Steve the Owl's Blog

Welcome to the second part in my series on what I consider to be the greatest movie ever made, Citizen Kane. The first post was more of a general entry on why I think that this is the greatest movie ever made. Today, I will get into some of the specific elements that made the movie great, beginning with the innovations of this movie, both technical and storytelling.

Different from the Beginning

One of the things that a viewer of classic films will note is that, unlike most movies today, the credits are front-loaded. However, Citizen Kane lets the viewer know that it will be different by simply opening the play with two cards for the credit. Both are on a black background, with the first opening with “A Mercury Production” and the words “by Orson Welles” dissolving in, with the title occupying the entire screen for the next card. One of the things that makes it such a shocking opening is that there is no music or anything for those few seconds. Then, the movie shows a light that stays in the back right hand portion of the screen, beginning with a “No Trespassing” sign. Each shot (involving a mix of actual scenery and matte paintings) gets closer to a mansion, with the light remaining in nearly the same shot the entire time. As the shot is up on the building, the lights go out, and when the lights come back on, you are in the room. There is an old man holding a snow globe, and he says the most famous one-word line in all of movies, “Rosebud,” drops the snow globe, it breaks, and in the next shot a nurse covers him with a sheet. My description is inadequate to describe the brilliance of this scene, so I will let the movie speak for itself (NOTE: The original aspect ratio of the movie was 1.33:1, so this is not scan-and-pan. It is the shown the way Orson Welles intended, except for the notice from the censors at the beginning. SPOILER ALERT: This video links to the original YouTube video. The comments there contain spoilers.):

What is the other thing that is so interesting to me about the innovations in this movie is how commonplace some of them seem today. After all, if someone points out that it was an innovation to begin at the end of the story, and summarize the story, which is then re-told through a series of flashbacks, that would not seem to be so daring. However, only two movies before Citizen Kane involved any flashback sequences at all, and one of them, Wuthering Heights, was based on a book that relied on just that. This was the first movie to tell the story in a completely non-linear way.

The Camera Angles That Shook the World

Another surprising element to the innovation of Citizen Kane is that, at the time, ceilings were never seen in movies. This is because they were shot on sets where the camera angles were mostly a straightforward one. However, Citizen Kane changed everything by using camera angles to tell a story. Orson Welles wanted camera angles so extreme that he literally dug out part of the floors of some of the sets in order to get his desired camera angle of floor height facing up, often with low ceilings to make the characters seem even more mythic. (In the famous party scene where Charles Foster Kane is dancing with chorus girls, Orson Welles nearly hits his head on the ceiling.) If there was a character who had a diminished or weakened role, the camera would always face down (such as with Kane’s second wife, who is often sitting on the floor).

Credit Where It Is Due

Perhaps the greatest contributor to the innovations of Citizen Kane from a technical level was Gregg Toland, who had worked in Hollywood for years as a cinematographer and was experimenting with deep focus photography. The key element of deep focus photography is that it demands attention from the viewer because, unlike traditional photography, the entire frame is in focus. Scenes of Kane’s childhood have Kane’s parents and Walter P. Thatcher discussing the future of young Charlie, and the eight-year old Kane is playing in the background just as clearly, forcing the audience to see all of the things that are going on at once. Even in scenes where Toland couldn’t pull it off, he used split screens to the same effect, such as a scene involving Kane and Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten) that had issues due to lighting, but the timing of the two actors was such that this special effect is completely invisible.

Willingness to Experiment

The reason Gregg Toland wanted to work on Citizen Kane was because he knew of Orson Welles’ penchant for daring from his theater and radio days. As a first-time director, Welles was open to suggestion, and he wanted to do something like no one had ever seen before. Some of the ideas may have seemed crazy at the time, but there is a reason why this movie is celebrated. As you build your business, there may be ideas that you have had that could totally change the industry. What would happen if you tried them and they worked?