At the very beginning of our first year teaching Film Studies at SIS, we used Citizen Kane (d. Orson Welles, 1941) as the starting place for analysis of film, given that it repeatedly gets voted as the greatest film of all time, as part of the Sight & Sound Top 10 poll which is conducted every 10 years. The forum for this period can be found here and provides lots of revealing analysis and pertinent points with regards to whether the film deserves its high level of kudos.

Before we start, review this cheat essay relating to Citizen Kane, highlighting and adding sticky notes to any points which may well be pertinent for the class to consider.



Our focus in viewing Citizen Kane will be based on 4 key areas:

1. Juxtapose alongside Bicycle Thieves, comparing the mechanisms of The Hollywood Studio System during The Golden Era (and in particular RKO) alongside the Post-War Neo-Realist movement.
2. Consider the relevance and importance of the auteur theory with analysis of:
- Orson Welles (director and co-script-writer)
- Herman J. Mankiewicz (Scriptwriter)
- Gregg Toland (cinematographer)

Citizen Kane is also interesting to consider from a theoretical perspective. Welles was one of the first 'reclaimed' directors, when Cahiers du Cinema (50s) began exploring/defining key auteurs from cinematic history. Yet by the 70s, Pauline Kael (a renowned but outspoken film critic/scholar) used Citizen Kane as a means of challenging the importance attached to authorship by film critics at that time. Kael championed the importance of Mankiewicz and the script. Note that in 1971 The Guild of Screenwriters agreed that Mankiewicz & Welles should share the screenwriting credit. Kael's imaginatively named book The Citizen Kane Book (1971) was almost immediately countered by the equally partisan Peter Bogdanovich in 1972 with The Kane Mutiny. In this book he set out the reasons why Welles should be considered the 'author' of the text with a defence of Welles the artist.

This is a debate which concerns you, particularly in light of your own production assessment. Who is the author of the text and how important are individual roles within the construction of the text as a whole?

It is also worth you watching The Battle Over Citizen Kane (d. Michael Epstein & Thomas Lennon, 1996) which outlines the political satire embedded in the Citizen Kane script and the life of media mogul William Randolph Hearst, the focus of the satire. Mr Ryan has a copy of this in school and if we have time in class, we will watch this award winning docu prior to viewing the film.