What does Cred Forums think of Citizen Kane? Is it a great movie even by today's standards...

What does Cred Forums think of Citizen Kane? Is it a great movie even by today's standards? Was it a revolutionary movie that shaped all of cinema forever? Is it over rated or does it deserve all the praise it gets?

Given the context of its time and background, it deserves its praise, although Chimes at Midnight is easily Welles' best movie. If you don't get what's so good about Citizen Kane and you don't care enough to watch a bunch of films from the 30s to see for yourself, then listen to Ebert's commentary on it. It's one of the best I've heard.

>Is it a great movie even by today's standards?
Irrelevant

>What does Cred Forums think of Citizen Kane?
It's pretty good.

>Is it a great movie even by today's standards?
Eeeh, it's excellent by the standards of then and still pretty enjoyable by today's, even if it's more as an historical piece

>Was it a revolutionary movie that shaped all of cinema forever?
Not really, no. Aside from the deep focus technique, everything the movie did had already been done by someone else. What made Citizen Kane brilliant was that it managed to use all these relatively fresh cinematographic and storytelling ideas (for movies, anyways) in an extraordinary way.

>Is it over rated or does it deserve all the praise it gets?
It's over rated by geeks who want to look smart but it does deserve a lot of the praise it got.

I will answer your question, but before I do I need you to answer a question of mine: What are 'today's standards'? There are hundreds of different kinds of cinema being made today, in most of the countries of the world. Which standards do you have in mind?

How does it compare to the best cinema has to offer in its entire history?

>had already been done by someone else

Not really, no, much as Pauline Kael, on assignment for the middlebrow knownothing constituency, would have had you believe otherwise. Funnily enough, the deep focus technique was the least new thing in the film.

Storytelling wise, it was all done in literature.
From a cinematography standpoint, what exactly did Citizen Kane do that had never been done before?

How could anyone begin to take a synoptic view of cinema's entire history? The majority of silent cinema in America alone no longer exists. Most of pre-WWII Japanese cinema is gone. Most of the movies made in Australia before the mid-twenties were burnt to create a spectacular fire for one particular production. We have about nine minutes of Sjostrom, then regarded as one of the world's greatest directors, directing Garbo, then regarded as the world's greatest film actress - the rest of the film is lost. The greatest films ever made have a high statistical possibility of having been lost forever.

>Storytelling

So you were just hoping nobody would challenge your claim, huh? Keeping within cinema, which is what we're discussing, give examples of how 'everything in Kane had been done before'.

I just said that the cinematography was the least new thing the film did, why are you asking me to expand on a claim that's the opposite of the one I made?

>literally arguing over Citizen Kane
How do you fail to realize how retarded this is?

>What does Cred Forums think of Citizen Kane?
Dull and uninteresting.
>Is it a great movie even by today's standards?
Probably if you can appreciate the story.
>Was it a revolutionary movie that shaped all of cinema forever?
Helped shape it, sure. Not singlehandedly though.
>Is it over rated or does it deserve all the praise it gets?
It's not overrated due to it's impact on filmmaking.

Did you read my post? Here's what I said:
>What made Citizen Kane brilliant was that it managed to use all these relatively fresh cinematographic and storytelling ideas (for movies, anyways)
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear, but the brackets were in specific for "storytelling ideas"
I'm aware that Citizen Kane was mindblowing for a movie, but multiple unreliable non-omniscient narrators was a well trodden territory in literature before George Welles was even born.

It was good for all the technical aspects but it's story was pretty meh

Right, so you know nothing, cool.

Google 'Chesterton white post black post'.

You're not able to deny any of the statements I made, so you just say I'm a fool and move on. Cool shit, mate.

Having never seen the film, I've always still been in awe of Orson doing it when he was like 25 or some shit. I'm 27 and have accomplished nothing, meanwhile this son of a bitch wrote, acting in and directed presumably one of the most enduring pictures of all time.

You didn't make any statements.

>I'm aware that Citizen Kane was mindblowing for a movie, but multiple unreliable non-omniscient narrators was a well trodden territory in literature before George Welles was even born.

It's shit

stopped it after ten minutes

Yes, so again, no knowledge of cinema, that's what I said.

