This is one of the finest movies ever made. What the world may have lost while Welles was blacklisted will never be known. The advanced camera angles and long lens pull-ins put it light years ahead of any contemporary work. I have heard that the movie introduced the following effects:
(please provide refutation or corroboration as needed)[ul][li] First movie to have interior scenes shot from above at a downward angle (i.e., no ceiling).[/li]
[li] As with above, also the first to use “closed” rooms during interior shots (i.e., all walls present) instead of the usual three wall rooms.[/li]
[li] First to use “worm’s” eye view by shooting from a trench.[/ul][/li]I know there’s a few more. I’m hoping fans and foes alike will discuss this cinematic icon. I regard it as one of the very finest black and white films ever produced and find it to rival a substantial amount of color footage as well.
It’s so cliched to pick Citizen Kane as the best movie ever made. Fortunately, I think it’s absolutely true.
There are surely more. My understanding is that the structure of the story - start at the end, work backward to the beginning, then move forward to the middle, all interspersed with the ‘bookend’ plot - was totally unique. I think the film’s use of matte painting and dissolves (check out the initial approach to Xanadu!) was also groundbreaking.
I’m SURE the film introduced deep-focus photography.
Zenster says it was “First movie to have interior scenes shot from above at a downward angle (i.e., no ceiling).” But it’s also true that that in other scenes, the stage DID have a ceiling. (Kane’s post-election blowup is one.) It had to, because some shots were FROM THE FLOOR. This meant the lights could be on the ceiling either, because they’d be in the shot. Welles’s use of camera angles (we often have to ‘look up’ at Kane, which makes him that much more imposing) may or may not have been a first, but it was first-rate.
Kane is massively overrated; it invented many revolutionary tricks, but as entertainment it simply doesn’t work. When I took Film Studies at university, the professor apologised for it being part of the course.
It works for me. ‘Greatest of all time lists’ are so subjective, but this film is really compulsive. The cast were really not well known- and most aren’t now apart from Welles and possibly Joseph Cotten.
I think Evil Death and the alleged professor are guilty of cultural snobbery.
Yeah. If I can add to that, let me say - like the movie or don’t, I don’t give a rat’s ass. Call me a fool for liking it and that’s another matter entirely.
Many earlier films showed rooms with ceilings. For instance, John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), when the travelers stop at the way station for dinner.
I don’t remember any shots in Citizen Kane where it was evident that all four walls of a room were present at the same time. Wouldn’t that take a 360-degree pan?
As for shooting from trenches, they were doing that in the silent days.
Looks like I misunderstood your statement about ceilings. You’re claiming that Citizen Kane was the first to have interior crane shots shooting downward? Look at any of Busby Berkeley’s musicals from the 1930s. Look at The Wizard of Oz or Gone With the Wind.
Cinematography Gregg Toland also used deep focus photography the previous year in The Grapes of Wrath. John Ford, however, did not set up his scenes to point this out quite so blatantly as Welles.
Great film, but I thought the innovative techniques were a little over-used. I found that as I was watching it I’d say, “Aha. He’s using that technique again. Oh, there’s that one.” This is not to say that they were poor techniques. Indeed, they were quite unique at the time. But seeing the film many decades after it was made, and having seen other films that used the techniques, I found them a little distracting sometimes.
Hitchcock’s The Lodger showed a shot of the ceiling of a lower room in a boarding house. It even went one step farther and showed the man in the room above the lower room pacing across the floor/ceiling of the lower room. He made the shot through the floor/ceiling.
I wouldn’t say the techniques in Kane were all that new (though directors didn’t call as much attention to them as Welles did), but the technical end is only one of the many aspects that made Kane a great film, and probably less important that others. (The one technique that was probably new was when Welles moved the camera through the solid glass window in the visits to Susan Alexander Kane’s bar).
Kane is, above all, a great story about a fascinating character. Its storytelling structure was brilliant – starting out with the public persona of Kane and then gradually peeling back layers and showing new aspects. There are also great scenes like the breakfast table one showing his marriage falling apart over time, going from doting conversation to Mrs. Kane reading a rival newspaper.
As for those who condemn it – the world is filled with people who automatically like to show a contrary position to everyone else. If something is popular, they assume it can’t be good (the truth is that popularity and quality are independent variables), so they invent excuses and nitpicks to show that they’re smarter than everyone else. They can be safely ignored.
Please refrain from implying that I’m a liar when you have proof of neither fact nor motive, Cicero.
Marley, I didn’t mean you were a fool for liking Kane. I meant that you were a fool to think it was the greatest film of all time. I’d probably say you were a fool for saying any film was the greatest of all time, mind you - I don’t think there’s any such thing - but Kane isn’t even the greatest film Welles ever made.
Now, if you want to talk about it as the most important film ever made, I’ll listen. (Then I’ll disagree citing Birth of a Nation, of course, but I will listen.)
I’d always heard it as the opposite of what Zenster said – that Citizen Kane was the first movie to make extensive use of shots aiming up, therefore necessitating building ceilings into the set. (The more usual way to build sets was without a ceiling at all, as in a stage play, because that made it far easier to place the lights and cameras.)
Whether Citizen Kane was the first to do X or Y isn’t so important, though. A diligent film scholar could no doubt find earlier obscure films that did X or Y before Kane.
The important thing is that Citizen Kane is a virtual encyclopdia of film techniques c. 1941 – just listen to Ebert reel off all the techniques that went into the newsreel segment on the DVD commentary – and those techniques are used well, in service of the story and the characters.
So you think your opinion is the only one that anybody should have, and as such the opinions of anyone who dares to disagree with should be ignored. You can take that attitude and stick it where the sun don’t shine [1].
People don’t need to invent excuses or nitpicks to dislike Kane, nor do they dislike it “just to be contrary”. They dislike it because they don’t like it; they came, they saw, they shrugged and wondered what all the fuss was about.
[1] The Pit.
