Citizen Kane (Dir Orson Welles, 2h, 1941)

You cannot talk about cinema as a medium without Citizen Kane and Orson Welles. Regularly topping lists of the greatest films ever made, Kane slowly unravels the story of deceased media mogul Charles Foster Kane (Welles), based, in thinly veiled brushstrokes on William Randolph Hurst, who successfully limited the film's release, from his childhood in Colorado, to his career, first running a newspaper then for office, before, bit by bit, he drives away those closest to him, dying alone in one of cinema's great openings. Kane, though, is more than simply a film about power and its corrupting influence, but one of the most visually and technically innovative films in cinema, twinning Welles' theatrical background, from low angles to the makeup used to age the 25 year old Welles into an old man, to editing techniques, montage and technical leap forwards in sound and music.

This is, of course, to say nothing of the influence Kane has on modern culture as a whole, and echoes of it can be seen everywhere from Kurosawa's Rashomon in its complex, multi-narrator tale, and Lean's Lawrence of Arabia in its structure, to its colossal impact over American culture in general, from innumerable references in the Simpsons, from its villainous billionaire, Charles Montgomery Burns outwards, to films which it shares its cinematic hinterland of portraits of remote American power, from There Will Be Blood to The Godfather. There are, 79 years on, few films reach the lofty ambitions that Welles set, technically and dramatically.

At the centre of Kane, undeniably, is Welles, both as director and actor; the atmospheric introduction of Xanadu, Kane's colossal, unfinished mansion, is a perfect piece of cinema, a potent mix of German Expressionism and impressive scope, giving way, through a series of fades, to Kane's bedroom, and his death. And it is one of the most cinematically evocative deaths in cinema, the whisper of "rosebud" , the oft-homaged fall of the snowglobe that sets the entire film's plot in motion as William Allan's Thompson sets out to interview Kane's surviving associates to find out who-or what-Rosebud could be.

And then Welles changes tack-even today, the sudden change from typically dramatic film to sudden hagiography in the form of a newsreel "News on the March" essentially laying out the official version of Kane's biography, as he goes from the child of suddenly wealthy landowners to the ward of banker Thatcher, to newspaper man, to would-be politician, to socialite, political force, and finally a lonely old man in his unfinished, if spectacular home. And it is from this mask that the real Charles Foster Kane, over the rest of the film begins to emerge. The newsreel is revealed, in a shot that features almost its entire cast in the shadows-a typically Wellesian trick, and part of the film that was shot unofficially, before RKO officially launched the picture-to be shown to a group, including Thompson.

He begins with Kane's second wife, the now destitute Susan Alexander Kane, and it is here that Welles really begins, in front and behind the camera, to innovate-the introduction of Susan, in a rainy Atlantic City, starts with a still remarkably innovative shot, crane shot giving way, through smartly hidden dissolve, to an interior shot of the bar she now works in. And it is here that Kane shows perhaps its most unexpected hand-the dialogue, nearly eight decades on, feels just as modern, as its cinematography, and one cannot help but come away from Kane struck by how fresh, especially compared to other films of the period, it is. Susan is uncooperative and the film turns to the diary of Thatcher, to show Kane as a young man.

The cabin sequence, and indeed those that follow it as Thatcher recalls his history with the young Charles Foster Kane are some of the film's best. From the young Charles playing in the snow, alongside the sled that, unnoticed by all, eventually proves to be the answer to the film's unanswered question, to the shot that holds, almost uncomfortably, on the adults discussing his fate as the oblivious boy plays in the background, Welles marries visual and narrative seamlessly. When the camera exits the cabin through its walls, to once again focus on Kane-a cinematic trick that Welles returns to again and again, to match his unreliable narrators with the omniscient eye of the camera, it is to show Charles' separation from his family, and, in one of the film's single most iconic shots, snow piling up upon the discarded sled. It is, wordlessly, the loss of innocence for Kane, the moment where he is ripped away from his beloved mother, that, even as an old man, he tries, vainly, to regain.

And it is here that the film's chief motif comes into focus-the role of power, and its corrupting influence, the force that slowly destroys every relationship Kane has, from his wives to his colleagues to his mentors. Taking control of the Inquirer, a small New York newspaper, Kane proceeds to build a newspaper empire, that openly attacks his former guardian, until, in what proves to be the first in a number of setbacks, he is forced to sell a controlling stake back to Thatcher, thus bringing his campaign of headlines to an end. From the memoirs of Thatcher, and the stuffy officious library that contains them, Thompson turns to Bernstein, Kane's business manager, who begins to unravel Kane's time at the Inquirer.

It is here, undeniably, that the film comes closest-at points uncomfortably close-to its obvious basis, that of William Randolph Hurst, from an almost verbatim paraphrase of the infamous Hurst quote "you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war", as Kane essentially manufactures the Spanish-American war, to the general outline of Hurst's life, arguably led to the film's downfall, at least commercially, with the powerful Hurst not only refusing to review the film in any of his papers, but attempting to stop the film's release, and eventually limiting screenings from his pressure upon the cinema chains when this proved unsuccessful. Though, nearly 80 years on it is almost impossible to think of Kane as anything but a resounding success-indeed, Kane's re-releases have finally taken the film;s box-office takings over budget, though the film's success and longevity lies, in part, due to 1950s television showings, the film's limited success on its initial release arguably fatally damaged Welles' career, which never truly recovered.