It was a first for cinema but well trodden territory in literature. That's my point.

>Was it a revolutionary movie that shaped all of cinema forever?

>Literature had done it

NOT THE QUESTION ASKED, YOU FUCKING PSEUD.

You're a memorable (spoiler)sled(/spoiler)

Not answering a question anyone asked. The question was about cinema. Nothing about the plot structure's resemblance to literature.

Kane?

It felt like it dragged on forever. Was pretty uninteresting.

Sure, but I meant arguing over it, not talking about it. The same arguments and counter arguments have been given and received a million times since it came out, and you can't contribute with anything interesting or worthwhile anymore. It's the most famous classic film, for fuck's sake.
On top of that, arguments on Cred Forums always stray from the subject and end up in bullshit personal attacks.

Nobody picked up on this post because it's too sad to think about.

Taking your second point first, they don't need to. Taking your first point second, the counter-arguments only emerged after Pauline Kael wrote a long essay to devalue the film while repositioning it as a Hollywood classic, where before it was seen as a bizarre fluke indie film backed by Hollywood because they wanted the name recognition of Martian scare guy. People parrot her bullshit at third hand to avoid engaging with the film.

As a result of Sight and Sound's pathetic wheedling with their (excessively numerous) decade poll voters, Citizen Kane is no longer the 'official' greatest film ever made, Vertigo is - a colour widescreen film with commercial stars made by a successful producer-director who stayed in the Hollywood system. Because of this, one day nobody will watch any black-and-white films. Film criticism's establishment have given ignorance their sanction. Of course there was never any one 'greatest film ever made', and that was implicit in always having the same one. Having the greatest writer always be Shakespeare frees the discussion for far more interesting matters. Now the 'greatest film' is different, it's implied that being 'the greatest' has meaning and value. And one day it will be the Lord of the Rings trilogy. One day, everything made in the twentieth century will be as relegated and forgotten as 'Rosebud'. That's why we need to keep painting the white post white.

>by today's standards

What did he mean by this?

I think it's intellectually dishonest to ignore the fact that Orson Welles took fairly common storytelling devices from literature when talking about how "it shaped all of cinema forever"

It was a good adaptation of these ideas, but the ideas already existed. You need to look at the big picture.

Every prestige movie, every Oscarbait production, is still palpably derivative of Citizen Kane. They abruptly grew up enough to imitate the most obvious aesthetic elements of what Welles was doing about ten years after the fact, and they've done nothing else ever since. 'Best Picture' might as well be renamed 'Best Kane'. It's quite pathetic, and no fault of Welles, who never repeated himself.

I never said it shaped all of cinema forever. You need to look at images and listen to sounds. Your literary references are superficial, middlebrow goalpost-shifting. The question concerns cinema.

>What does Cred Forums think of Citizen Kane?
I love it. From its casting, to its cinematography, to it's writing, to its atmosphere it's nearly perfect. Near perfection as far as I am concerned.

>Is it a great movie even by today's standards?
Yes. It tells a small story really well. It asks questions about the american dream that are still relevant today in an enthralling way.

>Was it a revolutionary movie that shaped all of cinema forever?
I don't know enough about cinema history to comment

>Is it over rated or does it deserve all the praise it gets?
I think it's perfectly rated, although opinions are a little polarized. Let me explain: A lot of people say it's either GOAT or OVERRATED TRASH. I think these are both wrong and damage the films reputation (by heightening expectations and making plebs feel OK for not 'getting' it. That being said I think it is one of the greatest achievements in film and deserves it's spot in popular culture.

It’s empty. It’s not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of — is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie’s got is absolutely unbelievable

nice pasta

I'd have a lot more respect for Bergman if he hadn't talked in such a catty, dismissive fashion about every film he considered a rival to his own work. The fact that he so clearly saw cinema in terms of status and rivalry is itself a mark against him. Welles is in good company - Bergman also dismissed Antonioni, and though Dreyer only made two good films.

>I never said it shaped all of cinema forever.
OP asked that exact question, I answered "no". I didn't move my goalposts at all. I acknowledged that Citizen Kane was a brilliant movie that used fresh new storytelling ideas for the big screen, but I also felt it was important to acknowledge that they were just adaptations of well known literature storytelling devices. Perhaps I should have been more clear in my initial post, but I've been really consistent in what I've been saying.

