Citizen Kane Techniques

Citizen Kane is recognized as one of the greatest films made in the history of cinema, mostly due to its innovativeness. The cinematography, sound, and narrative structure cemented Citizen Kane’s legacy and influenced films of all genres for years to come.

Many consider Citizen Kane to be the greatest film ever made, and although that is clearly a debatable point of view, no one can deny the contribution that Citizen Kane has had on the film industry. Orson Welles introduced some very innovative techniques in filmmaking, using some unique and unconventional camera shots, angles, and lighting techniques that revolutionized how films have been made ever since.

Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane is a revolutionary film. Although it might not look like much to the modern viewer, many aspects of the film were the first of their kind to appear and are still used today.

The debate over Casablanca and Citizen Kane has been a classic argument between film critics and historians alike, and this is because both of these pieces are timeless pictures that have managed to captivate audiences well after their era. On a broad spectrum analysis this is an apples and oranges debate as the two films both have great cinematographic value but for different reasons. However, the real question at hand is which film is the greatest? Which film transformed the future of American film making? It is these questions that I as many others have, will attempt to answer in the following essay as I explain why I believe Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made.

Orson Welles’ use of long shot allows him to pack the screen with action and give the audience the illusion of freedom to follow what they want in a scene making the audience being more invested because they believe they found out the conflict on their own. Through this illusion he is able to add more dramatic tension and dramatic irony to his work making it rich in content and catharsis as he did in Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil.

Widely recognized as one of the most iconic films of its time, Citizen Kane made nothing short of a thunderous debut in May of 1941. An article from the NY times refers to it as “the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture to be seen” [1]. But why? What makes this film standout in what the article notes to be the “withering spotlight” of Hollywood? Let us start with the narrative itself.

Citizen Kane is directed, produced by and stars Orson Welles and was made in 1941. Citizen Kane follows the life of famous newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane and was a very controversial film for its time. Citizen Kane does not come under one specific film genre but falls under the heading of several interesting genres, which include biography, narrative, detective and news-paper reporter genre. ‘Film Noir’ is also associated with Citizen Kane as it has many genres but also a very specific style that differs from the classical norm of Hollywood movies. This movie became extremely significant for its time and changed the face of film history. Orson Welles brought about a new way of filming with his use of low angle shots, three point lighting,

Struggle defines the movie Citizen Kane by Orson Welles. We struggle to follow along with it’s haphazard sequencing of events. The dark lighting strains the eyes. We even struggle to follow along as to where we are. There is narration but only that which helps tell the story of Kane, not where we are at the moment. That we must discover for ourselves as we follow the journalist through his investigation. Citizen Kane utilized unique camera angles that were not used in the cookie-cutter Hollywood style. Ceilings were almost never shown because it would expose the stage. The camera did not make you feel like an audience member sitting in the middle of a theater watching the story. Citizen Kane actually takes you into the world as a member of that world, a bystander that see’s these events first hand. The camera had a lot to do with that. In the opening scene the fades from shot to shot. The camera places you in realistic positions. Classic Hollywood films at the time were very much like going to a theatrical theater, such as an opera house. The camera angles were very limited.

I would have to agree that Citizen Kane was a film ahead of its time. I think this film revolutionized filmmaking in the aspect of flashbacks and then flashing forward and then back again. The director, Orson Welles also used long takes throughout the movie, which I, too, think revolutionized filmmaking. Both of these cinematic constructions were not necessarily new in 1941 but Welles made them unique, and they are still used today. Flashbacks in films were established around the 1930s, but Welles added more to it by going back and forth between reality and flashbacks. It is considered one of the most famous examples. We see this in the film at the beginning when we hear Kane has died and then we are taken back to his childhood, then

In making Citizen Kane Orson Welles implemented a variety of innovative filmmaking techniques. One of the most prevalent is the use of “deep focus”. Deep focus refers to having everything in the scene, including the background in focus at the same time. To accomplish this, the cinematographer must combine composition, lighting, and a special type of camera lens to create the desired effect. This enables the filmmaker to show overlapping actions causes the physical environment in which the film takes place to become more critical.

Citizen Kane contributed to the cinema world the most with its use of deep focus. This technique is interesting in the fact that it includes everything in the frame, even the background, in focus all at once. Welles was forced to combine lighting, shadowing, and using different lenses to produce this effect. “French theorist Andre Bazin described this technique as a dialectical leap forward in the language of cinema, allowing directors to preserve realism and ambiguity of

Citizen Kane is a Film Noir, directed by Orson Welles, and was released in 1941 as an RKO Production. Much of the success of this film is often attributed to the effectiveness of Bernard Herrmann’s musical score. Herrmann’s ability to compose various different styles of music ensured its dominance over many of his predecessors. The diversity of the score is significant, because it properly emphasized the highlights and pitfalls of Kane’s life and effectively portrayed the various emotions of the characters. Herrmann proved his worthiness as a film composer through the music he composed for Citizen Kane, by creating such a diversified score, using leitmotifs, and effectively transitioning between moods.

The beginning of Citizen Kane starts off with a ‘News Flash’ that is giving a quick history of Charles Foster Kane’s life and news that he has died. After that, it then goes into a storytelling but not in a usual way. There are different people narrating the movie throughout it. It shows different journalists asking multiple people about Charles Kane from when they knew him throughout his life. The main purpose of this interviewing by these journalists is to find out what ‘rosebud’ meant to Kane, since it was the last thing he spoke on his death bed. Throughout the movie, the time flips from what is currently happening to what has happened in the past. Flashbacks of Kane’s life are a primary way of explaining his childhood and history. This type of narrating is known as the parallel narrative structure which was not common for the time.

To this day, Stanley Kubrick remains one of the most influential and even notorious directors of American cinematography. Beginning in the 1950's, his work spans five decades and is responsible for collecting the attention of audiences to this day. However, it was in the 1960's that Kubrick substantiated and crafted his abilities as a director and a creative mind. During this decade, the United States underwent a generational revolution that influenced many of its cultural facets--in particular, motion pictures. Kubrick's two epics, Spartacus and 2001: A Space Odyssey, frame the beginning and end of this decade and thusly

Citizen Kane is a movie that can be rewritten and implemented into any film created today. In many ways, the storyline tells us more about ourselves than anything else and it relates to each one of us who has ever wished for a blah blah life. From his flamboyant adventures to the blah blah to his political agenda in his later years. Every film that came after Citizen Kane owes a great deal to Orson Welles because of the way he used music, shadows and lighting, and special effects, which without a doubt makes it one of the finest movies ever made. Some even call it the Mona Lisa of its time because Orson Welles was the first to implement these techniques, which revolutionize cinema forever.