Moreover, it is the scenes at the Inquirer that arguably begin to show Welles' cinematic innovations most notably-the fact, for example, the set has ceilings, may seem obvious to today's viewers, but the use of low angles, at some points cutting into floors, or otherwise dropping the camera to much lower than other films of the time in the States, made them a necessity. Much of this innovation, must of course, be credited to its cinematographer, Gregg Toland, a figure so vital to the production that Welles credited him alongside himself on the film's title cards. Together with deep focus-in which, in comparison to previous films, the camera focuses on objects in the foreground and the background equally, showing an entire scene in the same level of detail, it is Toland's low shots, often giving Kane and other figures a towering sense across the screen.

The film then cuts to Kane's estranged best friend, Leland, who chronicles the slow crumble of Kane's first marriage to the niece of the president, and it is here that the film's visual effects tour-de-force appears, with the breakfast scene, where, over two minutes, through the film's visual effects maestro, Maurice Seiderman, Kane ages twelve years, and his relationship with his wife, Emily slowly disintegrates. From here, Kane turns to politics, and here the film is at its most grandiose, the camera shooting Kane from below, as a poster of his own face looms in the background-it is a portrait of power seen everywhere from The Simpsons, in an episode that effectively reconstructs the entire political arc of Kane's life, to Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs. There is, of course, an undeniable sense of scale, and a faintly sinister echo of the cinematography of Leni Reifenstall in the rally. It is an emotional highpoint that the film never returns to for Kane, and the only other crowd scene in the film, at the opera he essentially creates for his second wife, he cuts a lonely, and almost dejected figure, his hollow claps echoing around an otherwise silent opera house.

It is at this point, with the unreliable narration of the three men that knew Kane best that the film returns to Susan, and it is arguably here that Kane's world begins to crumble-as his second wife, even more than Emily, Susan is essentially a tool for Kane, as he attempts to launch her singing career, despite her lack of talent. Here, Kane's dark side is on full display, as he fires Leland, whilst still finishing his review, and it is the extreme low shot, where Kane's figure towers into frame, and the composited shot of Kane writing this review, whilst Leland leaves in the background that fully depicts the widening void between the two men who have known each other almost their entire lives. This is used again to great effect as Kane bursts into his wife's room to find Susan having attempted suicide, the bottle and spoon looming in the foreground-Kane is a film of ever-widening gaps at this point, wih the remaining sequences involving Kane and Susan either physically, or cinematographically distancing them, so that they rarely appear in the same shot.

Now visually aged, again thanks to Seiderman, Kane is an ailing man, and it is here, amongst the hollowness of Xanadu, that Welles produces his final great moment as Kane, the destruction, following the departure of Susan, of her entire room, a spectacularly verité sequence in which Kane throws, tears, and trashes the room apart. And then, in arguably the film's single greatest shot, he stops, snow globe in hand, and utters, for the first time..."rosebud". It is a stunning moment, the film suddenly jolting from chaos to the sudden realisation of what Kane has lost as a man, that loss of innocence encapsulated in a single object. He walks away, cradling the snowglobe, and the film returns to Thompson and his associates in the vast, almost crypt-like Xanadu, seemingly no clearer to what "rosebud" could have been.

And it is here that the film pulls its final masterstroke. Panning over the innumerable boxes and collections of things that Kane has accumulated with his wealth and power, we arrive at a furnace where the detritus of Kane's life is being burnt. The camera holds as a new object, a sled, is brought into shot, dumped into the furnace, and, as the fire begins to consume it, the name, of course, appears. Rosebud. The camera pulls out, exits Xanadu, and we see, in ever longer shots, the smoke rising over the house. Charles Foster Kane's one happy memory, one moment of a childhood foreclosed by Thatcher and his parents, his innocence, personified, becomes nothing more than ash and smoke, just as Kane himself becomes nothing more than a memory

There are few films like Citizen Kane. It tackles everything from a portrait of power to an unflattering mirror of one of the most powerful men alive, to a critique of politics, the press, and even the gathering spectre of war that would not crash across America till four months after Kane's release. It is a film that, at once, feels remarkably fresh in its technical and narrative aspects, yet arguably did more for cinema as a medium than any other film, its fingerprints on almost every element of modern cinema. Kane is a masterpiece. It is the American Dream writ large; Charles Foster Kane reaches for everything from wealth to political power to the almost astonishingly omnipresent figure that guides the world's leaders, and falls short.

But more than this, Kane is still with us. It is, after all, not only a film that continues to sit in the highest tier of the pantheon of cinema, not only a film that continues to generate vast numbers of reviews, think pieces, reinterpretations and homages, not only the favourite film of many world figures, including the man who arguably understands the film least in his 2000s review, seeing only the power and fame and political power that he now wields in the White House, rather than the hollow failure that Kane becomes, dying alone in his self-created pile.

Citizen Kane, at its heart, simply, is a film that stabs into the heart of the American experience, the lonely hollowness of power, that speaks, arguably at the cost of the blossoming career of one of the single greatest filmmakers ever, unto power. Like Kane, like Welles, like Hurst, we cannot help but be fascinated by power, knowing only that it will, eventually, like everything mean nothing. No film captures the emptiness of power like it. Nearly 80 years on, Citizen Kane towers above cinema, a colossus with few, if any equals in its pure ambition, impact, and longevity

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation).