What did orson welles do for cinema and for the world?
I don’t know about what he did for the world per se, but he was, in my opinion, a veritable genius when it came to what cinema as a narrative media could be. Citizen Kane, as the prime example (though many people these days think of it as boring) was very provocative at its time in both the subject material and the complexity of how characters were developed and their interplay. The innovative way it was lit, filmed, and spliced, with its flashbacks and inside-out storytelling made you use your brain to reason through the visual symbolism in putting all the pieces together to extract the ultimate thematic meaning of the film. And he did all this in his very first film…and at only 25 years old! The fact that he had a vision for what he wanted to portray on the media, and his uncompromising resolve in seeing through that vision was quite controversial in a Hollywood controlled by studio bosses and financed by the very few. Bogdonovich, Polanski, Nichols, Scott, Friedkin…countless oth
