1104 Citizen Kane

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knives
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Re: Citizen Kane

#176 Post by knives » Thu Jan 30, 2014 2:34 pm

Clearly they go by a Babylonian system.

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martin
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Re: Citizen Kane

#177 Post by martin » Thu Jan 30, 2014 4:07 pm

6 stars has been the most common system in Denmark for decades. A DVD cover (horrible!):

Image

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jindianajonz
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Re: Citizen Kane

#178 Post by jindianajonz » Thu Jan 30, 2014 4:10 pm

How common is the Danish five-heart system that DVD cover uses?

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zedz
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Re: Citizen Kane

#179 Post by zedz » Thu Jan 30, 2014 4:40 pm

RobertAltman wrote:
Superswede11 wrote:In my high school film course, the teacher claimed this was the first film to use flashbacks and/or a non-linear narrative. So he's at least very unfamiliar with film history
In lower secondary school I gave a "lecture" on film history where I claimed this was the first movie where they moved the camera. No one corrected me.
When I was eleven I gave a class talk about Georges Melies, even though I hadn't seen any of his films.

(The next year my class talk was about Jack the Ripper, and afterwards some naif had to ask the teacher what a prostitute was.)

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Re: Citizen Kane

#180 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jan 30, 2014 4:56 pm

That's impressive considering when I was twelve I gave a class presentation on Houseguest (Starring Sinbad and Phil Hartman)-- I'd link to a trailer, but it's so unpopular that no one's even uploaded one to YouTube! Needless to say, not quite worth six stars

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Re: Citizen Kane

#181 Post by martin » Thu Jan 30, 2014 4:57 pm

jindianajonz wrote:How common is the Danish five-heart system that DVD cover uses?
The hearts system is used by the Danish newspaper Politiken. It's actually a six-heart system. So if they show 5 hearts, it's actually 5 of 6. Politiken is one of the better Danish papers when it comes to cultural reviews (but that's my personal opinion, of course).

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Re: Citizen Kane

#182 Post by Andre Jurieu » Thu Jan 30, 2014 6:12 pm

zedz wrote:
RobertAltman wrote:
Superswede11 wrote:In my high school film course, the teacher claimed this was the first film to use flashbacks and/or a non-linear narrative. So he's at least very unfamiliar with film history
In lower secondary school I gave a "lecture" on film history where I claimed this was the first movie where they moved the camera. No one corrected me.
When I was eleven I gave a class talk about Georges Melies, even though I hadn't seen any of his films.

(The next year my class talk was about Jack the Ripper, and afterwards some naif had to ask the teacher what a prostitute was.)
domino harvey wrote:That's impressive considering when I was twelve I gave a class presentation on Houseguest (Starring Sinbad and Phil Hartman)-- I'd link to a trailer, but it's so unpopular that no one's even uploaded one to YouTube! Needless to say, not quite worth six stars
In high school I used a clip from Beautiful Girls (containing some nudity) to try and explain what Browning meant by "a man's reach should exceed his grasp". It didn't go as well as I had planned in my head (my group members pretty much handed it off to me when the teacher asked for an explanation of why we needed to show that clip), but we somehow received the best mark in class on that project.

And just so that I don't send this thread too far off topic, we actually watched Citizen Kane in that class at the end of the year. Most of the kids in class thought it was boring and a few fell asleep. I think we watched Apocalypse Now also, but that was because we studied Heart of Darkness during the year.

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Re: Citizen Kane

#183 Post by captveg » Thu Jan 30, 2014 6:43 pm

We took an entire week in my Physics class sophemore year of high school to watch Ben-Hur, simply because our teacher loved it.

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Re: Citizen Kane

#184 Post by Numero Trois » Fri Jan 31, 2014 12:35 pm

I'd prefer a six-star ratings system over IMDB's cumbersome ten-star system any day of the week.
swo17 wrote:This comment was met with confused and derisive stares because, as it turns out, not only was no one there familiar with the reference, but only one of them had even heard of (but not seen) a movie called Citizen Kane.
One wonders if they've also never heard of TCM which is in what, 99% of cable/ satelllite services?

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Altair
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Re: Citizen Kane

#185 Post by Altair » Mon Oct 12, 2015 12:15 pm

I saw Citizen Kane at Oxford's Ultimate Picture Palace yesterday, which, to my very pleasant surprise, was actually in 35 mm. I'd only ever seen it on VHS and DVD previously so this was certainly a memorable experience, particularly as I'd expected a DCP. It was very scratchy, pops on the soundtrack, cigarette burns etc and preceded by a BFI logo, which was presumably where they'd acquired the print from, but it was still a treat to see it on actual film. The cinema is showing Chimes at Midnight later in the year so I'll definitely be seeing that to see what source they'll use.