Deleted this because it's probably too good for this context.

>the counter-arguments only emerged after Pauline Kael wrote
Sure, if you don't count the blacklisting it had to deal with. All the big theaters and critics ignored it until the mid-late 50s, so it was considered a massive failure until Sight and Sound started placing it at the top of their lists.

Do you genuinely not see how irrelevant and self-regarding your reply was? It's not important to 'acknowledge' something that isn't true - there's nothing 'just' about adapting devices from one medium to another. You care, or know, nothing about cinema as a plastic medium.

It's not irrelevant at all. Citizen Kane often gets credited for inventing these concepts rather than adapting them well to the big screen.

No, every serious critic who saw it when it was released knew it was a masterpiece, it just didn't get the distribution. The Sight and Sound list is created by polling critics internationally, it's not invented in the Sight and Sound office. The reason it suddenly polled so highly in 1962, not having appeared the previous decade, is that it was reissued for the first time in 1958.

No, it gets credited as having pioneered those techniques in cinema. People don't usually talk about them having been used in literature because 1: they weren't, Kane invented them for its medium, different artforms are not interchangeable content carriers, and 2: most people aren't so desperate for validation that they'll honk 'i've read books' in a film discussion.

>different artforms are not interchangeable content carriers
In this case they are. Storytelling applies to both mediums and literature has the advantage of existing for more centuries than its counterpart. I'm not being a /lit/ snob, I like movies much more than I like books and I very rarely read. All I was pointing out is that the credit to these narrative ideas is literature's and that it's intelectual dishonest to say "Without Citizen Kane, movies would haven't learned how to adapt these story-telling devices"

This is frustrating because we both agree that Citizen Kane is brilliant, we both agree that it's an excellent movie and you're saying I know nothing about cinema because I had the audacity to mention where the idea of fucking multiple non-omniscient non-reliable narrators came from. I said that everything the movie did had already been done by someone else, you told me I was wrong, I clarified that I was counting literature and you've been hounding on me for it ever since.

To add to this, I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough in my first post.

>In this case they are.

If you think that, not only do you know nothing about cinema, you know nothing about culture.

>literature has the advantage of existing for more centuries

This is pointless.

>Is it a great movie even by today's standards?
Irrelevant

How the fucking fuck is that irrelevant? OP asks for it, so it's CLEARLY relevant to him.

This page gives me cancer

You were perfectly clear, you were just wrong.

I'm sick of your needlessly reductive snob bullshit. You misinterpreted a comment and have never countered any statement I made. Go fuck yourself.

The question of *which* standards we're talking about remains unanswered.

Because even if the OP thinks it's relevant it isn't. It doesn't matter.

>it just didn't get the distribution
That's just what I said. For a film at that time, lack of recognition meant death. The fact that a handful of critics and indie theaters that recognized it as a masterpiece was irrelevant.

Like I said, most arguments on here end up in bullshit attacks. Seems like the other user just wants to argue because I don't see how anyone could possibly misunderstand what you're saying.

No, I wasn't clear that I was counting literature when I said that everything the movie did had already been done by someone else. I made a small mention to it when I said that the storytelling ideas were fresh for movies, but didn't labor the point well enough. I'm completely correct in what I said.

Films, and especially their "quality" aspect, whatever that may be, are a product of their time. That's why it's irrelevant. Even if you had some dumb standard for something to be "good", it still doesn't matter when the movie came out 75 years ago, in basically a completely different world.

You're the one being reductive - you stated that artforms are interchangeable content carriers. You have repeatedly clarified that yes, you did mean what I took you to mean, so I don't see where you're seeing a misintepretation.

>Go fuck yourself.

If this means you're now going to stop replying to me, great, I'm delighted, thank you.

Everything the movie did had already been done by someone else. You cannot deny this fact. You assumed I was talking exclusively about cinema and the misunderstanding rose from there. It's as simple as that.

You soon made it clear that all you wanted to do was repeat this vague statement, so there's no reason to retrace your steps now.

There's nothing vague about my statement.

