"Citizen Kane" is known in history as one of the best films of all time, but what makes a movie "the best movie of all time?" There are actually many different reasons a movie could be considered the best, but few have ever achieved something even close to the genius of Orson Welles that is "Citizen Kane." Orson Welles could easily be considered ahead of his time and that is because no one had ever created a movie that brought such an element of cinematographic storytelling to the screen. Cinematographic storytelling is the idea that simply with a camera and a visual from the movie can evoke a different meaning expanding to plot, character and even much more. Cinematographic storytelling, or visual storytelling, makes it seem as if the pictures on the screen can allude to much more then they actually do. What Orson Welles has done with his masterpiece "Citizen Kane" has created one of the first movies in American history that perfected the idea of visual storytelling.
The first scene of "Citizen Kane" is, in my opinion, is the best example of visual storytelling because there are no words and no characters, but just from what is seen on screen so much can already be interpreted. The first shot in the movie is a close-up on a "No Trespassing" sign, which immediately tells the audience that the camera is in private place, a lonely place, but even more important is the shots of gates and fences that follows. There are multiple shots of different fences in the opening scene, but what is important about these fences is that the camera is tracking up while filming them, giving the illusion of gates coming down over the screen. The gates coming down across the screen communicates a feeling of entrapment to the audience and without the use of characters or words the viewer already knows that someone feels like prisoner, and in this films case it is Kane who is a prisoner to his own life.