At any rate, seeing it with a paying audience for the first time was interesting, especially at the amount of laughter (with the film) at many of the film's witty moments and throwaway lines of dialogue. It was particularly notable in the early scenes set at the newspaper: combined with the overlapping dialogue, it made me really understand how influenced Welles (and Mankiewicz) were by the screwball comedies of the prior decade.

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Mr Sausage
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Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#186 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Nov 25, 2019 5:57 pm

DISCUSSION ENDS MONDAY, December 9th.

Members have a two week period in which to discuss the film before it's moved to its dedicated thread in The Criterion Collection subforum. Please read the Rules and Procedures.

This thread is not spoiler free. This is a discussion thread; you should expect plot points of the individual films under discussion to be discussed openly. See: spoiler rules.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#187 Post by domino harvey » Mon Nov 25, 2019 6:02 pm

I’m curious to hear from those who are really wild about this movie. I know it’s such a long standing “best” film that it may getting voted for by reflex at this point, but I’ve rarely encountered anyone who seemed all that passionate about it (and yet at least six of you placed it at number one, so obviously many of you are) even in comparison to the other Welles films of this decade (and for the record, I think it’s a great film, but not to the extent that I feel super compelled to ever vote for it over fifty-plus other great films from the 40s)

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#188 Post by FrauBlucher » Mon Nov 25, 2019 6:23 pm

I love this film and it is a great film but I just wonder if the myth of Citizen Kane is greater than the film itself

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Big Ben
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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#189 Post by Big Ben » Mon Nov 25, 2019 6:37 pm

Welles certainly didn't seem to think it was his best work and as I recall he publicly lamented that he was perceived as starting at the very top and working his way down with each subsequent project.
domino harvey wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 6:02 pm
I’m curious to hear from those who are really wild about this movie. I know it’s such a long standing “best” film that it may getting voted for by reflex at this point, but I’ve rarely encountered anyone who seemed all that passionate about it (and yet at least six of you placed it at number one, so obviously many of you are) even in comparison to the other Welles films of this decade (and for the record, I think it’s a great film, but not to the extent that I feel super compelled to ever vote for it over fifty-plus other great films from the 40s)
My Video Production teacher in High School was crazy about Citizen Kane and we did an entire blow by blow of it in class for some time. Speaking personally I think it's a great indication of what Welles would give us later in films that I personally consider superior like Chimes at Midnight or Touch of Evil. I think Citizen Kane is one of those things that's easily identifiable as "good" because it has so much going for it rather than one particular aspect that anyone remembers and can single out.
FrauBlucher wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 6:23 pm
I love this film and it is a great film but I just wonder if the myth of Citizen Kane is greater than the film itself
Part of me wonders if it's treated this way because it was simply elevated at the time by scandal alongside being a great film. Hearst trying to destroy Welles probably helped it, at least in the long run as it added to it's mystique. Nothing adds to a film's stature than a long standing mythos and well Welles had that up the wazoo.


Ray Carney doesn't like it though!

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#190 Post by domino harvey » Mon Nov 25, 2019 7:07 pm

It's funny, I'm not sure I'd trust the tastes of anyone who didn't like Citizen Kane, but I'd also prob say the same for those who consider it their favorite film!

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#191 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Nov 25, 2019 8:26 pm

I used to adore the film, and still enjoy it, but in recent years as other films have come along to really flesh out fuller characters over the course of a life, I’ve become more disengaged from Kane’s characterization. I realize that this is kind of the point, but I used to have more respect and sympathy for him throughout the film, and so while the whole film together is brilliant there are some parts that don’t move me as much as they once did. Where the film continues to succeed is in its summative power of innocence lost, and reducing the moral decay that comes with becoming broken by life down to its skin and bones, like peeling back an onion until there’s only a universal layer of harmless humanity ripe with possibilities for experience, moral growth, and identity shaping. To see fate take Kane down one forced path without his agency doesn’t stir resentment but does place him on a trajectory where he must contend with unique variables that muscle his ego and put him in a position to focus on excellence, selfish forms of achievement, rather than social or selflessly romantic areas that a position with less stressors may have supported. At least one of his relationships is loving, but he can’t sustain it. One must be left wondering if this is due to aspects of his conditioned self or his innate self, a question for all of us regardless of position or socioeconomic status, but all that matters is that it started with a universal beginning in untainted youth, a nostalgia for that time of feeling before life took its course on grating our existential wounds and caused the implementation of defense mechanisms in a shell that eventually would be gnawed down to the bone too.

