Best Movie Ever: Citizen Kane

The first sequence of Citizen Kane is a heavily art directed collection of special effects shots. At its close, we realize we've seen the passing of an old man reflected in a pastoral, wintery snow globe.

The man's dying word is "Rosebud," the MacGuffin that gets the story of Citizen Kane rolling. This moment has been parodied many times since, most notably on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons.

Know this: while the secret of "Rosebud" will eventually be revealed to Citizen Kane's audience (but not the characters) the "real Rosebud" was, according to Herman Mankiewicz via Roger Ebert, William Randolph Hearst's nickname for his mistress' most private of areas.

Twenty-Five year old Orson Welles won his Hollywood blank check by whipping up a cult of personality about his boundless innovation. On Broadway he staged an all African-American Macbeth and a Julius Caesar designed to mirror then-current European Fascism. More famously, he sent scores of New Jersey rubes into a panic, thinking aliens were invading during his radio broadcast of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

He didn’t disappoint with the opening of his first film.

After the arty "Rosebud" prelude, Citizen Kane bursts into an unprecedented false newsreel that clocks in at over ten minutes.

Mock documentary is commonplace today, but audiences at the time had no idea how to process this sequence. It is a mix of found footage, newly staged footage and, importantly, new footage scratched up and distressed to look like old footage. In these early days of Hollywood cinema, rare were examples of “meta” filming – taking the actual cinematic elements of a film and manipulating it to make it look like something other than a “picture show.”

Also: the “News on the March” sequence spoils the whole movie! In these ten minutes you basically learn about all the major story beats you are about to sit down and now watch. Crazy! But it works because it aids in making the story of Charles Foster Kane something of legend and myth.

Yes, yes, Orson Welles was a Shakespearean and a scholar, but he quickly fell in love with Hollywood's razzle-dazzle.

There are a great number of visual innovations in Citizen Kane, one of which is a frequently moving, even swooping camera.

The first CFK witness we interview is Susan Alexander Kane, now an Atlantic City nightclub singer. The camera begins on a brick wall poster, moves up to this iron and neon sign, goes through the sign (do you see the little break between the 'X' and 'A' in her name?) then gazes through a skylight and dissolves to the folks inside the club. Perfectly timed lightning flashes obscure what is a clever collection of miniatures.

Another of the big innovations in Citizen Kane is the use of deep focus. Welles demanded that all characters be in focus at all times, even though lenses (such as your eye) don't really do that. To compensate, unheard-of amounts of light were used on certain shots, like this one. In other compositions, matting was used to block off half the lens, then to shoot each half of the frame.

See, here's the deal. Absolutely nothing in Citizen Kane is there by accident.

Study it long enough and you'll discover that whenever Kane's character is on screen he is in the center - even if he is a small child at play.

And if you listen closely, even the background noise means something. Charlie's parents are about to sign his guardianship over so that he may come into his new fortune with an education and breeding. The boy is in the back, throwing snowballs, playing war and shouting "Union Forever!"  Is he just babbling civil war phrases, or commenting on the breakup of his family?

We'll let the White Stripes answer that.