Table of Contents
What is so special about Citizen Kane?
Citizen Kane is an encyclopedia of techniques: a 114-minute film school which provides lesson after lesson in deep focus and rear projection, extreme close-ups and overlapping dialogue. The reason it’s so vibrant is that its own director was learning those lessons too.
What POV is Citizen Kane?
First-Person
First-Person (Peripheral Narrator)
Is Citizen Kane the best film ever?
80 years ago last Sunday, radio/theater actor and producer Orson Wells released his first-ever feature film, Citizen Kane. The film has oft-been cited as the greatest film ever made and consistently tops best-of-all-time lists.
Why is Citizen Kane the best film of all time?
Of course, Citizen Kane is also known for many more things, such as its fantastic storytelling, but its story and plot structure, editing, and cinematography are what make it stand out to be considered the best movie of all time.
What is the film style of Citizen Kane?
Expressionistic Lighting. The lighting style in Citizen Kane is decidedly chiaroscuro and owes a debt to German expressionism while also prefiguring the visual style of American film noir. Noir in the United States was just getting started in 1941 with the release of The Maltese Falcon.
What is distinctive about the cinematography of Citizen Kane?
[12] The cinematography switches from deep-focus to soft-focus and the editing switches from long-take to classical shot-reverse-shot structure. The result is a sequence that takes on added significance. In Citizen Kane, deep-focus and long-take cinematography is the norm.
What is the narrative structure of Citizen Kane?
The non-linear structure of the narrative. Citizen Kane unfolds in a nonlinear and in a sense circular way. The movie loops through time, recollections of Kane’s life told through the memories of witnesses to Kane’s life. The newsreel obituary footage at the beginning was important for the nonlinear approach to work.
How many perspectives are there in Citizen Kane?
From this point on, with only a few exceptions, the film’s narrative itself shatters, fragmenting our vision through six different perspectives on the life of Charles Foster Kane, each one distorted in its own way.
Why did Citizen Kane flop?
Although it was a critical success, Citizen Kane failed to recoup its costs at the box office. The film faded from view after its release, but it returned to public attention when it was praised by French critics such as André Bazin and re-released in 1956.
Is Citizen Kane German expressionism?
Yet Citizen Kane is also a film in the tradition of German Expressionism. Like Murnau, Welles externalized the subjectivity of his characters (and especially of Kane) by means of psychologically charged settings, acute camera angles, distorting lenses, and disconcerting camera movements.
How does Citizen Kane use style?
Which of the following is a stylistic characteristic of Citizen Kane?
Which of the following is a stylistic characteristic of Citizen Kane? a technique that uses sound continuity to bridge shots with different times and settings.
How is Citizen Kane differ from classical narrative film?
Citizen Kane challenged traditional narrative and technical elements of classic Hollywood cinema. Kane was narrated by several people that include their take on Kane’s life. The story unfolds by many flashbacks and is told by different perspectives over the years through different narrations.
What is deep focus in Citizen Kane?
Deep focus allows subjects close and far away from the camera to remain in focus and is achieved by using a wide-angle lens and a smaller aperture. Deep focus means deep staging of characters along the z-axis. An early scene in Citizen Kane (below) is a great example of the deep focus found in the film.
Is Citizen Kane based on a true story?
The movie Citizen Kane was loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. The movie begins with the death of Charles Foster Kane, who was the editor of the New York Journal. He says the name rosebud and drops a crystal ball, which falls to the ground a shatters.
Is Citizen Kane the best role ever written for an actor?
The role that was written by Welles and Mankiewicz and directed by Welles for Welles is one of the greatest roles ever written for any film actor. The technique of Citizen Kane is always discussed, the flashbacks told from many points of view for the audience to get a grasp of what the title character was all about.
What was the name of the musical in Citizen Kane?
(The work Susan stars in is identified as Salammbo in the newspaper coverage, but it’s a fictionalized version — the music was written specially for Citizen Kane.) At the opening night performance, which was poorly received by the audience to the point where Kane is quickly left alone applauding his wife’s performance.
Was Citizen Kane’s Marion Davies a gold digger?
Most folks who talk about Citizen Kane go for the obvious target, Welles’s depiction of Marion Davies (Susan Alexander) as a no talent gold digger. In fact Welles himself in later years said he thought he was unfair to Davies then in Dorothy Comingore’s performance.