Thanks for the link Jim. I may have to take a few days off so I can watch all the movies on the list that I haven’t seen yet.

Although I didn’t find Citizen Kane terribly entertaining, I can see how it was a very important movie cinematically. I think it’s got more than enough laurels by now, though, and the critics really ought to move on.

1. Orson Welles was in his early/mid-twenties when he directed and acted in the picture, and the picture is an incredible accomplishment.
2. The cinematographic elements of the film were stunning and innovative at the time the movie wsa filmed.
3. Welles gives an awesome performance as Charles Foster Kane. The scenes depicting Kane as an old man are particularly notable.
4. The controversy which connects the fictional Kane to real-life newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst makes the film as large, or larger, than life.
5. The story depicts the best and worst elements of American ambition: old fashioned idealism corrupted by the quest for greed and power.

It seems unfair to current movies, because we’re stuck on this movie that did so much with so little, nothing can ever be better than it. There’s so much more potential in movies now than when he made it that it’s much harder to push the envelope cinemetographically. (is that a word?) There’s been so much technology that has added to movies that it’s almost impossible to reach the ceiling of what can be done.

Good points, illway. I think that’s a nice summary of why it’s such an important film, and why it has such artistic merit.

Dan, as far as cinematography goes, I hesitate to link it too closely with technology. I think about it in the same sense that I think of photography– you can take an excellent photo with a low-tech camera; it’s the way you compose the image that makes it special. Technology has opened the possibility for new sorts of compositions, but it doesn’t make them good by itself.

That said, I wonder if it will ever be possible to create a movie better, in critics’ eyes, than Citizen Kane. It’s been entrenched in the number one spot for so long that it’s almost become an idol of the world of cinema. It’s akin to blasphemy to suggest that any given movie is better. Maybe there isn’t a better one yet, but I can imagine the controversy when one comes along.

What more could he have done besides directing, writing and acting in it?

Very tricky…