By Noah Moreno
*Adjective used is open to interpretation. Citizen Kane, released in 1941, is your average, run-of-the-mill, mystery drama film. Only, it is not average in the sense that you and I would agree on, because this film is generally regarded as the best of all time. Think about your favorite movie. Citizen Kane tops it. Think about some of the other greatest movies of all time, such as The Godfather or The Shawshank Redemption or even A Charlie Brown Christmas. Well, Citizen Kane trumps them all. At least, that’s according to general opinion. Sure, it was a pioneer for modern filmmaking, and a lot of what is shown in the film was never seen before by audiences. But is it truly worthy of the title of the greatest? Well, it depends on who you ask.
If you ask the critics, they will agree with what the title says, and they’ll remark that this is the greatest movie of all time. And honestly, it really was a good movie. I only have one person to blame for that opinion: Mrs. Robinson—not that song by Simon & Garfunkel but a teacher of mine from my senior year of high school. She taught a class that was all about analyzing films and what the directors meant by them. Even though we spent all of class time just watching movies, we were taught about how to discern motifs of films and what they mean. We were taught to consider why a certain camera angle was used. We were taught to contemplate the song in the background and what it symbolizes, and so on. Because of Mrs. Robinson, every movie I now watch makes me feel like a Roger Ebert reviewer. Thanks, Mrs. Robinson.
Okay, so this film was innovative… what else? As the title suggests, this movie was highly crucial to the study of communications and how we understand media even today. You don’t have to look twice to see what I mean. The setting, acting, sound usage, and lighting are phenomenal, and compared to other works that were being produced at that time, these elements just seem to be done better. This is surprising, especially when you learn that Citizen Kane was the first film 25-year-old Orson Welles ever directed.
As far as the plot goes, here is the gist. When world-famous newspaper publisher, Charles Foster Kane, suddenly dies, a reporter is tasked with figuring out what his last word, “rosebud,” means. The reporter goes to numerous people, including his estranged friend, his mistress, his general manager, and even the dairy man to learn the meaning behind “rosebud.” Through these interviews, the viewer is taken through a chronological telling of the rise and fall of Kane. Despite having an insane amount of wealth on his hands that he could do anything with, Kane decides he wants to run a newspaper, because he thinks it would be fun to do so. When he acquires the New York Inquirer, it becomes a paper for yellow journalism—something that mirrors the methods of publisher William Randolph Hearst. You should also probably know that he was not the most ethical guy in the biz.
In Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age, Bill Kovarik states, “Hearst had no ethical boundaries. He could be ruthless with people and dishonest in his approach to journalism, having reporters write fake news stories or plagiarize the competition when it suited him” (142). At this point, you might be wondering if the film was actually based on Hearst’s life. You would be correct. It is not an exact recount of his life, of course, but the entire premise of the rise and fall of Kane was heavily inspired by Hearst. Once Hearst got wind of this, he did his darndest to make sure it was never seen by the public eye, “Hearst banned his many newspapers from even mentioning Orson Welles’ filmmaking debut, and in many accounts, the magnate had offered a handsome bounty, worth more than the film’s budget, to purchase the negatives, simply for the pleasure of destroying it” (Semley 1). This incident ended up becoming a textbook example of the violation of freedom of speech and press, and it would also endanger the democracy of communications. Luckily, as you and I both might have guessed, the film regained critical acclaim when a French critic named André Bazin wrote an essay describing Citizen Kane as “a revolution in film language.”
In the essay, “The Technique of Citizen Kane,” Bazin actually starts off with the fact that a lot of what Welles was demonstrating with Citizen Kane had actually been done before by other filmmakers before him. What separated the art from the artist, however, was the fact that he knew how to lend meaning to his work. He could exercise the techniques that others already employed, but his ability to create a new interpretation had never been seen before. “The previous use of certain devices in order to deny their appropriation by Welles is to forget that the invention belongs to the man who can master it” (7). Even though it is not like he invented the close-up shot or the use of lighting, Welles gave his devices new meaning. This essay would ultimately be the snowball that broke the camel’s back, the opus that put Citizen Kane back in the public spotlight, the reason it did not end up fading in obscurity, living out its days as a niche “experimental film” with a small cult following. Once this was published, audiences started to see the movie as more than just a piece of entertainment; they acknowledged the message that was being portrayed. They recognized how it totally reshaped the way it was initially understood.
That brings us to today, where most film critics mutually agree that Citizen Kane is the most influential, ground-breaking movie of all time. Yes, it did reuse techniques from other films from before its time. Yes, it was unfairly silenced by critics and did not receive the acclamation that it initially should have received. What it didn’t do was give in to failure. This movie had potential, and people recognized it. Otherwise, Hearst and his crew would not have tried to cover it up. Otherwise, Bazin would have never written his essay. Otherwise, the film would have never gone on to be consistently voted number one in the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound decennial poll. Otherwise, it never would have topped AFI’s “100 Years…100 Movies” listing. Otherwise, it never would have been decided by many people to either be one of their favorite movies of all time, or just one of the greatest they think has ever been made.
Although, that is all subject to opinion.
Works Cited:
Bazin, André. The Technique of Citizen Kane, New York: Routledge, 1997.
Jackson, Tony. Writing, Orality, Cinema: The “story” of Citizen Kane, 2008,
pages.charlotte.edu/tony-jackson/wp-content/uploads/sites/304/2012/10/writing-orality-ci
nema-the-story-of-citizen-kane.pdf.
Kovarik, Bill. Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital
Age. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 26 July 2025.
Semley, John. How One of History’s Most Famous and Beloved Movies Was Almost Forgotten,
Welles, Orson. Citizen Kane. RKO Pictures, 1941.
The Judson Mosaic 