A 50-Min Video Discussing 'the Greatest Film Ever Made'

If you have watched 'Citizen Kane' and wonder why it is considered the greatest ever in the history of cinema, may be this 50-minute video may answer some of your questions.

I have not spent so much time studying any other film. Despite that I learnt some new things about it in this brief and well-made video. Honestly, the three-hour lecture I get to take on this film, as a part of the course for the BMM students, is one of my favourites. I don't know if it is possible to determine the greatest among all films. But as long as they say it is 'Citizen Kane', I don't mind!

The Greatest Film Ever Made: Epilogue

“Old age – it's the only disease, Mr. Thompson, that you don't look forward to being cured of.”

What makes someone or something great? Incredible talent, brilliant performance, innovations, influence, test of time – all of these contribute, but there is one more thing essential for that final stamp of ‘greatness’. It is the legend associated, the folklore, the paradoxes, the enigma. Whether it is the symbolism of Muhammad Ali’s fight against racial discrimination, or the tragedy of Guru Dutt – these socio-political, poetic-philosophical elements always contribute to the unanimous acceptance of something as ‘great’, and often these have nothing to do with the actual performance of the act.

So here is a story, true, unbelievable…

At the time when the Hollywood Studio System was at its powerful best, when studio executives held more power than the stars or the directors, a unique contract suddenly became the talk of the town. RKO, one of the major studios, had just offered someone to produce, direct, write, and act in two feature films, without any interference and with the privilege of the final cut – something even the most established directors could not dream of. This offer was made to a 25-year old young man and this led to phenomenal jealousy in the Hollywood community against him, whom the world later identified as Orson Welles.

Welles decided to base the first movie on the life of a newspaper tycoon – William R. Hearst, playing the lead role himself. The name of the character in the movie was Charles Foster Kane, but the Hearst connection could not be retained as a secret. Fearing a negative portrayal of himself, William Hearst attempted to buy and destroy all negatives of the film but couldn’t. He then attacked the movie through his newspaper, and threatened to retaliate against theatres that showed it. The industry was terrified. A group of studio bosses offered RKO money to burn the negative. But the studio refused.

‘Citizen Kane’ opened to extraordinary critical acclaim. And my last three posts on it, which are only a glimpse into its brilliance, should at least justify that. I still feel that the unprecedented praise by the American media had definitely something to do with the controversy surrounding its production and release.

However, the movie failed to recover its costs at the box-office. Despite several nominations, it could not win more than one Academy Award in a ceremony where it was booed and insulted. Eleven years later, in 1952, Sight and Sound magazine voted it as the 11th greatest movie of all time. A group of French critics, who were soon to kick-start the most influential film movement in world cinema, the New Wave, were praising the movie highly during the 50s, and it was revived in America in 1956. When Sight and Sound released their next list in 1962, ‘Citizen Kane’ was voted as the greatest film ever made. Since then it has retained that spot for each subsequent decade, and today it occupies the top position in almost all great movies list. The story, though, does not end here.

The film did an everlasting damage to the career of Welles. The industry had realized that this man will always place his artistic aspirations over the finances. RKO violated the same contract by taking his next film away from him and changing the ending. Welles went into a self-imposed exile in Europe for much of the rest of his career where he found a more sympathetic audience. He acted in others’ movies to raise funds for his own. Two years before he died, he accepted that he “made essentially a mistake in staying in movies”. In the end, his first movie also became a prophecy for his own life which ended lonely and unfortunately like that of his character – Charles F. Kane.

‘Citizen Kane’ in my opinion, is definitely one of the greatest American movies. It is a wonderful film text, rich, influential, enigmatic, and also, once you start understanding it, entertaining. It is a brilliant expression of an auteur, a purely original work, an aesthetic and technical watershed in cinema history. But is it greater than ‘The Godfather’, ‘Seven Samurai’, ‘8 ½’, ‘Bicycle Thieves’? I don’t know. I’m not qualified enough to comment. However, when filmmakers and scholars and critics all over the world vote it as the greatest, I better listen to them. They know the medium better than me, and they have no reason to lie! "Everyone will always owe him everything" – believes Godard about Orson Welles. And just for this reason, I also recommend this film as a must watch (#21). You can not die without watching ‘the greatest movie ever made’.

The Sound of 'Citizen Kane'

“You never should've married a newspaperman, they're worse than sailors.”

Before making his first film, Orson Welles was already a name in theatre and radio, and was thus aware of the power of sound. While working on ‘Citizen Kane’ he employed all his experience to create the ‘right’ sound for the film. “If it sounds right, it’s gotta look right” – he believed. And the sound of this movie turned out to be a great achievement on its own. Here are a few examples of his innovations and imagination.

