"It isn't enough to tell us what a man did, you've got to tell us who he was"

Rating: 9/10 (1 January 2008)

Citizen Kane  one of the most acclaimed features of motion picture industry. Today, it's perhaps the most beloved film of those within the industry itself, topping the Sight and Sound directors' and critics' poll as well as AFI's 100 years, 100 movies list. But as with many a great and pioneering feature film it is also surrounded by a great deal of myth and misconception.
For me, the biggest misattribution regarding Citizen Kane is that it was highly innovative  a revolution in film history. It isn't  it's really more of a return to form. Many of the things that make Citizen Kane stand out actually hark back to the silent era. Perhaps this is not surprising given Orson Welles' unique position  a talented young man who had already proved himself in several other fields, hastily teaching himself the basics of film-making and then putting together a very individual yet finely crafted picture. Given all this, it makes sense that Welles is in many ways like those early pioneers of film who were creating cinematic styles for the first time without previous generation of filmmakers to be influenced by.
Take first of all Welles' independence. Welles is now looked back on as the ultimate director's director, bucking the studio system and controlling every aspect of production. This however was a freedom enjoyed by many silent directors, before the studios had consolidated their power, and the film-making process was a lot quicker and simpler. However, Welles' evasion of studio influence was significant, coming as it did at a time when the studio system was at the height of its dominance.
Now let's look at Welles' style as a director. The first thing that hits you when you start watching Kane is the rhythm  first how we home smoothly and eerily in upon the Kane mansion, how the images dovetail into one other, and then the startling change of pace with the "News On The March" segment. Ironically, even though it's a good mock-up of a straightforward newsreel, this is actually one of the most tightly constructed and cinematic sequences in the entire film. It's not just a rhythmic editing pattern, but each shot "agrees" with the one before and after it, the pace and style of the movement in each shot gives a consistent flow to the whole thing. This sense of rhythm harks back to earliest days of film  Melies is probably the first to use it, and Griffith and Eisenstein developed it, but an overt sense of rhythm declined with the coming of sound, with a few notable exceptions such as Busby Berkely musicals and Disney cartoons. What is really great in Kane is how the pace of the picture is carried through into Orson Welles' acting  you can see he is totally sensitive to the rhythm of his own work with every move he makes.
In a similar vein, Citizen Kane also represents a return of expressionism in film, that is the externalisation of ideas and feelings through technique and symbolism. Not that expressionism ever totally died out, but Kane is constantly and overtly expressionistic, almost as much as the silent films of Murnau and Hitchcock, with moody lighting in sombre scenes, high and low angles, massive distances between characters to demonstrate emotional detachment, the pelting rain when we first encounter the middle-aged Susan Alexander and so forth. Of course this is another reason why Kane is a director's favourite  touches like this are the chances for directors to express themselves and create something more than simply shooting a script. All this is sometimes a little overdone in Kane  often the hallmark of a young director  and the continual dollying in and out on headlines and ridiculously low angles can get a bit tiresome. Welles was to direct with more subtlety in his later features.
One area in which Citizen Kane does seem to be genuinely revolutionary, and perhaps the area in which it had the most influence, is in its creation of the modern biopic. Granted, it's perhaps not a true biopic because Kane is a fictional character (albeit one based on real figures), but the structure of revealing his story  beginning with the public image of the person at the end of their life, then telling their true story, warts and all, as a flashback, humanising them in the process  was the basis for Lawrence of Arabia, Gandhi and virtually every other biopic of the last forty years. It's often stated that Welles was ahead of his time, and it was a long time before Citizen Kane's influence could be felt. One director/writer team however, were more on the ball  Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) bears many similarities to Kane, taking a distant, un-heroic figure and turning him into a real and sympathetic person.
Citizen Kane is still in itself a unique and captivating picture, very clearly the product of someone who was never classically trained  as it were  in film-making but who had a natural feel for it all the same. It's not a perfect film, as some have claimed, but it's a satisfying, well crafted (not to forget brilliantly acted) piece of cinema, well deserving of praise and attention.