The film continues to work for me in the way it humbly doesn’t even try to invest us in the span of this character’s life, but instead show the key points- or so we think- of resilience, passion, and withering, without ever getting to know the man. Welles seems to understand that it would be inauthentic to try to get to know a life through the medium and so he comically contextualizes Kane through the subjective eyes of others. The focus then becomes almost solely behavioral observations and omitting the emotional subjective experiences of Kane is itself an unreliable method that voids any claims in the absence of a significant portion of a human being: ones true convictions and morals outside of a behaviorist lens. Still, sometimes the outside perspective paints a truer portrait that we’d like to think, and while there are certainly some events and interactions that may evoke a few moral judgments through action, the collective accounts build to the joke of giving up hope at true knowledge by the reporter, because how can anyone really know anyone else? But we all started from the same place, with the same simple pleasures, fears, longings, and will likely all end the same way, like Kane. I can identify with this nostalgia, the pain of wrestling with one’s life on life’s terms, and the harm to oneself and others that has been left in the dust of any life lived long enough to know a few people and do a few things. But mostly I love this way of looking at biopics and the idea of taking an objective summarization of a life as impossible, with the exception of the humanist lens that all people have dignity and worth. The sled is that sobering reminder of this uniting experience crashing through the joke of a fragmented narrative, and it hits closer to home because of this juxtaposition.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#192 Post by domino harvey » Mon Nov 25, 2019 8:55 pm

I think that’s an interesting point about Kane being seen primarily from the outside and that still having a degree of truth. Shades of the truism “We judge ourselves on our intentions and others on their actions,” perhaps. No one character may know or understand the totality of Kane, but the potentially unwelcome truth is that so it goes for all of us and to all of us. As the audience member, we are privileged with the fullest portrait, but I’m not sure we know any more or less in a functional way about the man than those who had less info but knew enough. Which is why the revelation of “Rosebud” is a bit facile— yes, after all it turns out he longed for the youth long-passed and the opportunities not taken, but in the end all that counts is the man, not the boy, he was. CC my Godard quote about answers here too!

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#193 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Nov 25, 2019 9:58 pm

This was, perhaps, the first "great movie" (TM) I ever saw. I loved it then (despite being prepared to reject it BECAUSE of its advanced billing) and still love it (when I re-visit it -- maybe once a decade). It remains my favorite Welles movie overall, probably primarily due to the performances. (I no longer believe in "greatest films ever" -- just in "films I love a lot").

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#194 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Nov 25, 2019 10:28 pm

It's one of the many brilliances of Kane that it depicts human life without reducing it--even doing so by offering us a convenient reduction, one we find soon crumbles under scrutiny. Any single lense or framework used on Kane is inadequate to explain him; and yet taken all together, the multiple viewpoints the film offers don't prove any more adequate. Mostly they outline the complexity of the problem.

You grow to realize any account of Kane is an account of the teller's own life. The reflections on Kane are also self definitions, each person defining their life to the reporter through their take on Kane and what they understand to be his role in their life. For example, Jedediah's sense of his life having peaked early and fallen steadily ever since into disappointment is told through a narrative of The Fall of Kane, a bright, idealistic young man who disappointed and alienated his supporters by selling out his ideals and values...more or less. Kane evades even that narrative in the end, tho', Jedediah having to throw up his hands and admit defeat after recounting Kane's decision to finish the negative review. And Susan, ever the forward-moving girl with a survival instinct, tells hers as a seduction into and finally escape from control and stultification, where she finally learns to use her voice for her own purposes rather than someone else's. Her Kane is both charming seducer and rigid, looming jailer. In another movie, her walk down the hall away from Kane would be attended by soaring music and a crashing "The End" as she liberates herself. Far from Jedediah's bitterness, she's someone who rolls with the losses.

Even Kane's "Rosebud" is one more revealing but inadequate narrative of his life. He seems to be viewing his own life as a narrative of loss and emptiness that he sought but was never able to redress. Again, the brilliance in seeming to privilege Kane's story by making it the frame and the central mystery only for the answer to be equal parts illuminating and confounding--only one more story to add to the balance.

