How great is Citizen Kane?

It’s difficult to recognize a film as being “the greatest ever made” if I wouldn’t consider it once of my favorites. Films that I might personally consider the greatest would fulfill all good film-making techniques, but they would also be in a genre that I personally enjoy watching again and again. Citizen Kane was not my favorite film we watched this semester, but I can appreciate several reasons why it would be considered one of the greatest.
Citizen Kane was a great satire of Hearst, his wife, his young mistress, and his newspapers. Kane was portrayed as someone who became increasingly more superficial with how his money should be spent and how he treated the friends and colleagues around him, but, most importantly, he was not like that from the beginning. The film successfully developed Kane’s character, representing Kane as a child, as a young ambitious man, and later as a selfish and hardened individual. This was effective because I felt sorry for the kid who was forced to leave his home and sympathized with the adult who regretted that he didn’t know who he might have been if he hadn’t become so wealthy. I also liked Kane as a college drop-out who was excited about starting a new kind of newspaper. He was energetic and those scenes were my favorite. The progression from this person into someone who bought everything he liked (including a pretty wife), but lived an empty and hollow existence (literally, his home echoed because it was too large to fill), was a powerful representation of how wealth and political influence could affect someone’s life, despite how accurate or inaccurate it may have been to the real Hearst.
Welles used editing and cinematography very effectively to make important points, especially about the characters of Kane and Susan. Newspaper headlines were juxtaposed with Kane’s words at the wedding of Kane and Susan, joking that he would build an opera house if Susan’s singing career needed a boost. He did build an opera house, the headline stated, giving a comic effect while indicating Susan’s poor singing and Kane’s seriousness. Camera angles were high and from Kane’s perspective to indicate his authority, such as in the scene when his shadow covers Susan who is sitting on the floor when he orders her to continue her singing career.
The narrative was developed creatively and effectively, using the perspectives of several friends, an ex-wife, and a servant. In these memory sequences, the situations were not necessarily chronological – some memories jumped back to younger years after already viewing scenes when his hair was graying – but overall the order was logical and easy to follow.Many of the scenes were engaging, such as when Kane and Emily grew more and more distant over years of breakfasts, while others were intentionally bleak, such as when Susan describes how lonely it is to live in Xanadu. The film created a strong image of what Hearst’s life could have been – judging his waste of his unending supply of money and his treatment of his wives and longtime friends.
Unlike other films that may fill time with meaningless dialogue or images, everything in this film was intentional and satirized Kane’s attitude or ambitions or lifestyle. Even the brief shot of a couple of monkeys on Kane’s property in the beginning of the film make reference to the private zoo he constructed on his property, a senseless extravagance. It missed several elements that I often look for in a film – romance, comedy (minus a few comedic scenes or conversations), or exciting adventure or action – but I believe if I watched Citizen Kane a few more times and looked carefully at the mise en scene, dialogue and cinematography, I could find significance and purpose in nearly every everything.