Citizen Kane

There is so much to say. Citizen Kane represented both the history of cinema up until 1941 and its future to come. Its influence is still being felt on numerous levels in many films. When it was released, James Agee short changed the film by saying it was only a series of cinematic shots from German Expressionistic Cinema. Citizen Kane combined shots from all facets of cinema including German expressionism, but also silent cinema and deep focus cinematography that was becoming prevelant in 1930s French Cinema. Before this film it was a norm to combine styles and touches from different cinemas, but Citizen Kane put it all on a grandoise level. Professional technicians in films were told to hide the style behind the story. Citizen Kane is about its achievement in style and structure. The focus on its own language would be a precursor to many art films of the 60s and beyond that took on film theory and poetics. As Pauline Kael said, Citizen Kane has a dramatic story, but the rosebud symbol at the end is a false one to inner meaning of Charles Kane. It doesn't explain him but only asks another question of what Kane's main identity in life really was. A lot of people I know are ambivalent toward this film. They know it is a classic, but it is a Hollywood classic that has no likeness to any other film made at the time. People have to stop comparing it to other Hollywood works. Citizen Kane was released in 1941 but its true release was really 1947. That's when it was released in France and erupted the foreign market to take influence for the first time from an American filmmaker. Hollywood owes every genre (besides the Western) to a foreign cinema, but America gave the rest of the world something more. They gave it its basic identity to art cinema. Citizen Kane was one of the best early opportunities for film to evolve over genre stories.