man who built it. He dies alone & essential anonymous.

Citizen Kane is now a kind of warning lesson for would-be auteurs. Welles took the studio’s blank check & built a composite character based mostly on William R Hearst. Hearst, deeply insulted, did everything he could to prevent its release. To Welles’ horror, he was mostly successful. It was only in the 50’s that film enthusiasts began to re-examine the film, and it is now considered one of the greatest movies of all time.