1941: Citizen Kane: What Makes A Masterpiece?

The word masterpiece has an interesting etymology. Now it means any great work of art, but originally it referred to the work that an apprentice would present before becoming the member of a guild. A piece of work that displayed the full command of their skill over their art. A piece of work for which they would be worthy of being called a master. Orson Welles was only 25 years old when he completed his masterpiece. Though a box office failure upon its release, Citizen Kane has been canonised as one of the most important films ever made. The name itself has become synonymous with greatness. But why? What makes this film tower above all others? Hello and welcome to 100 years of cinema. We'll be taking a look at at least one film each year from 1915 onwards to track the evolution of film over the last century. The evolution of cinema is a slow process. Occasionally a film breaks out with a radical new idea that shakes the medium to its foundations before being adopted by the mainstream. Slowly over the decades, each new idea, each spark of ingenuity and experimentation pushes the form just a little further. And very occasionally, a film will emerge so radical, so packed with new ideas, that the evolution of cinema itself seems to skip 10 years almost overnight. Citizen Kane was one of those films. It can be hard now to see Citizen Kane for the revolution that it was. Its impact on cinema was so profound, and its techniques became so ubiquitous, that its once radical ideas now seem commonplace. As innovation gave way to the imitators, the film now seems to stand in the shadow of its own greatness. Some of the ideas that are credited to the film, like the use of deep focus or extreme low angled shots, do actually originate from earlier films. But it was in Orson Welles and cinematographer Greg Toland's utilisation of these techniques, as well as many other innovations of their own right, that turned Citizen Kane into something revolutionary. Let's talk first about the visual innovations that Kane brought to cinema. Exactly who brought what to the table, and who deserves the credit between Orson Welles and Greg Toland, has long been the subject of debate. But it's indisputable that their combined efforts helped create one of the most visually rich and engaging films made up until that point. Somewhere between Toland's technical genius and Welles' command over his image, a new vocabulary was added to the language of cinema. The most famous visual innovation from Citizen Kane was its use of deep focus. Whereas earlier filmmakers had used different focal lengths to separate the characters from the background, or to draw the audience's eye to a particular detail, Citizen Kane had the whole scene in crisp focus. This was accomplished by the use of an incredibly small aperture. The smaller the aperture, the more of the image that could be in focus at one time. Greg Toland had used similar techniques one year prior in the John Ford film The Long Voyage Home, but it was Citizen Kane's application of this technique that was truly something new. The composition of the scene allowed the audience to read the whole frame at once, much in the same way that one would read a painting, each layer adding an element to the story. In the foreground, a business-like Mrs Kane arranges the paperwork that would see her son taken into the custody of Mr Thatcher for a proper education. In the mid-distance, we see Kane's father fighting to keep his son and eventually giving in to his greed. And in the background, a young Kane plays in the snow with childhood abandoned, unaware that inside, his fate is being decided for him. A more traditional film would have had these three elements shot separately, divided either by cuts or by changes in focus. But Kane gives us all of these components at the same time. The significance of the moment in a young Kane's life is heightened by the audience's ability to perceive each conspiring element in unison. Shots allowing the audience the ability to perceive every detail in a scene gave filmmakers a new, concise way of presenting complex ideas or relationships using framing and blocking alone. Moving on from Citizen Kane, we would see the use of this again and again throughout cinema. Though the use of deep focus is Kane's most famous innovation, Wells and Toland had plenty of other tricks up their sleeve, like the use of their roving, floating camera that seemed to move impossibly through objects, giving the audience an omnipotent, almost god-like perspective on events. The use of tracking shots wasn't new, but what was new was the complexity and the amounts of these shots and how they worked to give the audience a deeper understanding of the events and characters. Take the shot introducing Kane's second wife. We see a face, illuminated by lightning, later revealed to be Susan Kane, a nightclub singer at the El Rancho. A sneaky dissolve helps the camera pass through a plane of glass and Susan sits alone, drunk and distraught. In seemingly one movement and all of 30 seconds, we know who her character is, what she does and the depth at which the death of her former husband has wounded her. We see a young Kane in the snow, slowly becoming isolated in the frame as his parents sign the paperwork that would see him cast out of the family home. This same sentiment and camera movement is reversed when years later Kane takes control of his destiny, shot from below, literally larger than life. This kind of visual storytelling through camera movement would become a staple of cinema, borrowed by filmmakers as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher. Though the full list of visual tricks that Wells and Toland brought to Susan Kane may not have been wholly original, the effect and implementation pushed them into mainstream American cinema. The chiaroscuro effect that Toland brought to the lighting of the film was lifted directly from expressionist cinema of the Weimar Republic, but it's used to highlight the emotional states of characters would be a direct influence on film noir that would emerge a few years later. The use of low-angle shots that reveal a ceiling had already been used by Stagecoach, but