Legacy of Citizen Kane
[1] Citizen Kane was the only film made under Welles's original contract with RKO Pictures, which gave him complete creative control.
In the new contract Welles was an employee of the studio[5] and lost the right to final cut, which later allowed RKO to modify and re-cut The Magnificent Ambersons over his objections.
Bazin praised the film for its innovative use of mise-en-scène and deep focus cinematography, advocating for a filmic realism that allows audiences to engage more actively with the narrative.
His defense of Citizen Kane as a work of art influenced other critics and contributed to a broader re-evaluation of the film in Europe and the United States.
Over the decades, Citizen Kane has been consistently ranked highly in critical surveys and polls, often cited as the greatest film ever made.
This speech led to Bazin's 1947 article "The Technique of Citizen Kane",[10]: 125 which directly influenced public opinion about the film.
[10]: 130 Bazin's biographer Dudley Andrew wrote that: The world of Citizen Kane, that mysterious, dark, and infinitely deep world of space and memory where voices trail off into distant echoes and where meaning dissolves into interpretation, seemed to Bazin to mark the starting point from which all of us try to construct provisionally the sense of our lives.
[16]: 263 By 1942 Citizen Kane had run its course theatrically and, apart from a few showings at big city arthouse cinemas, it largely vanished and both the film's and Welles's reputation fell among American critics.
In 1949 critic Richard Griffith in his overview of cinema, The Film Till Now, dismissed Citizen Kane as "... tinpot if not crackpot Freud.
[18]: 152 In the decades since, its critical status as one of the greatest films ever made has grown, with numerous essays and books on it including Peter Cowie's The Cinema of Orson Welles, Ronald Gottesman's Focus on Citizen Kane, a collection of significant reviews and background pieces, and most notably Kael's essay, "Raising Kane", which promoted the value of the film to a much wider audience than it had reached before.
[33] On February 18, 1999, the United States Postal Service honored Citizen Kane by including it in its Celebrate the Century series.
[34] The film was honored again on February 25, 2003, in a series of U.S. postage stamps marking the 75th anniversary of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Art director Perry Ferguson represents the behind-the-scenes craftsmen of filmmaking in the series; he is depicted completing a sketch for Citizen Kane.
[40] In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild published a list of the 75 best-edited films of all time based on a survey of its membership.
[9]: 85–86 Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa said that his use of deep focus was influenced by "the camera work of Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane" and not by traditional Japanese art.
[48] Its cinematography, lighting, and flashback structure influenced such film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s as The Killers, Keeper of the Flame, Caught, The Great Man[49]: 425 and This Gun for Hire.
However, by the 1960s filmmakers such as those from the French New Wave and Cinéma vérité movements favored "flatter, more shallow images with softer focus" and Citizen Kane's style became less fashionable.
American filmmakers in the 1970s combined these two approaches by using long takes, rapid cutting, deep focus and telephoto shots all at once.
[16]: 414 The flashback structure in which different characters have conflicting versions of past events influenced La commare secca[16]: 533 and Man of Marble.
[52]: 78 Nigel Andrews has compared the film's complex plot structure to Rashomon, Last Year at Marienbad, Memento and Magnolia.
Andrews also compares Charles Foster Kane to Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull and Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood for their portrayals of "haunted megalomaniac[s], presiding over the shards of [their] own [lives].
Variety compared There Will Be Blood to the film[54] and called it "one that rivals Giant and Citizen Kane in our popular lore as origin stories about how we came to be the people we are.
[56] The Social Network has been compared to the film for its depiction of a media mogul and by the character Erica Albright being similar to "Rosebud".
[49]: 425 Many directors have listed it as one of the greatest films ever made, including Woody Allen, Michael Apted, Les Blank, Kenneth Branagh, Paul Greengrass, Satyajit Ray,[61] Michel Hazanavicius, Michael Mann, Sam Mendes, Jiří Menzel, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese,[62] Denys Arcand, Gillian Armstrong, John Boorman, Roger Corman, Alex Cox, Miloš Forman, Norman Jewison, Richard Lester, Richard Linklater, Paul Mazursky, Ronald Neame, Sydney Pollack[63] and Stanley Kubrick.
[65]: 231 François Truffaut said that the film "has inspired more vocations to cinema throughout the world than any other" and recognized its influence in The Barefoot Contessa, Les Mauvaises Rencontres, Lola Montès, and 8 1/2.
[69] Bollywood film director and producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra expressed his thoughts on Citizen Kane in his book Unscripted: Conversations on Life and Cinema.
Satyajit Ray always regretted not seeing Citizen Kane when it was released in 1941 and screened at the biggest cinema theatre in Calcutta.
The leather-bound volume included the final shooting script and a carbon copy of American that bore handwritten annotations—purportedly made by Hearst's lawyers, who were said to have obtained it in the manner described by Kael in "Raising Kane".
[90] In 2014, a collection of approximately 235 Citizen Kane stills and production photos that had belonged to Welles was sold at auction for $7,812.
