CITIZEN KANE AT 85: A Revolutionary Masterpiece Still Hiding in Plain Sight.
The picture was so different, so audacious, so avant-garde in 1941 that calling it “groundbreaking” understates the case. And because so much of filmmaking since has descended from it—or from films that themselves descended from it—it is easy now to miss the treasure hiding in plain sight. What once looked revolutionary has, by sheer force of influence, become part of the cinematic lexicon.
That is not Kane’s burden alone: it happens to every masterpiece that overturns the furniture, which the protagonist does quite literally near the end of the film.
Other filmmakers take what it did and make pieces of it their own. Then another generation borrows from them. Eventually the once-startling thing no longer looks startling at all.
It just looks like how movies are made. We still recognize the language. We do not always remember who taught us to speak it.
To appreciate just how transformative Citizen Kane was, it helps to compare it not to the films that came after it, but to the great classics that came just before.
Think of The Wizard of Oz. Think of Gone with the Wind. Think of The Philadelphia Story. These are not minor pictures, nor am I interested in diminishing them. They are classics for a reason. But place Citizen Kane beside them, and the difference becomes unmistakable.
Through that—wait for it—lens, you can see it almost immediately: in the use of light and shadow, in the use of sound and echo, in the startling deployment of deep focus, in the low and high angles and cavernous interiors, and in the determination to use the entire frame rather than treating the camera as a mere recording device.
Citizen Kane does not feel like a polished studio picture pushed to a slightly higher level. It feels like somebody came in and changed the language of cinema.
“Does Citizen Kane live up to the hype? Of course not—not eighty-five years later, at least. But that is precisely the point.” Actually, if there was any way to look at the film through the eyes of somebody who was going to the movies in 1941, rather than as someone who has seen innumerable movies made in the decades since which have stolen its tricks, it really does. (I watched it last week on the big screen in Arlington, TX.) Welles and his creative team, especially screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, cinematographer Gregg Toland, and editor Robert Wise, created a variety of techniques to radically change how movies were told. In the 1930s, Hollywood movies were built around the microphone, not the camera.
After The Jazz Singer in 1929, movies had to be talkies, and that meant everything was subservient to recording dialogue. The actors had to speak loudly, and not overlap each other’s lines, and a rather static cutting style evolved that was built around long shots, medium shots, and closeups. Kane replaced this with deep focus photography, longer takes, a moving camera, and carefully planned overlapping dialogue. Kane also made extensive use of the optical printer to glide seamlessly from exterior miniatures and matte paintings into scenes.
Rather than telling its story linearly, Kane relied on a series of flashbacks, each written and performed based on the tone of the person telling the story of that segment of Charles Kane’s life, which would be ripped off by no less than Stanley Kubrick in The Killing, and Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction. The optical printer was used to create the huge climbing shot in the opera house from Susan Alexander’s florid performance to the stagehand high above who hold his nose in response. That shot would be emulated by Tim Burton in his Batman movies. The vast warehouse at the end of the film containing Kane’s lifetime of possessions would later contain the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Citizen Kane is a film that Hollywood has endlessly ripped off. If there’s any chance of going into the theater and seeing it with fresh eyes, you will be astounded at the movie. But in any case, if there’s any chance of seeing it on a big screen near you, definitely go.