To complement his Deep Focus photography, he created ‘deep focus sound’ by carefully regulating his sound levels so that voices in the depth of the image sound farther away than voices in the foreground of the image. ‘Hear’ carefully the Colorado scene to appreciate that. Also note that in the shot that ends this scene, Kane’s sled becomes increasingly covered with snow, and the whistle of a train can be heard from a distance. It is so subtle you might miss it the first time around. But once you discover that, the image of the snow-covered sled becomes even more poignant.

Welles made his characters interrupt each other’s lines resulting in the overlapping of dialogue. He considered it more realistic than the tradition of characters not stepping on each other's sentences. Then there are scenes, like one between Kane and Susan in a tent, where apart from the characters talking, we can also hear the voices of characters around them who are not really seen (people outside the tent in this case). Welles also pioneered the J-cut, the technique of putting the audio ahead of the visual in scene transitions.

The efficient use of texture of voices is another remarkable achievement of this film. Susan’s voice is soft and warm when she first meets Kane, only to turn into high-pitched screams later. The palace of Xanadu appears even more alienating because of the reverberating echoes whenever Kane and Susan shout at each other from across the room. Also compare the might expressed through Kane’s voice during the political rally speech with the sterile flatness when he threatens Gettys.

Another brilliant innovation by Welles was the ‘Lightening Mix’. One sentence started by a person at the end of a scene is completed in the next and this new scene is at least a few years ahead in time. So, by using sound bridges, Welles devised an interesting way to signify passing of time. The best example is the Breakfast Montage where Kane and his first wife talk over the dining table and more than a decade of story time is compressed in two minutes of screen time. This scene amazes you every time you watch it.

The musical score of the film by Bernard Herrmann was also a landmark. Instead of the traditional practice of using non-stop music, Herrmann used musical cues lasting between five and fifteen seconds to bridge the action or suggest a different emotional response. This is superbly done in the Breakfast Montage. Also notice the score simulating the ticking of a clock during the bored life Susan and Kane are leading at Xanadu. Herrmann went on to become one of the prominent musicians for Hollywood, working in films like 'Vertigo', 'Psycho', and 'Taxi Driver'. But even he believes that he was at his best when he worked on this movie. If ‘Citizen Kane’ was a technical watershed, and it definitely was, its sound had as much to contribute as its cinematography.

The Cinematography of 'Citizen Kane'

"There's only one person in the world to decide what I'll do. And that's me."

Film scholars and historians view ‘Citizen Kane’ as Welles' attempt to create a new style by studying various forms of movie making, and combining them all into one, though Welles himself denies that. He believes it was his ignorance that led him to those technical innovations, all of which were not essentially pioneered by this movie but eventually became inseparably associated with it. The director here does not indulge in taking stand on the Realism versus Expressionism debate, but rather uses the best of both schools in order to create his cinema. We will discuss this with respect to the cinematography of ‘Citizen Kane’.

Observe this snapshot from the scene at the Colorado home. It might be difficult to appreciate it here, but in this shot all characters are in focus – including the kid Kane playing outside (he may appear out of focus, but it’s actually snow). This kind of photography is called Deep Focus, where the depth of field is enhanced and a lot of things appear to be in focus together. How is this achieved technically – I don’t know. Some of my photographer friends can help me understand. But Deep Focus photography in cinema has now become synonymous with ‘Citizen Kane’. We read this technique as being ‘realist’ – since everything is in focus the audience can choose what to focus on without the director ‘directing’ their attention to something in particular.

The shot on the left is also an example of Deep Focus photography.

Any time Deep Focus was not possible, and I guess it has something to do with the availability of light (though I may be wrong), the makers employed other tricks to create the deep focus effect.

In this shot, Kane is in foreground and his friend Leland is at a considerable distance. Yet both appear to be in focus. This was achieved by shooting the two separately and then visually layering the films together using an optical printer.

However, notice that in this shot after Susan’s suicide attempt, the imposing bottle and glass in the foreground as well as the men entering the room are in focus, while Susan herself is out-of-focus. This was achieved using in-camera effects. The foreground was shot first, with the background dark. Then the background was lit, the foreground darkened, the film rewound, and the scene re-shot with the background action. Of course, this choice of focus enables a crisp storytelling where no dialogue is required to explain what happened. The unconscious woman in soft-focus definitely enhances our perception of her delirious state. And focusing on her husband, and our protagonist, makes sure that this remains as much his scene as it is of the wife.

And then we move to the most expressionistic camerawork that this movie employs. This extreme low-angle shot is so different from our perception of reality. More such bizarre angles and lenses were used at various points in the movie. Here the director is producing his own version of reality. Welles had to create ceilings over the sets and dig the floors to create trenches that could accommodate the camera. In those days, all of this was unheard of. Why does he do that? May be it was a stylistic choice, but here is how the famous French critic Bazin reads this shot: “the gaze upward seems to come out of the earth, while the ceilings, forbidding any escape within the décor, complete the fatality of this curse. Kane’s lust for power crushes us, but is itself crushed by the décor. Through the camera, we are capable in a way of perceiving Kane’s failure at the same time we experience his power.”

