Essay On Citizen Kane

Orson Wells’ film Citizen Kane received terrific reviews as soon as it opened in 1941. While the average movie buff would not value Citizen Kane as much, for the critics, directors and film students: it provides a technical handbook as to the nuts and bolts of how a film is to be assembled. It has now been chosen as the greatest American film in a number of polls due to the many remarkable scenes and performances, cinematic and narrative techniques and experimental innovations in photography, editing and sound.

Citizen Kane is a 114-minute film school providing lessens after lessons in deep focus and rear projection, extreme close-ups and overlapping dialogue. Although appearing as a biographical movie (Biopic), it refused to follow the conventional

norms and used multiple narrators and multiple prospective. The script explodes with quotable one-liners and exchanges, such as when
Kane meets his estranged friend and employee, Jed. "I didn't know we were speaking," says Jed. "Sure, we're speaking, Jedidiah," Kane replies. "You're fired."

Although said to have “shared" some of its techniques from Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and other earlier films, It uses an art form to effectively communicate and display a dynamic view of life. Its components brought together the following aspects:
1. Use of Subjective Camera: With unconventional lighting, backlighting, high-contrast lighting, darkness and low-key lighting and inventive use of shadows and irregular camera angles. It used deep-focus shots with depth of field and focus ranging from extremes of fore ground and background. This made everything in focus at the same time, a technique unheard in classic
Hollywood cinema.
2. Frequent use of Curtain wipes (Transitionary dissolves): Such as the scene where the camera ascends in the opera house to the rafters to show the workmen's disapproval of Mrs. Kane's performance.
3. Overlapping, Talk-Over Dialogue: As in real life where people so not wait for the other to stop talking before they do, so the movie allowed characters to talk over each other and finish one another's sentences, a practice which was never used before.
4. Long, uninterrupted shots and lengthy takes of sequences: The story is told from several prospective and opinions by a number of characters - providing a life-like contradictory, out of sequence and enigmatic portrait.
5. Flashbacks flash forwards and non-linear story telling: The movie has cast of characters those ages throughout the film. Before Citizen Kane, almost all the films were organized chronologically. They began at the beginning and ended at the end. However, Citizen Kane begins when dying a Charles Foster Kane whispers "Rosebud." It also used clips of actual news footage as wells as staged shots of the actors.
6. Scarce use official close-ups of cast and elaborate makeup techniques: Since the story takes placeover50years, the actors age throughout the film. But, rather than just covering the lead character with latex wrinkles and grey hair, he wears a complete body case with custom-fitting body pads to show him aging over 27 different stages of life.
7 In Citizen Kane, the sequences are tailored to the music, as opposed to the traditional movies where the musical scores were written after the film was finished.

The film uses a mournful music when Kane announces his death, the trumpets in celebrating his life, loud crowd at the rally and echoes of loneliness in his home when his loved ones have gone.
8. Classic Hollywood movies had no ceilings as the lamps needed to light the scene were hung above the sets. Citizen Kane used a cloth canopy to simulate presence of an actual ceiling.
9. Most of the actors in Citizen Kane had never been in a movie. They has appeared on stage and on radio and lacked the conventions of traditional Hollywood culture.
10. Excellent Editing: There are many examples of extraordinary editing in the film, such as the brilliant summation of entire life of Kane's marriage in fifteen seconds.

Before Citizen Kane, filmmaking was easily predictable and virtually all the movies used the same stagnant camera angles, same lighting, and similar sets. Citizen Kane broke all the settled rules and introduced exceptional storytelling and Cinematography methods to the Hollywood.

"Fifty years later. Citizen Kane is as fresh, as provoking, as entertaining, as funny, as sad and as brilliant as it ever was. Many agree it is the greatest film of all time. Those who differ cannot seem to agree on their candidate."
- Film Critic Roger

Ebert