The great directors of today still steal from Welles' masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (8 September 2007)

**** out of **** stars
When I finally watched Kane for the very first time a few weeks back, it fiercely occurred to me how much has been honorably stolen from this enigmatic masterpiece. Take the flashback scene of little boy Kane in the snow, for instance; the overlapping dialouge and Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography reminded me of an ingredient Spielberg has used time and time again (Minority Report, Schindler's List). Welles' nod to the classic "March of Time" newsreels in the beginning of the film, brought to mind the pseudo-documentary stylings of Oliver Stone's JFK and Nixon. Scorcese is there too; the jagged scene shifting and pacing. Moments of stillness and silence prompted me to think of Coppolla's Godfather films. Citizen Kane remains the number one film of all time because of these homages. Newer films that are also bathed in genius will never dethrone this predecessor, because all the wonderful artistry they contain has already been consummated in Kane.
Welles, being only 25 at the time of this film's creation, is flooring. The little boy to salty-old-man passage of Charles Foster Kane's lifetime, along with his strange and extensive friendships and romances, are experiences that should seemingly be understood by a man much older than Orson was in 1941. Simply put, an artist ahead of his time made a movie ahead of it's time, and the aftershocks of Kane's greatness are still felt today.
I believe those of us that expected Rosebud to become something specific or tangible or touchable, missed the heartbeat of Citizen Kane. Rosebud is Kane's soul, his lost innocence, his antiquated beauty. Rosebud is in all of us, or once was. What Welles did was tell a story about the human condition; the dream of something blindingly pure that is in all of us. He used film-making as a megaphone to scream and whisper to our exceedingly similar human sensibilities. Sometimes it's hard to comprehend the megaphone, but that's what makes Kane so great. Orson Welles understood, at his very young age, that all of us can often feel very alone, and that we need something sacred to rely on.