Why is the movie “Citizen Kane” considered to be so great?
The thing with Citizen Kane isn’t so much the film itself as how it was made. It was the first film to do a lot of things. In order to appreciate that you’d have to see a lot of movies that came before it. The cinematography was incredibly innovative: deep focus shots where things are going on in both the foreground, midground, and background all at once. The low-angle shots involved new ways of building sets. They introduced effects to make crowds look bigger and buildings look grander. The compositions and shading of the shots are quite beautiful. Welles invented the L-cut: the edits for a scene would change the soundtrack a few frames ahead of the visual. They do that all the time today, and when you see old movies that don’t do that the cut feels abrupt and jarring. Finally, there’s the way the film was produced. They gave Welles an unheard of amount of creative control, so he got to make the movie he wanted to make. It’s as if he made an indie film on a big studio budget, perhaps
Citizen Kane… The wonderful thing about Citizen Kane is that so many of the cinematic techniques in it–ones that you probably won’t even notice–Orson Wells invented and used for the first time in that film. The camera coming in through the ceiling, how he used perspective, cuts, certain types of dolly-shots…over and over again, he created techniques that we all take completely for granted, and if you don’t know what you’re looking at–you have no way to realize how utterly startling the film was. It was not just a re-done stage play, as so many movies of the day were, or a film that was FILMED like it was a stage-play, but Welles used film in ways that showed the audience the story in ways that couldn’t be possible on stage. It’s sort of like someone reading Hamlet and saying “What’s so wonderful about this? It’s all quotes!” People have been “quoting” Citizen Kane” visually, ever since it came out.
Citizen Cane, when it came out, was like no other movie ever made. It pioneered deep focus cinematography, many of the camera angles were incredibly innovative and unorthodox, the aging make up was like nothing seen before, the non-linear style of story telling was unorthodox and compelling, and countless other little film making innovations were introduced in this one movie. But in the intervening years, all of those things that were so amazing when they first appeared in Citizen Cane have become movie standards, so a modern audience isn’t impressed. It’s one of the greatest films ever made, within the context of it’s making. You can’t really compare it to modern movies, because they’re using tools to craft their product that didn’t exist until Orson Wells and the crew of Citizen Cane invented them. It’s like standing Issac Newton alongside a 2008 Physics grad student- the grad student actually knows a whole hell of a lot more about physics than Newton did, but we’re still impressed b