This is only a glimpse into the bag of tricks that this movie is. You can watch the film again and again just for its cinematography, the importance of which can be assessed by the way Welles credited his cinematographer. There is no separate title card for Welles as the director. He shares it with the cinematographer! I have never seen something like this elsewhere.

The Screenplay of 'Citizen Kane'

"You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn't been very rich I might have been a really great man."

Statutory Warning: I am assuming that you have watched the movie before reading this. Please don't read further if you plan to and haven't.

Let's go through the narrative structure of 'Citizen Kane'. It begins with the death of the protagonist - Charles Foster Kane, followed by a loud 15-minute news film on his life, revealing to us almost every major landmark, almost all crests and troughs that came to him. At this point a group of journalists decide to find the relevance of the last word uttered by Kane. The word is 'Rosebud' and the journey that a journalist called Thompson undertakes to find its significance forms the body of the film. We hardly get to see Thompson's face, though we are constantly with him. And in the end we hardly come to know anything about 'Rosebud' - possibly the most famous MacGuffin, arguably the most talked about secret in the history of cinema.

The rest of the movie is a jig-saw puzzle, going back and forth in time, often repeating the same incidents with different perspectives. It is definitely not as twisted as '21 Grams' or 'Memento' or other such modern puzzles, but is definitely more mature in its narrative structure than most. Interestingly, unlike other 'time-twisted' films, it doesn't complicate matters just for the sake of it, nor does it rely on seducing you to solve it, rather it tries to prove the futility of such an exercise and revels in its inherent complication - the journey to explore the life of an enigmatic man. What puzzle can be more interesting to experience, more challenging to solve? And since the 15-minute short-film has already narrated to us his life, we are more interested in knowing 'why and how' rather than 'what'.

The film is told from the perspectives of multiple narrators. Like it would happen to all of us, after one dies, his life-story can only be constructed from others' memories of the person, and depends significantly on his relationship with them, and on their respective world-views. Furthermore, all narrators here - the news film, the memoirs of Kane's guardian, his old manager, his ageing friend who later turned against him, his alcoholic and depressed second wife, and the obviously greedy butler - are unreliable. Naturally, it makes us think - perhaps Kane was not as bad as he appears in the film. The eventual hint at the meaning of 'Rosebud' also creates an out-of-character image for him, thus establishing the limitation of the entire endeavour to try to understand a person through the perspectives of others. I believe that this helps us admire Kane better with repeated viewings, and an apparently anti-hero emerges to be someone we'll always want to know more about.

Go through the preceding three paragraphs again, one by one. You will agree that each has the promise for a truly fascinating and complex screenplay. Even today, to write something structurally and philosophically as complicated as this will be an arduous task. 'Citizen Kane' had it all organically woven into one, not to forget that most of these tools were unheard of back in those days.

However, the screenplay of this movie is not great only with respect to 'its time'. In my opinion, despite the various technical accomplishments of this film, it is its writing that remains its most timeless and unparalleled achievement. A screenplay as good as this will always end up as a memorable film, whether its translation on film employs the best of technique or not. If it can ever be considered a yardstick of cinematic excellence - the Oscar for Original Screenplay was the only win this movie could manage out of nine nominations. Even the worst of hostility towards it during that year's Academy Awards function could not prevent this to happen. Today, for all screenwriters, the script of 'Citizen Kane' remains the ultimate challenge, and inspiration, though ironically, no one can actually learn or teach to write something like this, a story which manages to impress and entertain without adhering to the classical screenwriting rules, and eventually mocking them with its sheer brilliance.

P.S. If you are interested in reading this screenplay, please send a request to s.satyanshu@gmail.com. I will mail it to you.

Understanding Cinema Lecture: The Greatest Film Ever Made

The biggest problem with ‘Citizen Kane’ is the baggage it comes with, the tag it has earned over the last seven decades, of being the greatest of all films. Our first experience of the movie is generally a useless exercise – trying to question, appreciate, and criticize at the same time different aspects of a movie that is bogged down by its reputation. In the end we are still not convinced about the reason behind its hype, our final reaction being – “Well, may be… I don’t know.”

If only we could watch it without the enormous expectations…

For the first time on this blog I’m going to discuss any one film in such detail, and it is merely a coincidence that the first such movie is going to be ‘Citizen Kane’. But somehow, I feel good about it. Starting with the best!

The posts to follow will focus on three aspects of the film:

- The Writing

- The Cinematography

- The Sound

An Epilogue will then conclude the discussion. I’m really looking forward to it…