Citizen Kane 79 years later hailed the best film ever made is worth seeing

Rating: 8/10 (10 January 2020)

Take a look at Citizen Kane, the defined "perfect" film from director-actor-screenwriter Orson Welles.
The story follows the life (and death) of Charles Foster Kane, the eccentric owner of the New York Enquirer who is on a rise to power and wealth throughout the publishing industry , both of these which he achieves through aggressive means of "cutting and slashing" everyone who might get in his way. Kane dies at the start of the film and utters a single word at his deathbed: "Rosebud", and the majority of the film is one reporter's mission to find out the meaning of the word.
Citizen Kane has a tenancy to submerge it's viewers in the midst of the reporter's mission and the flashbacks of Kane's life that it almost becomes easy to miss the film's deeper meaning, which is love and happiness. More specifically still and it's how Kane gains this notion of love and how he loses it. This could be personified in how he is taken away from his parents at a young age, effectively losing their love, or how he gains the love of his second wife Susan, but casts her aside when he wishes for her to continue her career as a singer and she isn't having any of it. Ultimately this idea of gaining love and then losing it is littered throughout the film, and it's this concept that secretly drives forward the narrative. Kane is constantly desperate for people to love him as much as he loves himself, and by trying to make people feel this way he instead alienates them and pushes them further away until he reaches his state at the end of the film, old, sad and alone.
Citizen Kane is not just notable for it's character-oriented narrative, but also in the way of how the mise-en-scene is presented. Whether it's from the purpose of editing, such as the opening sequence of the show-reel of Kane's life which parodies The March of Time in style and execution. Or to the way in which Welles manipulates the lighting by blacking out certain characters in scenes, specifically the scene where Kane hits his wife Susan as here his shadow completely covers her suggesting that Kane is a gigantic, towering threat that she is unable to fight and that she is blind to the danger he poses to her. Furthermore it's emphasised how Welles has clearly spent a lot of time working the set design too, from the almost perfect reconstruction of the newspaper publishing rooms to Kane's Xanadu he has really put in the effort to sell the idea to the audience that this man, Kane is indeed a very important character and as such deserves to have everywhere he sets foot in to be presented exactly as himself - important.
The cinematography is too very notable and in particular is the film's use of deep focus photography, by which everything that is in the mise-en-scene remains perfectly in focus throughout the whole passage. This technique is demonstrated the most in a scene where Kane is in his mansion, and he moves over to a fireplace that is located in the foreground of shot and as he moves over to it only then is it's massive size revealed to all. This use of the deep focus photography demonstrates fully to the viewer of the extent of Kane's "outsized" riches, which somehow still aren't big enough to outshine his biggest prize, his own ego.
Welles didn't just direct the film, but he wrote the screenplay and most importantly by his fabulous portrayal of Kane himself. It's hard to imagine then that this is Welles' first time acting on-screen, as he perfectly captures the emotional feel of Kane as a man who has all the materialistic items in the world represented mainly by his wealth and mansion, but yet seems to lack simple human feelings that is picked up on by other characters throughout the course of the film. In a sense then, Kane is not considered to be a proper human being as the functions that are normally attributed to human beings are in this case not given to him. Welles himself has dabbled with acting before having dominated the world of theatre by starring in Voodoo Macbeth, a modern day re-working of the classic Scottish tale. He had also worked within the radio industry before, working with Mercury Theatre to create a radio drama version of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
For all of these reasons, Citizen Kane is considered to be one of the greatest films of all time having been billed as such by the British Film Institute in their list, Sight and Sound for 50 straight years. At the end of the film the reporter that was tasked with finding out the meaning to Kane's last word doesn't actually find out the meaning, despite having talked to various people who were close to Kane in his final days. He and the other reporters take to burning Kane's belongings, which to them are worth nothing, and as the camera pans to the furnace a single item can be seen and on it is the word, "Rosebud". The item is a bobsleigh, one that was ridden by Kane as a young child of just 8 years of age in the scene where he is taken from his parents. The significance of the item is that this may well be Kane's only true happy memory of his life, specifically a memory before he was taken away from his parents. And that maybe, in that single moment, Charles Foster Kane felt something that he doesn't truly feel throughout the whole rest of the film. He is happy.