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By Gordon MacLachlan
Originally titled "The American," Citizen Kane is an astonishingly ambitious film chronicling the (self-)love and (self-)loss of a man suspiciously akin to media mogul William Randolph Hearst. (Both the bonus disc in the DVD release as well as the film RKO 281 can shed light on the blurring of art and life in the Kane/Hearst story.)
Most significantly for us as viewers, this film rewrote the book on the possibilities of narrative and technical achievement in cinema. Fifty years or so before Mystery Train and Pulp Fiction, director and co-writer Orson Welles (with the power of final cut in his first film!) created a non-linear story of incredible complexity and depth, and luckily for all of us cinematographer Gregg Toland was there and willing to execute whatever photographic virtuosity Welles dreamed up. It's a sore spot in Academy Award history that Citizen Kane didn't win Best Picture (and maybe Hearst had a little bit to do with that), losing that year to John Ford's How Green Was My Valley.
The American Film Institute is not alone in its judging of Citizen Kane to be the greatest film of all time. But that's a lot for a film to live up to when viewed 65 years after its release—and it also says much about the movie that it's still held in that kind of esteem given the extraordinary evolution of film since 1941. But what we generally mean by "best" is something like "most influential"—it announces what a movie is capable of, and makes lots of other artists strive to reach and surpass its heights. Enjoy this big film about a big little kid as it shows off, sentimentalizes, soapboxes, and soars. And don't worry about whether you already know what "Rosebud" supposedly means. It doesn't matter. What matters is that it mattered to Kane.
Gordon MacLachlan, SFS Board of Directors and Program Team Chair, owns Sound on Screen Video Services in Camden and teaches film analysis at University College at Thomaston.
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