I don't know if it's one of my very favourite films, but, to throw in an unnecessary provocation: it's inestimably superior to How Green was My Valley. I'll take originality and invention, from form all the way to conceptual framework, over the traditional and the classical, no matter how well done they may be. It is astonishing for a film from this era to embrace ambiguity so thoroughly.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#195 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Nov 25, 2019 10:34 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 8:55 pm
As the audience member, we are privileged with the fullest portrait, but I’m not sure we know any more or less in a functional way about the man than those who had less info but knew enough. Which is why the revelation of “Rosebud” is a bit facile— yes, after all it turns out he longed for the youth long-passed and the opportunities not taken, but in the end all that counts is the man, not the boy, he was.
I think that's exactly right but I see that as a strength not a weakness. We don't know him at all, the composite we 'get' from the collective is itself a joke because it's not an accurate representation of who he is, just as we never really know what Rosebud actually means to him. The "revelation" of Rosebud is only facile if we choose to draw inference to the thoughts and feelings of Kane that we aren't afforded. We project our own nostalgia and longing for that innocence, the opportunity for a do-over, onto that symbol. It becomes a mirror for ourselves and then we choose a surface-level facile approach in its definition of simplifying while ignoring the complexities. All we really know is that Kane thought back to that moment of innocence, but the rest is a narrative we construct, just as we do with our own filtered nostalgia. It's specifically this incomprehensible significance placed on the object that makes the ending powerful, not the contrived simple reduction we place on it through fantastical estimation of a character's feelings and thoughts whom the entire narrative blocks us from truly knowing.

Edit: Sausage said it better, great post

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#196 Post by zedz » Mon Nov 25, 2019 10:49 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 8:55 pm
I think that’s an interesting point about Kane being seen primarily from the outside and that still having a degree of truth. Shades of the truism “We judge ourselves on our intentions and others on their actions,” perhaps. No one character may know or understand the totality of Kane, but the potentially unwelcome truth is that so it goes for all of us and to all of us. As the audience member, we are privileged with the fullest portrait, but I’m not sure we know any more or less in a functional way about the man than those who had less info but knew enough. Which is why the revelation of “Rosebud” is a bit facile— yes, after all it turns out he longed for the youth long-passed and the opportunities not taken, but in the end all that counts is the man, not the boy, he was. CC my Godard quote about answers here too!
I think the 'Rosebud' reveal is something Welles has both ways.* It's on one level too simplistic and pat (especially if you just read it as "innocence lost"), but it's actually woven through the screenplay in a very subtle way that insists we take it seriously. It - or the scene in which we first see it - is evoked in a number of the third person flashbacks by characters who know nothing about it (for example, when Kane meets Susan Alexander, he's on his way to see it). (I haven't watched the film for years, but as I recall, the last time I saw it I believe I noted that every single flashback - and even the newsreel - in some way refers to that scene, which can't be a coincidence.) And that initial 'Rosebud' scene is the primal scene of the character's development, as he (incorrectly) sees it as a rejection by his mother instead of what it really is (a sacrifice to save him from his father). The key flaw of the character is explained several times by different characters, in a wide enough variety of ways that Mankiewicz and Welles cover their tracks, but each partial explanation works together to form a prismatic whole: that original 'betrayal', in which he sees himself 'sold off' by his mother, renders him unable to relate to others in a non-transactional way. He can't not buy other people's affections, and he can't trust anybody else to like him, let alone love him, without some form of transactional value. Thus every human relationship is poisoned at its root by incipient mistrust.

I think it's a beautifully constructed and masterfully executed film, but it's never been a favourite of mine.

* And so that final scene is a conjuror's double-bluff reveal of the story's actual lynchpin, which Welles immediately tosses away, saying "only kidding."

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#197 Post by domino harvey » Mon Nov 25, 2019 11:27 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 10:28 pm

I don't know if it's one of my very favourite films, but, to throw in an unnecessary provocation: it's inestimably superior to How Green was My Valley. I'll take originality and invention, from form all the way to conceptual framework, over the traditional and the classical, no matter how well done they may be. It is astonishing for a film from this era to embrace ambiguity so thoroughly.
As much as this forum likes Ford, I imagine it's still not much of a provocation here! I was kind of stunned, though, when I read one of Bogdanovich's later film books and he argued that the superior film won Best Picture, especially considering his close friendship to Welles

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#198 Post by HinkyDinkyTruesmith » Mon Nov 25, 2019 11:57 pm

I prefer the Ford, think it greater, and consider Welles my favorite filmmaker. It seems the more you love Welles, the more you consider How Green Was My Valley superior to Citizen Kane.

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#199 Post by domino harvey » Tue Nov 26, 2019 12:00 am

I mean, I would have voted for Sgt York or Here Comes Mr Jordan over either, so it’s not even an issue for me!

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Re: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

#200 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Nov 26, 2019 12:15 am

HinkyDinkyTruesmith wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 11:57 pm
It seems the more you love Welles, the more you consider How Green Was My Valley superior to Citizen Kane.
I thought I loved Welles but now I’m not so sure since I can’t relate to that opinion

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