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Many of you know I have only recently "discovered" film. I really had and have a very limited movie knowledge. Trying to make up for lost time in order to learn.
This film is commonly called the best of all time. But I had never seen it. Found it online today, so I decided to give it a shot.
I'm not going to review it or analyze it much. Every film student has studied it and most of you guys already know it inside out.
The first 15 or 20 minutes of the film, my reaction was negative. Yeah, there seemed to be some intriguing camera stuff, but it seemed a strange way to do a story, with the phony news reals, the death of the protag at the outset, and the complete lack of any other characters. I mean literally, as they are generally in shadow. So 20 minutes into the movie, one doesn't have a sense of a single character.
But then...wow. Somewhere around the 30 minute mark, the film really hit me. A short while after young Kane has bought the newspaper, and has turned it into the top paper in the city, he is celebrating with his staff. And this is where it hits you how isolated this man is. He is surrounded by people bought and paid for.
And since we know the isolation and loneliness of his demise, we know that this is just the first glimpse of the man's lifelong quest for not only meaning, but real human connection. Because we know the quest fails, it casts a powerful gloom over the story.
But why do we watch? I think because we want to see if there were turns on the road he took where things could have turned out different for him. And we wonder about the crossroads in our own lives.
The film has a weird nightmare quality to it, like when our dreams are patched together in menacing bits of memory, and we are just an observer. It's one of the darkest movies I've ever seen, where a man who is not a bad man, but is essentially empty and isolated in a cold world and trying to fill that void with something.
Glad I did not give up on the film. Very powerful. And it's a power that sneaks up on you.
Like yourself, well until today for you , I haven't seen it either. On my "must do" list.
I did read the mckendrick book "on film making" and in that there is a interesting description of how Wells filmed a scene, maybe the last one, from the POV of the person in bed., rather the people entering POV. Not that I ever intend to be a film maker, it was at least interesting in the choices he made compared to how it would normally be shot.
I am probably the last person to comment on why this is the best film, but enviably it must always be difficult comparing a film that broke the mould, set new standards etc with those that followed, which one hopes, improve upon the ideas it illustrated. As such, the question of which is the best film, almost needs to be judged according to the era it was filmed.
The Elevator Most Belonging To Alice - Semi Final Bluecat, Runner Up Nashville Inner Journey - Page Awards Finalist - Bluecat semi final Grieving Spell - winner - London Film Awards. Third - Honolulu Ultimate Weapon - Fresh Voices - second place IMDb link... http://www.imdb.com/name/nm7062725/?ref_=tt_ov_wr
Love Orson Welles, both as an actor and a director, and love Citizen Kane. It's been a while since I saw it, but I didn't have any problem with the beginning. Welles was 26 when he made CK and I think he was amazing.
Pia, that's been my experience, that sometimes a films disappoints. And that seemed to be the case with Citizen Kane, but I stuck with it, and to my surprise, what I found was that the film truly is powerful. It leaves a mark on you. That's the best way I can describe it with my amateur film vocab. Check it out, and watch at least half.
To find the film: search on Bing. It's on a Chinese site, tudou or something. There are Chinese subtitles, but the rest is untampered with.
According to spell check, untampered is not a word. It should be!
Always thought "What Makes Samny Run" is a natural bedfellow to this film. If you've read the book, the conclusion is suitably haunting - just like Kane is described here.
Apparently Spielberg hates it, but I think the book would make a fabulous film if faithful and directed with the right tone. PTA would be a great fit for it.
Around minute 61 in the film, Kane gives a speech before a large crowd in an auditorium. He's running for governor on a liberal(his word) platform of helping the poor.
The auditorium is majestic, dark, a huge portrait of Kain behind him as he speaks. The curtains look like spotlights, the kind that search for bombers. And knowing where they were going with the film, I suspected they wanted this to remind of Hitler.
So paused the picture and looked. And there it is! The swastika. Cleverly hidden, but front and center. There is a table behind Kane, who is at a podium. The table and the podium very clearly make a half a swastika! I seriously doubt this was by accident. Why place a table behind the podium?
