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Citizen Kane is playing at AFI Silver this weekend, but that doesn’t mean you can see it. Sometimes a film’s reputation becomes so towering and its influence on cinema so pervasive that when you watch, all you see is its legacy. Citizen Kane innovated several filmmaking techniques. The film pioneered a genre. Its insights into American politics haven’t aged a day. It was selected as the best film of all time by film magazine Sight and Sound for five decades running, from 1962 to 2002 (it was down to number 3 in the 2022 poll). This is a precarious place for any film to exist. But perhaps the greatest achievement of Citizen Kane is that its greatness has never been eclipsed by its “greatness.”
It’s a work of profound modernity whose novelties never get stale because they are wielded only to serve the timeless story at its center. We watch Charles Foster Kane, a boy abandoned by his parents and sold to a bank, grow up to be the third-richest person in the world, a newspaper tycoon, a gubernatorial candidate, and, eventually, a ruin of a man. A loose adaptation of the life of William Randolph Hearst (and if you want to get deep, a spiritual autobiography by Orson Welles, the wunderkind), Citizen Kane chooses as its real subject an enduring brand of American arrogance, in which a man who sets out to stand up for the little guy—or at least claims to—ends up swallowed by his own mythology. Gary Hart and John Edwards should have been taking notes. So should Donald Trump; Kane’s loudest campaign promise during his gubernatorial run was to throw his opponent in jail.
Sadly, politics repeat. But cinema offers a revolution of the mind. The formal innovations of Citizen Kane are evident even to a novice student of film, particularly cinematographer Gregg Toland’s rigorous use of deep focus. Toland invented the split diopter shot—in which two people different distances from the lens remain perfectly in focus—in 1940 in The Long Voyage Home. But in Citizen Kane, released a year later, he goes a step further with a technique called “deep focus,” which allows multiple characters to be in focus at once through lighting, composition, blocking, and camerawork. Welles uses it throughout the film to produce an effect that feels a bit more like the stage, which birthed Welles’ career, than cinema at the time; the director got his start at New York’s Mercury Theater, and he plucked many of the film’s actors from its troupe.
Welles’ use of deep focus, which allows viewers to literally choose their point of focus in a scene, also suits the film’s themes. Citizen Kane has been called the first “existential” film for how it refuses to underline its message and let viewers decide for themselves how to feel about Kane and his downfall. This steadfast ambiguity has allowed Citizen Kane to live on—and even gain power—throughout history. Coming at the very start of the 1940s, Citizen Kane came out of a period of great escapism. Screwball comedies and broad westerns ruled in an era when compromised, cash-strapped citizens were desperate for levity and moral clarity. In 1940, The Maltese Falcon invented film noir by reflecting darker truths about American corruption, and Citizen Kane followed with its exaggerated angles, hints of German expressionism, and its bracing refusal to judge its weak-willed protagonist.
Kane is easy to root for in the film’s early scenes. His boyish charm is irresistible, and the unfortunate circumstances of his childhood make him sympathetic. But when he begins imbibing the love of the crowd during his ill-fated run for governor, viewers may diverge. Some will see an arrogant man drunk on his own power, while others will see a boy seeking the parental affection withheld from him. The film may tip its hand in its final shot—there’s an argument we’d be better off not knowing the meaning of “Rosebud,” its final words—but the resolution of its mystery doesn’t wash away the unsettling feeling that Kane’s virtues and flaws are indistinguishable from each other. We’re forced to reckon with him, and nearly a century later, we still are.
It’s a profoundly emotional film whose insights into the sadness of the human experience extend beyond Kane himself. There’s Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), who Kane married and tried to turn into an opera singer, to the great embarrassment of all; Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), Kane’s friend who foresees Kane’s downfall but whose foresight ends up a curse; and Kane’s faithful associate Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), who, in one of film’s great monologues, recalls to the camera his memory of a girl he once glimpsed half a century earlier, foreshadowing the climactic reveal of Rosebud and underlining the film’s focus on how the smallest things in life eclipse the grandest. The Mercury Theater cast knows how to make the most of their moments, and their transition to the intimacy of cinema is virtually seamless. Every character is so richly developed that they feel like they deserve their own movie.
So how do we see Citizen Kane? It’s easy. Young filmmakers will study the camera techniques, and scholars will work to place the film, with its dutch angles and hints of German expressionism, in the timeline of film noir. The rest of us will linger on the humans, especially Kane, a fictional man whose contradictions reflect the lives of the many: Hearst, Welles, and anyone who dares to watch.
Citizen Kane plays Sept. 1 through 7 at AFI Silver. silver.afi.com. $10–$13.
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