Over 70 years later, very little has changed about journalism. In one of the most delightful but overacted parts of the film, a hammy, makeup-caked Joseph Cotten stares into Thompson. Even as a teenager I had a distrust of canons and the mostly male white critics that made and protected them. Thankfully, none of that really mattered. Nearly 80 years after Citizen Kane was made, watching that sled burn made me want to burn everything around me less. Plus, Ryen closes it out with some listener-submitted Life Advice questions.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Filed under: Movies Pop Culture. When a director's work influences a master like Kubrick, it's definitely a top-shelf achievement. The plot functions as a brutal condemnation of real-life mogul Charles Randolph Hearst who attempted a blackmail plot to stop Welles from making the movie , a pointed critique of the rise of fascism in America and Europe, and a compelling human drama at once.
In that respect, it set the stage for future sympathetic villain protagonists like Walter White, Dexter Morgan, and Tony Soprano. It is easy to name movies more visually impressive or moving, funnier, sadder, or more diverse than Citizen Kane. It's even left a lasting mark on pop culture, being referenced and parodied countless times by movies and TV shows since, including The Simpsons , which at one point turned Mr. But what goes on between the dramatic high points, the story?
What goes on is talk and more talk. It is a thing that takes years and practice to learn. Tricks and symbols never really come to much. The real art of movies concentrates on getting the right story and the right actors, the right kind of production and then smoothing everything out. And after that, in figuring how each idea can be made true, how each action can be made to happen, how you cut and reverse-camera and remake each minute of action, and run it into a line afterwards, like the motion in the ocean.
Does this picture do this? Right now I have to hurry to catch a boat back to New York. To make any sense about technical innovations in any one movie, one should, in an ideal state at least, have some idea of the general technique of making every movie. Before coming to the wonders of Citizen Kane, therefore, we will just run over a few fundamentals we will, that is, if anyone is still around when these wandering messages of mine catch up with themselves.
The first thing necessary to a movie is a story, and the first thing necessary to stories for the screen is a writer who understands the screen and works along the line the director will take later, preferably with the director.
But the most important thing in the technique of a motion picture—and here director and writer are in varying degrees interdependent—is its construction shot by shot, not for the effect or punch line of any one fragment, but for such devising and spacing as avoid monotony, hold the interest, and lead easily from one thing into another, the devices for illusion being always and necessarily hidden in the natural emergence of the illusion itself.
One scene may be broken down into six or twenty camera positions, yet these shifts you are not conscious of: you follow the actor across the room and pick him up coming through the door; you may not see him when he is speaking; you may see only his face when someone else is speaking; he turns to look through a window and suddenly you are looking out the window.
These are the smallest things, but they make for pace and variety—which will be the biggest things before you are through. A scene is made, another to fit with it; there may be interscenes, or long shots covering action, establishing atmosphere; later there will be inserts, titles, the transitional devices of trick or straight cutting, dissolves, montages. And the next sequence should take up without jar, without confusion, and lead on again, shot by shot and scene by scene, in the right way of the story.
Finally when all the sequences have been made and assembled in a rough-cut, you must study over and over this familiar work of weeks to inquire whether what you put in it is there, to study it for continuity of mood, for how well the sequences match and balance—and for where to cut, where to remake.
Does it move, does it complete its circle, do characters and ideas and the express meaning come alive in action? It is true that of all the arts, movies are farthest from being one-man shows. Actors are the most important in the public eye, and indeed they are the dramatic exposition, the writing hand, of stories on the screen; without good ones you are lost.
The music and scenic departments are important, and the cutting room is the watchtower of unsung heroes who have brought a thousand bungling messes out of the hopeless into something that at least moves and has coherence. Technically, the most indispensable is the cameraman, with his crew of assistants and batteries of lights; he is a high man indeed.
Later, the film is a political drama, then a backstage farce, then a dark melodrama. No wonder film students love Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane has even more to offer as entertainment than it does as education. Co-written by Herman J Mankiewicz, a veteran of dozens of comedies from the s and s, the script bursts with quotable one-liners and exchanges, such as when Kane meets his estranged friend and employee, Jed Joseph Cotten.
Orson Welles was just 25 when he made Citizen Kane, but he had already made a name for himself in the theatre and on radio Credit: Alamy. Astoundingly, Welles was only 25 when Citizen Kane was released.
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