Maybe one of the resident film experts here can confirm this for me. Nothing came up under Google.
The thing to remember about Citizen Kane is that it is even a greater movie when looked at in terms of film history. Without it, we might not be telling stories on film the same way we do now. It pretty much ushered in our modern storytelling techniques with it's innovations on flashbacks and narrative flow.
Here's an image. I am confident it's not an accident. And this has nothing to do with politics.
I believe Orson's point is that though Kane is running on a noble platform, his heart has gone cold, and he is trying to acquire a following just like he acquires everything else, such as wealth, power, friends, statues.
Never finding love or human connection, he is empty inside, and in his hands, political power would be a dangerous thing. In the name of helping people, he will seek to control them, like he does everyone in his life.
I took a look at that scene, and IMO I didn't see the swastika. But who knows, I certainly wouldn't put it past Welles, comparing Hearst to Hitler.
This film pretty much wrote the book in terms of modern non-linear storytelling and various innovative camera techniques. Some of the deep-focus work is pretty astounding, even now.
I haven't seen the whole movie since college, but its power and impact stays with you long after you watch it.
I've never seen this film. I searched my netflix and couldn't find it. I always thought China Town was the cat's ass when it comes to writing a film???
I've never seen this film. I searched my netflix and couldn't find it. I always thought China Town was the cat's ass when it comes to writing a film???
I will seek this out.
James
Citizen Kane is usually ranked numero uno when it comes to most lists of the greatest films of all time. And the fact that Orson Welles was 25 years old and it was his first film makes it all the more incredible.
Chinatown, of course, is epic writing. I think that script is cited more by screenwriters not only because it's much more recent than a flick like Citizen Kane, but because Towne's style of writing innovated techniques that are still emulated. A friend of mine actually has a signed copy of one of the producer's shooting scripts and it's fascinating to see how Towne bent and broke screenwriting rules and invented some new ones.
There's another little scene that I found interesting, around 2/3 through. He's just lost the election, and is walking around campaign HQ alone. Lleland, his life long associate, who he considers a friend, but who has always judged Kane harshly, shows up drunk. Gives him a piece of his mind. He accuses Kane of being selfish, of not really caring about the people he was running for office to help, but instead wanting them to be dependent on him.
Kane absorbs this without much effect. Then Lleland asks to be transferred to Chicago to be away from Kane. Kane refuses, says they need him.
Lleland starts to say he will resign, and sensing this, Kane OK's the move. Despite where the film is driving us in terms of Kane, he does have some humanity left. He does not want to lose his "friend", and even though he expects he can control everything, he relents.
Then he pours himself a drink, asks Lleland to have a drink with him, to get drunk together. Lleland refuses, says he's out on the first train.
At that moment, you really feel Kane's pain. You see it on his face. He doesn't know how to connect with people and form real friendships, or marriages, so he tries to do what he knows: possess them. But it's not hopeless. He still tries. But Lleland rejects him, and it felt to me like a mini turning point. A person Kane had known all his life closing the door and refusing to even have a drink with him. Hard for the humanity left in Kane to survive these blows.
I haven't seen the film since college, either. Funny, because when I recently moved, I came across a bunch of my college things and one of those was a report on the movie.
The report was titled:
Citizen Kane: A True Classic
Based on my report, I liked it and understood why it was said to be one of the very best of all time. If I watched it now, I doubt I would still feel that way. Who knows...I don't plan on seeing it again.
BTW, I do not see any swastikas in that shot, Kev, nor do I remember any historians ever bringing something like that up.
It's more like a twisted swastika. The whole film sequence evokes the rise of a dictator. That's not the focus of the film, so he didn't want to go overboard.
Jeff, you studied film in school? The plot thickens. Plenty of talent to look at it in the class? Maybe that's where and how it all began?
Plenty of talent all over BGSU! Damn...those were the days.
I was cracking myself up the other night when I thought back to those college days. I remember going to a class 1 day, with nothing on except a short pair of shorts - like Stevie still wears today. Barefoot, shirtless, and baked out of my gourd...what a great student I was...