After watching Citizen Kane, I didn’t understand why it was such a highly-regarded film. Other films we’ve screened in this class have been so clearly different from the movies I’d usually watch, and it has forced me to pay attention to the choices made by the directors. Citizen Kane, on the other hand, felt like it was nothing new, and the techniques used by Welles seemed pretty common. With this in mind, I wanted to find out why Citizen Kane was considered one of the best movies of all time. 

First I looked at a Time article from 1941 (The TIME Magazine Vault). In the article, they discuss how new Welles’s style of storytelling was. While using newspapers and older looking videos are used in other movies today, it hadn’t really been done before Citizen Kane. Panning the camera for a reaction to something has also been done in many movies since Citizen Kane, but was not a common practice before. The article also explains how the scandal surrounding the film brought more attention to it. I knew there was a dispute over Kane’s similarity to William Randolph Hearst, but Time made it clear that the dispute made more people want to see the film and made Welles’s decisions seem more brave. 

Similarly, I watched a youtube video (The Eternal Influence of ‘Citizen Kane’) that explained the part of Citizen Kane’s greatness is it’s lasting impact. It explained that using varied camera placement, deep focus, and lighting for impact were all revolutionary. Now we see these techniques all the time, in award-winning films and Hallmark movies alike (just look at stills from Elf, Christmas with the Darlings, or The Grand Budapest Hotel). In other words, I didn’t understand the importance of Citizen Kane because the film techniques didn’t seem special, and that is part of the reason people argue it is one of the best films ever.