Wells had the technique influence how the audience reads a scene, emphasizing the importance of a character and the power dynamic in a relationship. It's use of extreme close-ups to isolate and amplify a character's expression. It's use of montage to condense the growing strain of a 16-year marriage into a few short minutes. It's use of wipes and transitions to take us from one scene to the next without breaking the dramatic tension. The use of superimposition, layering images on images to project a character's mental state into the real world. What made Citizen Kane such a visual masterpiece is that every little trick, every camera movement, every dramatic low angle is there for more than just appearances. It's there to drive the story forward and allow us a window into the minds of the characters. However, the rich complex visuals would have been wasted if they didn't work in the service of a story worth telling. And equally revolutionary in its approach to how a film looks was Citizen Kane's approach to the kind of story that films tell and how they tell it. What separated Citizen Kane from the kind of films that preceded it was the overall ambivalence of its tone. It's a film about one of the wealthiest most successful men in the world and yet permeating the entire film is the gloom of failure. Kane is an idealist standing up for the rights of the downtrodden and vulnerable and yet we see him compromise these ideals near constantly. It's a film about the love and friendships in a great man's life and how that greatness strained those relationships until no love remained. We as the audience are not directed in our feelings one way or the other. We're simply given the facts of a life and forced to come to our own conclusions. Whether we love Kane or hate him is entirely up to us and our feelings are likely to change as we make our way down the winding path that is the film. At its most basic, the story of Citizen Kane can be boiled down to this. After the death of a prominent newspaper editor, a group of reporters attempt to pin down the significance of his enigmatic last word. However, to get us from point A to point B, the film takes us through a labyrinth of flashbacks and different points of view. A series of incomplete, subjective and occasionally contradictory glimpses into a man's life from the people who knew him best. Throughout the film, we take on multiple perspectives. The first being that of a typical Hollywood film of the time. An omnipotent observer that glides through the window of his Xanadu mansion to hear Kane's final words. A moment only the audience is privy to. The artificiality of this perspective is compounded by the use of superimposed snow. Immediately after Kane's death, we're given our second perspective, that of the news camera. The newsreel quickly and concisely lists off every major event of Kane's life and therefore exactly what's going to happen in the remaining hour and 45 minutes of the film. From this point on, the audience already knows every major plot point of the film. But Citizen Kane isn't really a film about the events that take place, it's about why these events take place, how they shaped the characters in the film and how the characters shaped the world around them. It's about how greed and ambition and uncontrollable circumstances can transform a young idealist into a jaded old man. We're given the actual events of the film through the newsreel, but the corrupting forces that shape Kane into who he becomes are explained through a series of flashbacks of the five people closest to him. Each one revealing a new piece of the jigsaw that makes up a man's life. This narrative technique was unlike anything else seen in cinema. It was a radical approach to storytelling that completely shattered the audience's expectation of the linear narrative they would receive when going to see a film. Now, all of a sudden, an event you've already seen could be rewritten or given new meaning. And it paved the way for films like Kurosawa's Rashomon, Last Year at Merriam-Bad or Memento. It's fragmented nature forces the audience to pick up the pieces and rearrange them in a way that most makes sense to them. By the end of the film, the reporters have failed in their mission to uncover the meaning of Kane's last words. But as Thompson points out, It's only after this do we return to the same omnipotent perspective that opened the film. As the camera glides over the real labyrinth of treasures that are now all that remain of Kane's life, it's revealed to us, the audience, and only the audience, the true meaning of Kane's final words. The name of his childhood slave. Rosebud is a metaphor for the loss of childhood, a yearning for a time before being thrust into greatness. And at the age of 25, having created one of the most influential and celebrated films ever made, it's possible that Orson had many of the same feelings. If the legends are to be believed, Wells only saw the film once in its entirety, when it was first completed, six months before it was released, and then almost one other time at its premiere, but he chose to leave the cinema before it ended. One has to wonder whether the pain of Charles Foster Kane, his life led in equal parts success and failure, a man who had everything in the world but still found himself wanting, whose greatness brought him only misery, cut just a little too deep for a man who would become one of America's greatest filmmakers. I want to say a massive thank you to all the people that support me on Patreon, including my new supporter, Maxim Sam. I love Citizen Kane for all of the reasons listed above, but also just because it's so fun, and it moves so fast. So if you haven't seen the film, or it's been a while, check it out and let me know what you think in the comments below. If you liked that video you can check out more by clicking the links on screen, you can hit the logo to subscribe, and you can also follow a link to support me on Patreon to help me make more videos as well as receive exclusive bonus content. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time when we'll be talking about a film from 1942, and not to give too much away, but it is literally my favourite film ever made.