Citizen Kane Analysis

Citizen Kane (1941)

Directed, Co-Written, Produced and Starring: Orson Welles

A film made in 1941, is often considered to be the greatest film ever made. But, how can a film made in 1941 still be relevant and how can it tell an interesting story? Guess what, it does. I haven't seen a film like this before, this film created a similar effect on me as 12 Angry Men did. I think this film should be one of the first films to do a character based movie telling a tale of corruption and Taxi Driver, Wolf of Wall Street, Joker are loosely based on this theme. 

The film is about Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper tycoon and the film opens with his death and some of his important life events are told in flashbacks through different characters in his life. There is a brilliant montage sequence with his first wife, I couldn't believe I was seeing that kind of a sequence in a 1940s film. Character study films are usually based on non-conformist, eccentric characters who stand out from the crowd and so is Charles Foster Kane. He says, 'There is only one person in this world to decide what I'll do. And that's me.' This line explains the arc of this character and the choices he'll make. I could see some similarities in the characters and the arcs of Charles Foster Kane and Mahanati, both powerful people and both succumb to their own actions, choices they make out of integrity. These films give an unusual moral message that, to be in this world you can't be purists and that you need to be manipulative.

This film is known for using the 'deep focus' technique where everyone in the foreground and the background are in focus, this technique is useful to take long shots with ensemble casting. You can capture the scene like a play to have the drama play in real time, unless if you have a multi cam setup which I doubt if they had back then. I could see this technique being used in Satyajit Ray's last films where there were dramas set in homes and I'm sure many other films even till date use this technique, especially filmmakers who do long takes. There's an essay in Andre Bazin's 'What is Cinema? - Vol 1' on the merits and demerits of montage. It talks about how by using montage we can't capture the objective reality of the scene, as he explains in the difference between a photograph and a painting in his other essay.

Orson Welles was 25 when this film was released and he was considered an autuer for this film. Years later, Pauline Kael, a film critic wrote a 50,000 word book length essay about how this film uses the unique talents of the screenwriter and the cinematographer and she bashes the Auteur theory.