Watching 1941's CITIZEN KANE this morning on TCM, I think I might be finally understanding why it has long been considered the best (Hollywood) picture ever made...

But I'm appreciating it ONLY because I have spent the past year watching many other TCM films made prior to 1941... Lots of American B&W Westerns, dramas, comedies, horror pictures. Good ones. Thoroughly stupid ones.

It was about ten years ago that, while investigating several excellent art museums, I realized that, to fully appreciate why ANY work of art is hailed as something special/superior/singular/excellent, you simply have to understand the kind of "stuff" that was being produced in the decades just prior to the emergence of the artist's breakthrough works.

WHEN something was done is a big, big deal. I had to be middle-aged to understand that...

For example, I was born in 1963, and have grown up with the art of Andy Warhol. I've always thought it was really neat, you know, really vibrant and striking. But NEVER did I fully understand just how striking it was until I started looking at American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950's, with its warm, spiritual palette and dreamy, unstructured (seemingly) shapes...

Then came 1962, and the apoearance of Andy's MARILYN-- done in cold, stark, baboon-like, psychedelic shades of industrial yellow, sickening pink, metallic gold, Detroit aqua, cerise. What a brash, naked departure Pop Art was from AbEx! How I would have loved to have been some of the first New York eyes to view a Warhol in '62!

But I digress. I see now that Orson Welles's KANE was a masterwork because it utterly dispensed with the "rules" of narrative filmmaking... all the rules accumulated in the first 20 years or so of American narrative film which everyone assumed was the "right" way to tell a story... In KANE there is no difference, for example, between exposition, story, mood, movement and meaning: they're all done simultaneously, as if with one loaded brushstroke. And the sheer temporal pace of the film is twice as brisk as anything that preceded it... Welles apparently thought American audiences were smart enough and ready to grasp things, but quickly...

In some ways, I don't think Orson Welles's innovations were truly digested until the 1980's or so.

Absolutely agree. But what gets me MOST, about this film, is its message: 'everything ends up, in the fireplace. Including, that most dearly loved, little sled . . . rosebud.'

David, I think you are spot on, as usual. You absolutely need to understand the historic and artistic context of any work to truly "get" it. I also think the cinematography of Kane set it apart. The use of light and shadow is visually astounding.


But PS, while I consider Kane a worthy film, I do not consider it to be the best Hollywood film ever made....far from. It simply lacks the personal, emotional connection for me that really makes me live a film, if you will. But an important film it most certainly is.

You're right, Ruby-- KANE is a primarily intellectual exercise; a tour-de-force of Welles's masculine mind on fire. There's hardly opportunity, time in the picture to feel anything too deeply.

I must add naughtily: Joseph Cotten was really gorgeous in his day, wasn't he? With his tobacco-stained lips and eyes, pretty chin, patrician forehead and all that wavy golden hair. He was the "thinking woman's Hollywood hunk", I imagine, no?

Click to view attachmentrasputin, what about the very last image . . . the black smoke, billowing from Xanadu's chimney? To me, that said it all . . . minus sentiment, or soap bubbles, or cornball dialogue.