Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane
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"For what profit a man, if he gains the world and loses his own soul?".
Matthew 16:26; Mark 8:36 .
CITIZEN KANE is Orson Welles's greatest achievement--and a landmark of cinema history. Every moment of the film, every shot, has been choreographed to perfection. The film is quite possibly the greatest film ever made and certainly the most influential not only for American film history, but for the world film history as well. .
For me personally it was amazing how a man, basically, of my age (Welles was only 24 when he started to work on Citizen Kane) could produce such an exclusive and outstanding masterpiece. .
Analyzing various aspects of this film we should bear in mind that it was a result of co-action of four main players that make Citizen Kane the film it is: Orson Welles the director/writer/producer/actor, Gregg Toland the cinematographer, Herman Mankiewicz the writer, and William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration.
Strange as it may seem today, Citizen Kane required a lot of getting used to. If those greatest-film polls had been conducted in 1941 it would have ranked well below the top 100. Audiences in general hated it at the time because it looked and sounded "freakish". Many cinematographers found it offensive too, not for its innovations but because it resurrected techniques that had long been considered outmoded. .
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Along with the personal story is the history of a period. ``Citizen Kane'' covers the rise of the penny press, the Hearst-supported Spanish-American War, the birth of radio, the power of political machines, the rise of fascism, the growth of celebrity journalism. A newsreel subtitle reads: ``1895 to 1941. All of these years he covered, many of these he was.'' The screenplay by Mankiewicz and Welles (which got an Oscar, the only one Welles ever won) is densely constructed and covers an amazing amount of ground, including a sequence showing Kane inventing the popular press; a record of his marriage, from early bliss to the famous montage of increasingly chilly breakfasts; the story of his courtship of Susan Alexander and her disastrous opera career, and his decline into the remote master of Xanadu.
