Citizen Kane is a film produced in 1941 and written, directed, and produced by Orson Welles who also starred in it as the role of the main character. Not only that, but the movie was Welles’s first feature film! Citizen Kane is considered by many critics and fans as the greatest film ever made. The movie is ranked 93rd top rated movie on IMDB and 4th on Rotten Tomatoes with a 100% positive reviews from critics. The main question is: why is citizen Kane that important? And why film critics consider it a revolutionary film? The answer will concern the narrative of the film and how the story was told. Before I dive into the answers, let’s quickly remember the movie.
Citizen Kane Summary
The movie starts with an old man on his dying bed. In the first scene the man says the word: “Rosebud” before he dies. And the journey begins in a search for the mystery of the meaning of Rosebub. After that it is revealed that this old man is actually the wealthy newspaper publisher Charles Kane. The audience are introduced to a documentary about the life of Charles Kane. The producer of this showreel is unsatisfied by the result because he thinks that it does not reflect the real character of Kane, so he send a reporter to search for the meaning of Kane’s last word. The reporter starts his investigation and interviews different people who were close to Kane in an attempt to find the meaning of Rosebub. The movie tells us the story of Kane from his childhood until he died through the interviews of his associates and through flashbacks.
Why is Citizen Kane and Important Movie?
Citizen Kane was considered as a turning point towards a new form of narrative cinema where the movie defied the conventions of the classical movie narrative. The story of the film is told from the perspective of six narrators by a series of flashbacks. This way of storytelling added complexity and ambiguity to the film narrative. Another modification in the typical narrative is that the film presented the ending of Kane since the beginning, the viewer knows that Kane will be successful and rich and that he will die at an old age. The enjoyment that the audience get from the narrative is no longer through suspense about what will happen to the character, but rather from understanding why his life turned out the way it did. In Citizen Kane, the spectator needs to put together bits and pieces presented by the six different narrators in order to get a hold on the whole narrative.
The ending: What is Rosebud?
In the end of the movie, the characters did not succeed in knowing the significance of the word “Rosebud”, but we are given an additional shot that Rosebud was engraved on a sled that belonged to the young Kane before he was taken from his parents. So, before the last shot the film ends with an open ending. But the final shot introduced the meaning of Rosebud to the audience and not to the characters. By that the movie has 2 endings. This is a new technique which adds to importance of Citizen Kane in film history.
