Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film directed by, produced by, and starring Orson Welles. Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote the screenplay. Citizen Kane is frequently cited as the greatest film ever made.The Sight & Sound Poll of the Greatest Films of All Time
Citizen Kane was the only film made under Welles's original contract with RKO Pictures, which gave him complete creative control. Welles's new business manager and attorney permitted the contract to lapse. In July 1941, Welles reluctantly signed a new and less favorable deal with RKO under which he produced and directed The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), produced Journey into Fear (1943), and began It's All True, a film he agreed to do without payment. In the new contract Welles was an employee of the studio and lost the right to final cut, which later allowed RKO to modify and re-cut The Magnificent Ambersons over his objections. In June 1942, Schaefer resigned the presidency of RKO Pictures and Welles's contract was terminated by his successor.
The European release of Citizen Kane was delayed until after World War II, premiering in Paris in 1946. Initial reception by French critics was influenced by negative views from Jean-Paul Sartre and Georges Sadoul, who criticized Hollywood's cultural sophistication and the film's nostalgic use of flashbacks. However, critic André Bazin delivered a transformative speech in 1946 that shifted public opinion. Bazin praised the film for its innovative use of mise-en-scène and deep focus cinematography, advocating for a filmic realism that allows audiences to engage more actively with the narrative. Bazin's essays, especially "The Technique of Citizen Kane," argued that the film revolutionized film language and aesthetics.
In the United States, the film was initially neglected until it began appearing on television in the 1950s and was later re-released in theaters. American film critic Andrew Sarris helped revive its reputation, describing it as a profoundly influential American film. Over the decades, Citizen Kane has consistently ranked highly in critical surveys and polls and is often cited as the greatest film ever made.
Release in Europe During World War II, Citizen Kane was not seen in most European countries. It was shown in France for the first time on July 10, 1946, at the Marbeuf theater in Paris. Initially most French film critics were influenced by the negative reviews of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945 and Georges Sadoul in 1946. At that time many French intellectuals and filmmakers shared Sartre's negative opinion that Hollywood filmmakers were uncultured. Sartre criticized the film's flashbacks for its nostalgic and romantic preoccupation with the past instead of the realities of the present and said that "the whole film is based on a misconception of what cinema is all about. The film is in the past tense, whereas we all know that cinema has got to be in the present tense."
André Bazin, a then little-known film critic working for Sartre's Les Temps modernes, was asked to give an impromptu speech about the film after a screening at the Colisée Theatre in the autumn of 1946 and changed the opinion of much of the audience. This speech led to Bazin's 1947 article "The Technique of Citizen Kane", which directly influenced public opinion about the film. Carringer wrote that Bazin was "the one who did the most to enhance the film's reputation." Both Bazin's critique of the film and his theories about cinema itself centered around his strong belief in mise-en-scène. These theories were diametrically opposed to both the popular Soviet montage theory and the politically Marxist and anti-Hollywood beliefs of most French film critics at that time. Bazin believed that a film should depict reality without the filmmaker imposing their "will" on the spectator, which the Soviet theory supported. Bazin wrote that Citizen Kanes mise-en-scène created a "new conception of filmmaking" and that the freedom given to the audience from the deep focus shots was innovative by changing the entire concept of the cinematic image. Bazin wrote extensively about the mise-en-scène in the scene where Susan Alexander attempts suicide, which was one long take while other films would have used four or five shots in the scene. Bazin wrote that the film's mise-en-scène "forces the spectator to participate in the meaning of the film" and creates "a psychological realism which brings the spectator back to the real conditions of perception."
In his 1950 essay "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema", Bazin placed Citizen Kane center stage as a work which ushered in a new period in cinema. One of the first critics to defend motion pictures as being on the same artistic level as literature or painting, Bazin often used the film as an example of cinema as an art form and wrote that "Welles has given the cinema a theoretical restoration. He has enriched his filmic repertory with new or forgotten effects that, in today's artistic context, take on a significance we didn't know they could have." Bazin also compared the film to Roberto Rossellini's Paisan for having "the same aesthetic concept of realism" and to the films of William Wyler shot by Toland (such as The Little Foxes and The Best Years of Our Lives), all of which used deep focus cinematography that Bazin called "a dialectical step forward in film language."
Bazin's praise of the film went beyond film theory and reflected his own philosophy towards life itself. His metaphysical interpretations about the film reflected humankind's place in the universe. Bazin believed that the film examined one person's identity and search for meaning. It portrayed the world as ambiguous and full of contradictions, whereas films up until then simply portrayed people's actions and motivations. Bazin's biographer Dudley Andrew wrote that:
The world of Citizen Kane, that mysterious, dark, and infinitely deep world of space and memory where voices trail off into distant echoes and where meaning dissolves into interpretation, seemed to Bazin to mark the starting point from which all of us try to construct provisionally the sense of our lives.
