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Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles, is considered one of the greatest films ever made.
What is so great about Citizen Kane? I grade a film on four criteria. These are:
- Technical artistry
- Storytelling artistry
- Entertainment and
- Art
A film must ace all four to be great. If you want to know the details of what makes a film read this:
Technical artistry
The first film to revolutionize filmmaking was The Birth of a Nation. The second time it happened was with Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane turned filmmaking on its head, and changed the perception of what could be achieved technically, on so many different levels.
The majority of the credit goes to the legendary Gregg Toland, whose cinematography I have explored in detail here (only for members):
In my video on Seven Samurai I said every frame of it is a painting. In Citizen Kane, every frame was groundbreaking in its day. It wasn’t just one or two things, it was everything.
I’ll try to explain.
Orson Welles is the undisputed master of the long take. He said the ability to do that separates the men from the boys. Not very gender neutral back in the 40s, but you get the idea. The most famous scene involves Kane’s early life, where his mother decides to send him away for his own good. They went so far as to move tables to make the shot work, all in one take.
But that’s not all. Citizen Kane is one of the two films that revolutionized deep focus cinematography. You can see the boy playing outside even as we’re in a mid close up of the group talking inside. Try filming that yourself, and you’ll see how hard it is to do.
Orson Welles and Gregg Toland used wide-angle lenses to devastating effect. You can see a character’s face in the foreground and everything that happens in the background. In a famous shot in the bar, the composition is meticulously layered. The reporter is in the phone booth, the waiter’s in his place, and the actress is in hers.
This lighting technique of extreme chiaroscuro is directly attributable to Caravaggio.
When the focus depth was too much for a camera to do in one go, they employed split diopter lenses and merged them together. There was no photoshop or computers. It had to be done in camera, on film stock, with no monitors on set.
Even forty years later Spielberg couldn’t execute the split diopter perfectly. It’s a hard thing to pull off. Citizen Kane is littered with them!
When the mise-en-scene got too large, they used matte paintings to extend the sets. They used bare lights in a dark background to simulate a crowd. They used a rudimentary keying technique to get a parakeet in front of a background plate. They employed multiple reflections, and reflections on broken glass. They did a photo merge, and on and on it goes.
The lighting was revolutionary, with sharp shadows and silhouettes. Toland wasn’t afraid to use shafts of light and underexpose the foreground. Sometimes the lighting is like a dance. One light goes and another appears. There are even complex lighting changes during dissolves. When he needed softness he brought out the nets and filters. The entirety of Citizen Kane is a textbook of cinematography.
Orson Welles was a young kid who miraculously got a studio to give him unlimited power to make whatever he wanted. His hubris knew no bounds, except in the presence of Gregg Toland. Welles knew Citizen Kane wouldn’t be Citizen Kane without Toland, which is why the director graciously shared the title card with this cinematographer. How often do you see that?
Before we move on I should also mention the art direction, which is yet another masterclass. Citizen Kane used deep focus photography not just to show us the background, but to also create optical illusions that take your breath away.
Like Kane walking in the foreground, then moving back, and suddenly we realize the windows are larger than they appear. This is repeated in a later scene where Kane walks to his fireplace, except it’s more like a bonfire-place.
When Kane insisted on taking his camera to ground level, they made a raised set with a hole for the camera. Hardly anyone showed ceilings in those days, but Welles wanted to. So they used muslin to get some fill light in and to record sound at the same time.
And lastly, let’s not forget the phenomenal makeup job that turned a 24-year old Welles to an old man and every age in between. And not just Kane, but the secondary characters as well.
The sheer audacity of the technical achievements in Citizen Kane is mind boggling.
Storytelling artistry
Orson Welles played Charles Foster Kane, and it is one of the great acting performances. The secondary cast of characters are all exemplary and complete the world Welles wanted to create. It was a world of speed, loose morals and where right or wrong wasn’t well defined. One of the criticisms of Citizen Kane is that Kane isn’t a sympathetic character, except at the very end.
And that’s where Citizen Kane shows its storytelling prowess. It’s a mystery story. Kane’s last word – “Rosebud”, is a mystery. Why did he utter it? That’s the mystery a reporter wants to uncover. His quest to understand that forces him to understand Kane. The hook of the mystery keeps us on our toes and even though we don’t like Kane, we want to know the answer.
Another significant storytelling risk was the long opening sequence of newsreel footage, where the entire story of Kane is first laid out. They had to make footage look as bad as newsreel footage, and some of the shots involving Kane are also handheld, like a classic paparazzi camera.
The editing in Citizen Kane was all mapped out in Orson Welles’ head. The complex transitions and editing couldn’t have been achieved through random coverage. The most popular scene was the disintegration of the marriage, from day one to day kaput. The sheer timing of the acting, the dialogues and the camera work clearly display an extreme precision that is so hard to achieve.
Citizen Kane, ultimately, is a character study of a man that is very close to what Orson Welles is in real life. He destroyed his career with this one film, and forever afterwards had trouble raising money for his projects.
Entertainment
Citizen Kane was a box office failure. It’s such an intellectual film that flies at a rapid pace, but I never find it boring. I can watch it again and again, which is how I score a film on entertainment.
But that’s not all. Citizen Kane has done well in other markets, and continues to do well on DVD and Blu-ray. It was also selected by the Library of Congress for being culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. It’s not surprising you’ll find it in the top five of most greatest films lists.
Art
Is Citizen Kane art?
If Citizen Kane isn’t cinema as art, I don’t know what is. Today, the film stands on its own, freed from its controversial and historical baggage. It showed extant and future filmmakers how films could be, and it revolutionized film craft forever.
Its value over time has only risen, and no film since has delivered so many novelties in one film. Most films would be happy to have just one innovation, which is hard enough. Together with Gregg Toland, Orson Welles, the kid, schooled everyone else.
This is why Citizen Kane is one of the greatest films ever made, and is second on my list of 100 films to see before you die:
