Citizen Kane

Orson Welles’s classic tale of a publishing tycoon’s rise and fall is compelling, distressing, and ingenious in its storytelling, earning its reputation as a milestone achievement in film. It is the world’s most famous and exceedingly rated film. An American drama film, this was known as a masterpiece in cinematic history, with its remarkable cinematic and narrative techniques and tentative innovations.

More importantly, the inventive, bold film is an acknowledged landmark in the enlargement of cinematic technique. It uses film as an art form to energetically communicate and display a non-static view of life. Its components brought together some important aspects such as the use of a subjective camera, eccentric lighting, prefiguring the darkness and low-key lighting of future film noirs, creative use of shadows and strange camera angles, following in the tradition of German Expressionists, low-angled shots illuminating ceilings in sets, sparse use of revealing facial close-ups, sophisticated camera movements, over-lapping, flashbacks, flash-forward’s and non-linear story-telling, long, continuous shots or lengthy takes of sequences.

In the entire movie the foreground, mid ground and the background are in focus in every scene. This was done by experimenting with lenses and lighting. One of the story-telling techniques introduced in this film was using an intermittent sequence on the same set while the characters changed costume and make-up between cuts so that the scene following each cut would look as if it took place in the same site, but at a time long after the previous cut.

The film traces the life and career of Charles Foster Kane, a man whose career in the publishing world is born of idealistic social service, but gradually evolves into a brutal chase of power. Narrated chiefly through flashbacks, the story is exposed through the research of a newspaper reporter seeking to solve the mystery of the newspaper magnate's dying word: "Rosebud."