Bazin went on to co-found Cahiers du cinéma, whose contributors (including future film directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard) also praised the film. The popularity of Truffaut's auteur theory helped the film's and Welles's reputation.
Re-evaluation By 1942 Citizen Kane had run its course theatrically and, apart from a few showings at big city arthouse cinemas, it largely vanished and both the film's and Welles's reputation fell among American critics. In 1949 critic Richard Griffith in his overview of cinema, The Film Till Now, dismissed Citizen Kane as "... tinpot if not crackpot Freud."
In the United States, it was neglected and forgotten until its revival on television in the mid-to-late 1950s. Three key events in 1956 led to its re-evaluation in the United States: first, RKO was one of the first studios to sell its library to television, and early that year Citizen Kane started to appear on television; second, the film was re-released theatrically to coincide with Welles's return to the New York stage, where he played Shakespeare King Lear; and third, American film critic Andrew Sarris wrote "Citizen Kane: The American Baroque" for Film Culture, and described it as "the great American film" and "the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since The Birth of a Nation." Carringer considers Sarris's essay as the most important influence on the film's reputation in the US.
During Expo 58, a poll of over 100 film historians named Kane one of the top ten greatest films ever made (the group gave first-place honors to Battleship Potemkin). When a group of young film directors announced their vote for the top six, they were booed for not including the film.
In the decades since, its critical status as one of the greatest films ever made has grown, with numerous essays and books on it including Peter Cowie's The Cinema of Orson Welles, Ronald Gottesman's Focus on Citizen Kane, a collection of significant reviews and background pieces, and most notably Kael's essay, "Raising Kane", which promoted the value of the film to a much wider audience than it had reached before. Despite its criticism of Welles, it further popularized the notion of Citizen Kane as the great American film. The rise of art house and film society circuits also aided in the film's rediscovery. David Thomson said that the film 'grows with every year as America comes to resemble it."
The British magazine Sight & Sound has produced a Top Ten list surveying film critics every decade since 1952, and is regarded as one of the most respected barometers of critical taste. Citizen Kane was a runner up to the top 10 in its 1952 poll but was voted as the greatest film ever made in its 1962 poll, retaining the top spot in every subsequent poll until 2012, when Vertigo displaced it.
The film has also ranked number one in the following film "best of" lists: Julio Castedo's The 100 Best Films of the Century, Cahiers du cinéma's 100 films pour une cinémathèque idéale, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, Time Out magazine's Top 100 Films (Centenary), The Village Voices 100 Greatest Films, and The Royal Belgian Film Archive's Most Important and Misappreciated American Films.
Roger Ebert called Citizen Kane the greatest film ever made: "But people don't always ask about the greatest film. They ask, 'What's your favorite movie?' Again, I always answer with Citizen Kane."
In 1998, Time Out conducted a reader's poll and Citizen Kane was voted 3rd best film of all time. On February 18, 1999, the United States Postal Service honored Citizen Kane by including it in its Celebrate the Century series. The film was honored again on February 25, 2003, in a series of U.S. postage stamps marking the 75th anniversary of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Art director Perry Ferguson represents the behind-the-scenes craftsmen of filmmaking in the series; he is depicted completing a sketch for Citizen Kane.
Citizen Kane was ranked number one in the American Film Institute's polls of film industry artists and leaders in 1998 and 2007. "Rosebud" was chosen as the 17th most memorable movie quotation in a 2005 AFI poll. The film's score was one of 250 nominees for the top 25 film scores in American cinema in another 2005 AFI poll. In 2005 the film was included on Times All-Time 100 best movies list.
In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild published a list of the 75 best-edited films of all time based on a survey of its membership. Citizen Kane was listed second. In 2015, Citizen Kane ranked 1st on BBC's "100 Greatest American Films" list, voted on by film critics from around the world.
Influence Citizen Kane has been called the most influential film of all time. Richard Corliss has asserted that Jules Dassin's 1941 film The Tell-Tale Heart was the first example of its influence and the first pop culture reference to the film occurred later in 1941 when the spoof comedy Hellzapoppin' featured a "Rosebud" sled. The film's cinematography was almost immediately influential and in 1942 American Cinematographer wrote "without a doubt the most immediately noticeable trend in cinematography methods during the year was the trend toward crisper definition and increased depth of field."