Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

Citizen Kane (Re-release) (1941)

Director: Orson Welles

5
Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

This re-release ties in with the BFI’s season dedicated to  architecture on film. Given the picture’s embarrassment of riches – block your ears and it’s a silent movie, close your eyes and it’s a radio play – a certain rigorous pleasure can be found in considering Orson Welles’s anatomy of a great, hollow American through so specific a lens.

From the tight log cabin of Kane’s youth to the cavernous castle he builds himself to die in, from a fecund breakfast parlour to a mausoleum-like library, built environments are put to richly expressive use throughout the film. Many of the novel techniques Welles developed with cinematographer Gregg Toland were calculated to offer new angles on film space: as well as refining deep-focus photography, they used camera tricks to elide scales and locations, and dug holes in the floor to shoot upwards.

But there’s a constant tension between the freedom with which the camera creeps, swoops and climbs and the restrictions bearing on the characters’ behaviour: the more lavish the buildings get, the more ammunition they provide for the picture’s scepticism about the pursuit of material acquisition. Welles remained alive to the expressive potential of architecture throughout his career, from the doomed richness of the Ambersons’ mansion to the splendidly anonymous Chartres cathedral in ‘F for Fake’.

Author: Ben Walters 2009-10-27 11:41:47

Time Out London Issue 2045, Oct 29 – Nov 4 2009

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Citizen Kane (Re-release)

Cast & crew

Director: Orson Welles

Producer: Orson Welles

Cast: Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Paul Stewart, George Coulouris, Ruth Warrick, Alan Ladd full cast

Duration: 119 mins


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.