Source: This information was given to The Film Society by a 1996 member who did not sign her name. It was meant to be used in conjunction with a screening of Citizen Kane that did not materialise. We thought that it was a shame to waste such interesting information, and as soon as I hunt down the author I will add her name! (Esther "a typist I aM NoT" Speight).
Citizen Kane
Orson Welles (1915 – 1985), born Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Citizen Kane, US, 1941, 119 minutes, Black and White
A newspaper tycoon dies, and a magazine reporter interviews his friends in an effort to discover the meaning of his last words.
A brilliant piece of Hollywood cinema using all the resources of the studio; despite lapses of characterisation and gaps in the narrative, almost every shot and every line is utterly absorbing both as entertainment and as craft.
Kane is not simply a matter of a novice director’s immediate creation of a visual style that is simultaneously baroque and precise: overwhelmingly emotional, and unerringly founded in reality. Deep-focus photography, ceilinged sets, and exaggerated low-key lighting — such tangible effects were not born with Kane. Welles had learned from German expressionism and its influence on stage production in the 1930s.
Before or since, no one in Hollywood has carved out such freedom for himself, and then used it to initiate a chorus of damnation, mistrust and rumour that would reliably hinder him from a lasting commercial career. As if Welles would ever knuckle under to stability! He handled RKO like a conjurer. Without their being able to prevent it, he charmed, bullied and provoked Mankiewicz, Houseman, Toland and Bernard Herrmann into their best work for the screen. That is a sort of authorship that consists of dictating the terms in which collaborators deal with him. It was only when he had brought Hollywood to its knees that Welles — always a chronic victim of boredom, and an actor unconvinced by his own masquerade — spurned carte blanche, so that he should himself be made a Falstaffian outcast.
Citizen Kane is less about William Randolph Hearst — a humourless, anxious man — than a portrait and prediction of Welles himself. Given his greatest opportunity, Mankiewicz could only invent a story that was increasingly coloured by his mixed feelings about Welles and that, he know, would be brought to life by Welles the overpowering actor, who could not resist the chance to dress up as the old man he might one day become and who relished the young show-off Kane just as he loved to hector and amaze the Mercury Theatre.
As if Welles knew that Kane would hang over his own future, regularly being used to denigrate his later works, the film is shot through with his vast, melancholy nostalgia for self-destructive talent. Kane goes out of his way to destroy and isolate himself by calling Geddes’s bluff. In the same way, Welles repaid astonishing freedom by gratuitously insulting William Randolph Hearst. And in Confidential Report, the scorpion still stings the frog, no matter that it will destroy them both, because it is his character. Kane is Welles, just as every apparent point of view in the film is warmed by Kane’s own memories, as if the entire film were his dream in the instant before death.
Beyond question, Citizen Kane is the film that influenced film-makers in the years from about 1955 onward — until then it was neglected. The reasons for that are several. We feel now how far its study of the flawed tycoon embraces Gatsby, Howard Hughes, and the American recipe of public charm and actual demagoguery. This too is the age that sees Welles coming into the inheritance of Kane at Xanadu, the ageing bulk, haplessly issuing uncompleted projects. More than that, Citizen Kane expresses the nature of cinema. Kane’s enterprise is so evidently Welles’. His surrender to glory is equally the overwhelming of the performer by his own glamour. But visually, Citizen Kane is about the gulf between concrete things and their mysterious, emotional meanings. There is still not a film that so grows out of that discrepancy, that is so vividly material and so deeply imaginary that advances ultimately on a forgotten sledge and reveals to us its significance, while denying it forever to the people in the film who are in search of it. Where else is there such intense complicity between the heart of a film and its audience? Rosebud is the greatest secret in cinema, and cinema the most secretive of public shows.
Citizen Kane is acknowledged by critics as the greatest movie made.
