Citizen Kane (1941)

Film: Citizen Kane

Director: Orson Welles

Country: USA

Released: May 1941

Runtime: 119 minutes

Genre: Drama

Studio: RKO

Influenced: John Huston, David Lean, Yukio Mishima, Alain Resnais, Paul Thomas Anderson

So much ink has been spilled in praise of Citizen Kane that perhaps it's best I take a different angle here and focus on all the key contributions to the film beyond that of Orson Welles. That's not to say Welles wasn't the visionary behind this groundbreaking story of loneliness and megalomania, and also it's star actor, but his genius tends to overshadow the important input of his collaborators. 

One obvious place to start is the cast, many of whom were from theatrical backgrounds and came from outside the Hollywood studio star system, giving the film a freshness even now. This brave decision by Welles has led to Citizen Kane being linked with the neorealist movement in Italy, which put an emphasis on unknown actors to create a sense of naturalism, with film critic André Bazin drawing a link between Welles and Italian directors such as Rossellini (notably his 1946 film Paisà).

While Citizen Kane's cast may have been new to cinema, his crew certainly were not. The film is often identified as Welles’ movie, but Orson actually shared the directing credit with cinematographer Gregg Toland. Toland had previously worked on John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and with William Wyler, but it was on this film that he was given free rein to experiment on a larger scale. His innovations included extensive use of deep focus and long takes from a fixed camera position – allowing us to see the drama unfold across various different areas of the huge sets – as well as the use of low-ceilings and arc lamps to create a dynamic sense of light and shade.

DW Griffith said he loved Welles' Citizen Kane, "and particularly loved the ideas he took from me", such as the low-ceiling sets. However, what was thoroughly unique about Toland's approach to the film, as he explained in a 1941 article in Popular Photography entitled How I Broke the Rules on Citizen Kane, was how "the photographic approach... was planned and considered long before the first camera turned', which was itself "most unconventional in Hollywood, where cinematographers generally have only a few days to prepare to shoot a film."

Another of the film's seemingly novel features is the use of newsreel, but again it's possible to find a precedent, specifically the way cinematographer James Wong Howe lends The Power & the Glory (1933) – also a film saga about a tycoon – a quasi-newsreel look that may have influenced Citizen Kane. Welles' role as "author" of the film has also been contested, notably by film critic Pauline Kael and director David Fincher (in his 2020 film, Mank), who presented the (probably false) argument that the script was solely the work of Herman J Mankiewicz.

Donald Siegel, head of the montage department at Warner Bros, produced a large number of montage sequences and deserves the credit for compiling the film's opening newsreel about the life of Charles Foster Kane, as well as a later sequence showing the breakdown of his marriage via six breakfast encounters with his wife. 

As well as cutting-edge camera tricks and newsreels, other notable features of the film include its multiple narrators and its complex narrative structure, which relies heavily on flashbacks. When Welles arrived at RKO, he compared the studio to the biggest toy train set in the world, and there's no doubt he enjoyed playing with its studio technology in the same way as he had on the radio, notably in his production of War of the Worlds.

Citizen Kane is composed almost entirely of flashback accounts of the life and character of Kane as told to a reporter by those who had known him: but whether the "truth"  about the man emerges from these accounts is in the end moot. More important than interpretations of what Rosebud means, is the fact that the film kickstarted a modernist movement in film, "a vast stirring of the geological bed of cinema" as Bazin puts it, marking a revolution in the language of the screen.