What is the significance of citizen kane

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. The greatest American films. Share using Email. Nicholas Barber explains. The script bursts with quotable one-liners and exchanges. Around the BBC. There, Kane came in ninth place, one of only three sound films to place in the Top Along the way, it would top lots of other surveys as well.

In some senses, the debate over who actually wrote Citizen Kane slips in between these two extremes. By bringing the focus back to Mankiewicz, and suggesting that he was primarily responsible both for the script and for what made Kane so special, Kael perhaps hoped to do away with the idea of the all-powerful auteur once and for all. He was a regular presence on radio, and later, on TV. Additionally, many of us consider later Welles titles like The Trial and F for Fake to be equal to, or greater than, Kane.

Thus, the more films Welles made, the more the legend of Citizen Kane grew. And the further Hollywood itself moved away from the heydays of the studio system, the more Citizen Kane seemed to shine like a distant city on a long-ago hill. The poll has grown over the years, becoming more international and more diverse, and more titles are now available to us than have ever been before in the history of humankind. The masterful Vertigo , savaged by critics upon its release in , had slowly clawed its way up the list over the years.

It was a runner-up in , eighth place in , fourth in , and second in , just five points behind Kane. But one thing seems sure. The idea of a consensus pick, and for that matter the need for any kind of consensus, is a thing of the past. Then the major Hollywood studios gave him the chance to direct big-budget pictures, over which he gained more and more artistic control until he made his culminating mature masterpiece: Citizen Kane , the story of the doomed press baron Charlie Kane — played by Welles himself, partly based on WR Hearst — and told in a dazzling series of fragments, shards, jigsaw pieces and reflected images.

Poor, poor Orson Welles : repeatedly talked about as a tragic disappointment, his achievements somehow held against him, as if he had culpably outlived his own genius. After all, he only created arguably the greatest Hollywood movie in history, only directed a string of brilliant films, only won the top prize at Cannes, only produced some of the most groundbreaking theatre on Broadway, only reinvented the mass medium of radio, and in his political speeches, only energised the progressive and anti-racist movement in postwar America.

Perhaps it is the fault of Citizen Kane itself, that mysterious, almost Elizabethan fable of kingship, which so seductively posits the coexistence of greatness and failure. Martin Scorsese , in his brilliant commentary on the film, said that cinema normally generates empathy for its heroes, but the enigma of Kane frustrates this process.

It is the same with cinema: however immersive, however sensual, however stunningly effective at igniting almost childlike sympathy and love, cinema withholds the inner life of its human characters, while exposing the externals: the faces, the bodies, the buildings, the streetscapes, the sunsets.

The story of Charles Foster Kane is a troubled one: the headstrong newspaper proprietor who makes a brilliant marriage to the niece of the US president and takes a principled democratic stand for the little guy against monopoly capitalism, but only to reinforce his own prerogatives, and only in an attempt to pre-empt the growth of trade unionism. Diminished by the Wall Street crash and personal catastrophe, Kane becomes a pro-appeasement isolationist, complacently unconcerned about European fascism, though in his youth cheerfully willing to indulge the idea of a short circulation-boosting war with Spain.

He dies in the present day, in — Citizen Kane was released seven months before Pearl Harbor. For any journalist, Citizen Kane is a glorious, subversive, pessimistic film. We all know what newspaper journalists are supposed to be like in the movies: funny, smart, wisecracking, likable heroes.

I recently watched it yet again in a film class. At first I was a little aggravated about it. However, about 5 minutes into the film these thoughts stopped.

Charles Foster Kane grows up poor, living in a simple rural world. He is then given wealth and opportunity, for a price: the loss of his mother and father. This scene alone both symbolizes and foreshadows the rest of the Kane story, right down to the visuals, Welles employing a large depth of field to illustrate the growing distance between son and parents. He is young, handsome and savvy.