Citizen Kane

A confession. I fell asleep during this movie the first time I saw it. Which is very embarassing, as you might imagine. (Uh, it lulled me to sleep. Yeah, that's right. Lulled.) That was about 10 years ago, so maybe we can chalk that up to inexperience. Now that I've seen it again, I'm bowled over. How can anyone not be bowled over by this film? Because the genius of Orson Welles is not necessarily in his direction, acting, writing or cinematographic choices. It's in the mix of all of those. In one scene, he places his character in a room with two other men. In the background is a bank of windows. Which you completely ignore until his character walks away from the camera towards the windows, turns around, speaks, and walks back. You're then forced to pay attention to the scene's physical space and depth, while at the same time his character utters the most important line of the scene after he turns around. So, the illusion of a BIG room is mirrored in the BIG words said at that point. For me, it's the close collaboration between the production design, cinematography and writing that makes the film what it is: a complete whole, but so multi-layered that you could watch it many times, focusing only on one layer at a time. I will hold onto this rented DVD a little while longer because it contains two commentary tracks, one by Peter Bogdanovich (a director and film historian) and one by Roger Ebert. I didn't want to wait to review the film, though. I thought a more off-the-cuff review without a ton of cinephilic commentary banging around in my head would be more worthwhile.

year: 1941
length: 119 min.
rating: 4.0
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033467/combined