Citizen Kane Turning Point

Since the beginning of film, very few single films have changed and influenced the industry as much as Citizen Kane. It is considered a masterpiece and will often be cited as “the greatest film of all time”. Barsam says “Citizen Kane is important to your study of the movies because, within the borders of film history – 1895 to the present – it marks a major turning point between the films produced before it and those produced after it.” (2016) Orson Wells who produced, directed, and stared in the movie, used many new techniques both in challenging traditional narrative, as well as using new technical elements to create this revolutionary work. In the Hollywood era of film, narrative was much cut and paste. How the stories were told in traditional narrative were all very similar as this is what was though was needed for a good film. June Bhattacharyya says, “The usual Hollywood practice is to foreground the narration in a film’s opening passages and to present it as moderately self-conscious, oscillating between the duty to facilitate viewers with relevant details and the liberty of suppressing knowledge in parts.” (2013) Citizen Kane challenged this. From the very beginning, the exposition of Citizen Kane was very
Welles used a lot of depth in his shots, allowing the actors to move freely on the sets, allowing them to produce entire scenes uninterrupted by editing. Barsam says, “Previous directors had used deep-focus cinematography in a limited way to achieve limited results, but Welles’s achievement overshadowed all of those efforts. No longer would audienceses see actors working chiefly in the foreground; now they moved easily from fore- to background.” (2016) Today depth in pictures is extremely common; it is rarer to not have a lot of it. Even in editing and sound Welles challenged Hollywood conventions, such as editing the flashback scenes and recording most of the sound on set with hiding