The music and scenic departments are important, and the cutting room is the watchtower of unsung heroes who have brought a thousand bungling messes out of the hopeless into something that at least moves and has coherence. But it is also true that without writing and direction of intelligence, taste and actual mastery of the craft, you just won't get a picture that is a good picture. For dramatic action, it shows its character in four main situations, supplemented by newsreel interludes here and there. This makes a pretty weak structure dramatically, so it has to be surrounded with a great deal of stationary talk, as Kane is described, analyzed, asked about, remembered, talked into existence and practically out of it. This is different from many good movies but it is not new, technically or otherwise.
Symbols are a dime a dozen and justify their use in the result achieved.
The smoke rising to heaven at the end was trite to start with and dragged out absurdly. As you can see, there is nothing startling in these component parts. The outstanding technical effect in the picture is in the conception of settings and the use of camera. The camera here loves deep perspectives, long rooms seen through doors and giving onto rooms through other doors, rooms lengthened out by low ceilings or made immense by high-angle shots where the ceiling seems to be the sky. Figures are widely spaced down this perspective, moving far off at will, yet kept in focus.