No I didn't. It's not a fact. You parrotted Kael, then switched to focus exclusively on literature when challenged for an example. Everyone can see the posts where you did this, and neither you nor I believes your bullshit, so why are you bullshitting, you weak, weak man?

I didn't mention a single thing about Pauline Kael. You were the one who forced that narrative here My immediate next post was in reply to that with me clarifying myself.

Yes there is, as it's based on an illteracy of both word and image. You know nothing about culture if you think artforms are interchangeable content carriers. The discussion was over when you confirmed that you believed that.

great at the time, hasn't held up at all. same applies to casablanca.

I didn't say you credited her, I said you parrotted her. The 'Kane did nothing original' lie comes from her.

Except it isn't a lie no matter how many times you tell yourself it is. You yourself admitted that the storytelling techniques are only new to cinema.

No, I said they were reinvented in cinema by Kane. Stop trying to gain ground for your middlebrow cultural illiteracy, learn something about medium specificity, and stop wasting people's time.

The first part was meant for , not my bad

"Reinvented", right. Nice way of saying "adapted"

The thing about Citizen Kane is that it did a lot of technical things decades before other people even attemped to do it in a movie of the same scale again.
It aged like milk by some standards but remains somewhat impressive still, mostly because of it's influence.
F for Fake is the best Welles film anyways.

I watched Citizen Kane in the theater not too long ago, my second lifetime screening. Watching it with an audience was interesting, and although it's impossible to be objective about a sacred cow-meme (people either want to affirm it or detract from it, based on their own culture, generation, and individual temperament with regard to whatever the sacred cow is, like how it seems to be less cool to like The Beatles among young people these days), I think I can at least offer an informed and reasonable opinion, not having watched the movie much myself, but having given it one really good, close watch this past go-around, as a fully adult person this time.

I will come down on the side of AFFIRMING that Kane is a Very Good Movie that I've personally enjoyed watching for its own merits, although I'm not sold on its commonly-bantered GOAT status. Kane does multiple interesting, "fully modern" filmic things:

-bouncing back and forth in time, although not quite to the degree of the Tarantino :^) meme, the movie basically tells two parallel tracks of time in equal dose: Kane's life, and the journalists' task of picking up the pieces. It is thus a complex narrative which is nevertheless tightly compacted in a coherent fashion. Although Kane is not an "action" movie, good modern action movies share this trait of cohesively bouncing back and forth in quick fashion between multiple places and times to tell facets of an overall story.

-this is pleasantly complicated by the "meta" aspect of the different media of storytelling which are used throughout: the "now" of the present day, the "then" of the flashback, the opening "other" of the newsreel which I suppose could plausibly, at the front of the picture, have been "read" as a literal old-time newsreel by original moviegoers, blurring the media around this point. This delerious confusion and blurring of media reminds one of Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast, which as I had learned was done just shortly before.

cont.

So basically I think that Kane holds up because above all it doesn't bore us. There's always something different going on every five minutes or so. I remember liking the slow, ominous pan up the side of the fence as the movie is about to get going, and the rhyming pan at the back end (IIRC), opening and closing our story.

Now for memes. :^)

What makes the drunk orson Welles takes that much funnier is that as both actor and director, OF FUCKING COURSE he knows how to give and take direction, insert himself in and out of this-or-that role, etc. And yet this sacred cow just sits there and instead of doing something that should to him of all people be second nature, even while drunk, (act, take direction and deliver a take) he still just sits there like an awesome dunce while that beta fuck off to the side is kinda-not pouring.

I guess he really was just that shitty at the time, or something. Also one wouldn't really GAF about commercials I suppose, having done Shakespeare IIRC and churned out great meme-movies.

meant to say:

MUUAAAHWWH THE FRENHC

I liked it. It's worth watching. I'm no film snob.

Citizen Bane?

it was the michael bay of it's era

Yes some of the greatest films have been lost to history

now I know what it must have felt like to witness the prime of Aztec culture before the Spanish fucked into eternity

such is the way of human culture, it comes and goes, just try and keep an eye on the time, the best we have to offer is happening now though few want to admit it until 30 years later

About to take the plunge. Will report back at 1:40PM.