Steve the Owl's Blog

Those of you who have read my blog knows that I have watched a lot of movies, and what you may not have yet picked up on is that some of the movies that I really enjoy are the great movies that have made the canon of great cinema. One movie that seems to show up over and over again at the top of the list of the great American or English-language films is Citizen Kane. I knew of its reputation, but for the longest time, I thought that the greatest American movie ever made was Gone with the Wind. In some ways, I think that the latter may say more about America, but I believe that Citizen Kane has more than earned its reputation as the greatest movie ever made. Because of its impact and its myriad of lessons, I have decided to offer a series of blog posts on Citizen Kane.

Ahead of Its Time

The first time I saw Citizen Kane, I was 22 years old. I was a junior at West Virginia University, and as a Christmas present, my parents gave me a VCR for my apartment in Morgantown. The local grocery store had a video store adjunct, and it had a section for classical films. This being a college town, some of them were part of the canon, including works by Bergman and Fellini (although I never watched any of those). They had a copy of Citizen Kane, and I thought that I would see what the hype was about. When I saw the movie, I could not believe that it was made in 1941. The camera angles, the lighting, the method of story telling: everything about that movie screamed something that was truly great and magnificent and in a class all by itself.

A Clear Dividing Line

One of the most amazing things about any great work of art, or any great artist (such as Marlon Brando), is the way that one sees a clear dividing line between the things that happened before and the things that happened after. Some of the innovations in Citizen Kane have become so appropriated in film since that it is hard to see just how revolutionary they were at the time. For example, it was the first movie to have a non-linear narration. This is something that is so commonplace today that moviegoers are used to seeing dates in place to keep one oriented in time.

Citizen Kane uses a different tactic. The movie begins with the title character’s death in 1941 and his last word, “Rosebud.” Then, the movie shows a newsreel to give a basic summary of the events of the story of the life of Charles Foster Kane, a thinly-veiled biography of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst with some elements of other figures and elements from the life of its visionary creator Orson Welles. Then, the movie retells the story through several witnesses, sometimes jumping back and forth chronologically (such as multiple tellings of his second wife’s musical career) in order to tell the story.

The Story Itself

Even if the movie were only a collection of technical advancements, it would certainly be remembered as a great film, but the real genius of the movie would be considered Gregg Toland, the cinematographer, not its director, producer, star, and co-writer. The movie is a compelling story of someone who started off with lofty ideals, but someone who became a victim of his own success whose methods were ill-suited for a new age. Seeing the deterioration of the relationship between Kane and his childhood friend Jed Leland is something that was painful to anyone who knows what it is like to see people drifting apart.

This is a movie that shows what happens when visionaries have a dream, have the talent, have the skill, and have the drive to make something that is truly great. Come back for more of the specific lessons from the greatest movie ever made.