Rewatching this. One thing I don't understand about it is the film purports to tell the rise and fall of Kane because he let go of his principles- becoming increasingly corrupt.
But the very first scene of him running the newspaper when he first gets it is him making up stories. He makes up a story about the woman being killed by her husband, and he also says "you provide the prose poems, I provide the war." That's a reference to Heart starting the Spanish-American war with fake news, but then how is that Kane losing his soul?
I don't know much about Hearst, but was he corrupt and dishonest from the start?
And if he and Kane were corrupt from the start, then what's the point of the movie? How does he lose his soul or his principles? Why do people love him at first and hate him at the end?
The movie is praised for it's style, not content.
>>69651700
Actually, it's the exact opposite. If you read any serious film criticism you'll see that Kane is considered the best film ever made not because it innovated any new techniques or styles, but because it synthesized them in a way no other film had before in order to tell the story visually and auditorally.
If you want to see a tech demo, go see Avatar. Kane is all about content- it's such an actor driven film. Welle's charismatic and comedic performance carries it.
Some of the scenes are shot very simply, in overs. shot-reverse-shot-reverse-shot, etc... That comes from Welle's experience in radio and the theatre. They are no less cinematic, though.
But you didn't answer my question.
>>69651429
It's not about any fall from grace or loss of principles, he wasn't principled to begin with. Just a man driven to fill the hole in himself with various activities, politics, newspaper, women. And how we piece together that man from post mortem accounts.
>>69651429
Actually, now that I think about it, isn't another parallel with Revenge Of The Sith. Plinkett says Anakin was portrayed as a good man who got corrupted by the Sith in the original films, but for some reason Lucas writes him as a bad apple from the start.
Why do Mankiewicz and Welles write Kane as a bad apple from the start?
>>69651936
But then what is Leland's beef with him? He was complicit in the dishonesty of Heart-style yellow journalism from the start but then he develops a hatred.
I guess the film is about a guy who goes from a grey morality to a black morality. Despite that, I always feel so sorry for Kane throughout the film, every time I see it I like Kane more than anybody else being mad at him and am on his side. I suppose Welles wanted to make is very morally ambiguous, nuanced, and complex, which it is. But basically he does go from bad to worse, like Hearst and his other models.
I guess my other theory is since the film is about how impenetrable and intractable understanding one human being's life is. That's why the first and last shots of the film are "no trespassing" We can never understand Kane or any one human, even if we do know what Rosebud is, we can only see our perspective on them- a glance, an interaction, we can't get inside someone's head. It's psychological Rashomon.
Sorry plebian, people are never 100% good or 100% evil. Maybe Harry Potter is more your speed
>>69652336
>fictional characters
>people
it's not a documentary m8
>>69652229
I appreciate your insight and opinions, and enthusiasm, I just don't see morals or any kind of moral struggle playing that big a role. It's a relatively clean, straight ahead picture, devoid of much pathos imo. Still brilliant for myriad reasons, but not terribly obtuse. Obviously that's my (simple) reading and likely dozens of books have proven me wrong, but I like how sort of... simple it is.
>>69652336
But if you read what I'm saying ITT, you'll see that that's exactly what I just wrote:
>>69652229
>>69652006
I guess it's also sort of like the scene where the guy calls him a fascist and then a guy calls him a communist and Hearst says "I have always been nothing but an American." He's more complex than the labels we give him, we all are.
And I suppose it also is a criticism of Hearst's shift from the far-left wing of the democratic to the far-right wing of the republican party. the line where Leland yells at him about Organized Labour. That's a rare political criticism from the mostly apolitical Welles - the people don't want their rights from Kane as a gift, they expect them as their rights. When his people ebcome organized labour, that's when Kane revolts. He wants love, not obligation- or at least that's Leland's biased perspective. Everyone's opinion is subjective.
>>69652445
Let me guess, you just took your first film class?
>>69651806
Didn't it invent/popularise the montage? I heard thatfrom Frank Sinatra Jr.
>>69652501
montage was theorized by Soviets and used first by them and DW Griffith in America. The first cut was used by T. Edison I believe tho
>>69652498
Let me guess, you're an asshole. No, don't know what that's supposed to mean. Had I been high on my first film class i'd be analyzing it to death instead of appreciating it for what it is having seen it a handful of times.
S. Eisenstein is the father of montage.
>>69652501
Montages were popular in hollywood long before that. The 1930s had lots of montages, check out the work of Vorkapich, senpai. I'll link u one if I find it.
>>69652445
I couldn't disagree more. I think the entire movie is about the obtuseness of understanding a human being. Remember the last lines of the picture:
>Charles Foster Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get or lost. No, I don't think it explains anything. I don't think any word explains a man's life. No - I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle - a missing piece.
I also think Welles explicitly hated Hearst and wanted to portray him as a hypocrite from the start- which explains my opening conundrum. The contradiction is the point.
Ok, here's a montahe Vorkapich did that Welles directly quoted in Citizen Kane (Kane itself is a film that borrowed from a lot that came before it, a sort of cinematic smorgasbord of contradictory techniques.)
https://vimeo.com/12409293
I saw this once on TCM and it came out of nowhere- here was a fun convention romantic film and all of a sudden it turned into something cinematic and artsy-fartsy and wonderful.
also, lubitsch did amazing montages going back to the 1920s.
>>69652787
>>69652614
montage means two things- cutting thoery, which is what the soviets did, and a montage meaning a sequence that shows the passage of time visually using fast cuts, which is what frankie jr must have meant.
