Citizen Kane: Is It Still Significant - Essay Example

Citizen Kane: Is it Still Significant? of the Visual Arts and Film Studies of the Concerned March 12, Citizen Kane: Is it Still Significant? There is no denying the fact that there tend to be a plethora of lists affiliated to the movies that are considered to be the best movies ever made. Each of the movies comprising such lists does tend to have attributes, features and characteristics that titillate and grasp the audience interest in its own unique way. Some movies command audience attention by the fact that they tend to present the worlds that hitherto remained unknown to the audience in a manner that is powerful and gripping. There are other movies that happen to wrench the audience attention by playing on the human emotions of pity and fear or by delicately presenting the essential human feelings like love and hatred, courage and cowardice, loyalty and falsity in a manner that happen to be thought provoking and moving. Yet, the ultimate litmus test for any movie that accrues to itself the prerogative of being the best is its eventual capacity to grab the essential human interest and attention. In that sense, many critics do consider Citizen Kane to be the best movie ever made owing to a range of significant reasons. In a factual context, Citizen Kane is indeed the best movie made ever owing to the superiority of its story and script, its cinematography that indeed transcended the cinematic constraints of its time and its gripping and engrossing narrative technique. Though the very first frame in the movie tends to facilitate an intimate view of Kane, extending a vivid close up of his struggling and quivering lips as he utters his enigmatic last words “rosebud”, yet they do succeed in leavening the audience interest regarding this impressive character, by straightaway presenting it as somebody, whose travails and life story do deserve attention. The amazing thing is that the movie shows Kane in first person at the beginning only and the audience watch Kane in the rest of the movie through the eyes of other people associated with Kane, thereby attributing to the movie a collage like appeal that indeed mages to keep the audience riveted to the storyline till the very end. Once the audiences are made to share an innate intimacy with the character of Kane in the very first scene that he is abruptly made to vanish, thereby managing to attribute to the audiences a reporter like attention, who keep on looking for Kane through the shadows, trying to make a viable sense and meaning out of Kane’s life, by struggling to align the fragments rendered by other characters in a gripping yearning to put together the emotive jigsaw puzzle that the overall life of Kane tended to signify. Yet, the amazing attribute that extends to Citizen Kane an elusive appeal is the manner in which the storyline makes the audience miss the culminating aspects of this puzzle, thereby rendering to the plot a tragic appeal and interest (Stewart, 2007, p. 132). The other big factor that not only makes Citizen Kane the best movie ever is its expansive format that almost accrues within its scope all the things that the audience would like to converse about after watching a great movie that are greed, idealism, love, war, animation, tranquility, old age, youth, jealousy and sacrifice (Gillett, 2008, p. 20). The overall canvass of the movie elaborates on the journey of a character whose life enveloped so much, from childhood to demise, in a manner that is indeed delectable and smooth and seldom seems rushed and sketchy. The storyline is indeed well knit and compact, irrespective of the fact that the overall plot relies on a juxtaposition of the experiences of an array of characters touching Kane’s eventful life (Gillett, 2008). The hallmarks in Kane’s life, are they his humble childhood, his lonely and well endowed youth, his nascent integrity and eventual corruption, his episodic love affairs with women, his rise to fame and affluence and the eventual fall that all these things finally and collectively lead to, though happen to be so very human and relatable, yet carry within themselves an essentially epic appeal that happens to be timeless and eternal. The film quintessentially relies for its timeless appeal and craze on a favorable compilation and fusion of elements like joy, energy, visual appeal, a tightly knit plot, an attention accruing storyline, evocative dialogues, commensurately appealing dance and music, and all the basic accoutrements of visual art that go into the compilation of a timeless piece of cinematic art. It does need to be mentioned that in Citizen Kane Orson Welles did manage to contrive an impressive blending of the sound with the visual elements in the movie to accentuate and heighten the overall audience experience (Gillett, 2008). Simply speaking, the greatness and relevance of Citizen Kane do not rely on the finesse of some definitive singularities, but rather on the juxtaposition, contrast and blending of an array of cinematic elements that go into the contriving of a timeless work of art. The storyline of Citizen Kane accrues within its ambit almost everything that a person could comes across or cares about in one’s life. Yet, the thing about Citizen Kane that still manages to get a hold of the audiences’ attention even today, is the fact that the storyline never tries to extend definitive answers regarding any facet of the human life, thereby imbuing the overall plot with a sense of elusiveness and mystery that happen to be the attributes of a timeless work of art. The narrative technique resorted to be the movie nudges the audience to think about the varied aspects of their life in a way that they had never tried before, rather than facilitating simplistic and immature solutions, which make a work of art fall apart and scatter over time. The peculiarity of the narrative technique in the movie is that it rather than compiling a standardized audience experience, rather facilitates a uniquely divergent and diverse cinematic influence, thereby making every audience develop a sense of the movie that is unique, different and still relevant and valid. The narrative technique exploited by the movie is indeed interesting and gripping. Though the newsreel sequence imminent in the plot makes the audience conversant with the varied facets of Kane’s life in a linked and sequential manner, thereby endowing the narrative with a sense of linear and predictable progression, but the advent of intermittent flashbacks in the narrative nudge the audience to explore the varied aspects of Kane’s life that are randomly left untouched and elusive (Gillett, 2008). The very simple yet amazing fact that Citizen Kane presents to the audience is the realization that the life of a single person never happens to be so simple as to be confined to a collection of facile conclusions and solutions. It is the expansiveness and unpredictability of the overall plot that make the movie timeless and eternal. The other aspect that makes Citizen Kane a trend setter and a classic is its innovative cinematography. The movie tends to exploit the technique of deep focus in an immaculate manner to give way to elaborate frames that suitably tag with the overall expansiveness of the plot and storyline (Hayward, 2000, p. 81). Right from the start to the climax everything in the frames comes out as being clearly visible, whether it constituted an aspect of the background or the foreground, thereby presenting every cinematic detail in the movie as being crystal clear and vividly focused. The whole idea is to present the varied facets of Kane’s life in an elaborate and expansive manner, thereby bringing into focus and accentuating the lacunas marking Kane’s life. The whole idea is to make the viewers see the dearth hiding amidst the abundance. Throughout the movie the camera is immaculately use to poke around varied aspects of the foreground and the background, thereby unraveling before the audience the hidden and unsavory aspects of Kane’s life (Hayward, 2000). For instance in the opening scene, the camera gradually narrows down its focus to pick “no trespassing” sign at Kane’s estate, thereby making the audience feel that they are being made to eavesdrop into the hidden and intimate facets of Kane’s life, bringing in an element of secrecy and thrill. This technique is adroitly used time and again in the movie. The whole idea is to make the audience pick on the minutiae of Kane’s life, so as to help them contrive an overall image that is larger than life and gripping. Thereby, Citizen Kane is indeed one of the best ever movies because it carries an appeal that transcends all the attempts to simplify and narrow the meaning that the movie happens to convey to the audience. The plot is well knit and the narrative technique resorted to be the movie is attention grabbing and compact. The timeless appeal of the movie gets further accentuated by the apt cinematography that manages to weave varied scattered aspects of the movie into a well woven and compact whole. Reference List Gillett, P. (2008). Movie Greats. New York: Berg. Hayward, S. (2000). Cinema Studies. London: Routledge. Stewart, G. (2007). Framed Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Read More