Citizen Kane, then...

I love the scene with the dancers in the news room, just so full of joie de vivre.

I wish Welles had done a musical, I suspect that could've been really something.

It's All True is the closest...

For me, the best thing about Citizen Kane is its up front, unrepentant, hella wonderful theatricality. Welles took his larger-than-life-size main character and scaled everything else in the movie up to that size. This makes it all great fun to watch.

If it's about anything at all, it is just about fame and power, American-stylee. Everything it has to offer is so tightly bound to the surface of things, with the grandiosity, sordidness, arrogance, desperation and greed it puts on display, that the only way to 'get' the film is to watch it and let it speak for itself. And the superficiality of it makes for a puzzling mixture of intellectual shallowness and emotional depth.

As for Rosebud and all that bumpf, that's all just a silly red herring to keep the plot from disappearing altogether.

i agree with all of that!

"Bernstein, am I a stuffed shirt?"

Sonny Bupp dies:

http://www.cinematical.com/2007/11/09/last-surviving-cast-member-of-citizen-kane-dies/

"Ma, is Pop governor yet?"

RIP. I'd been on a Welles kick for the last couple of days, oddly enough.

RIP.

"Bernstein, am I a stuffed shirt?"
Bernstein's "Girl In The White Dress" is a key scene in the movie, no?

Sparky Schulz' favorite movie.

Annnnnd, I see that's been covered already.

So of course Simpsons, Schulz, and about 800k other things have reffed this. I'm kind of afraid to see it, like if I do it will just be like watching something where I know entirely what will happen the whole time. And I have to admit I'm intimidated by its Ultimate Status. But I would like to see it so someone tell me I'm talking silly nonsense or something.

I've never seen a movie with or of Orson Welles.

this film has a lot more going on than most top-ten all-time classic snoozefests.

I've never seen a movie with or of Orson Welles.

you should invite him over post-haste!

he was hot back then, Abbott.

I've never seen a movie with or of Orson Welles.

Start with The Muppet Movie and work your way up to Citizen Kane.

if one's never seen it, i wonder if they'd enjoy it more by starting with a less Serious and Important welles

er, what he said

I have "F for Fake" on my ntflx q; this is a docu, yes?

Whoa I had no idea he had youthful hotness. Prolly not young Brando hotness tho?

'citizen kane' is one of his more fun ones. if not the most fun!

i don't think F for Fake is really the place to start? Lady From Shanghai or The Third Man might be more like it?

not dissimilar from Brando hotness, actually!

just jump in with 'kane'.

Yes, Citizen Kane can be a bunch of fun if you're not spending all your time trying to focus and wrestle down "The Greatest Motion Picture Of All Time."

Naturally, I prefer The Magnificent Ambersons and Chimes at Midnight.

I'm intimidated by its Ultimate Status

Don't be. It's a gallumphcious romp, not a frowning brow-wrinkler.

Yeah, Kane's syntax is as far from insurmountable as The Wizard of Oz. It's not Resnais or anything.

I've never seen a movie with or of Orson Welles.

-- Abbott, Saturday, December 15, 2007 6:28 PM

dude go for Touch of Evil. it's one of my like all time top ten way gr8er than Kane

maybe more fun than Kane, but not as good an introduction because way less iconic?

This is all v reassuring, thx guys.

This is gonna turn into what my Spike Lee thread did, huh.

Touch of Evil, also fantastic.

I'm pretty sure there are Welles films to avoid. I'm just not the one to suggest them.

maybe more fun than Kane, but not as good an introduction because way less iconic?

-- gabbneb, Saturday, December 15, 2007 6:52 PM

def less iconic, plus you get charlton heston in brownface which is great for lolz, but i really love the shit out of that movie.

possibly cause i was mad lifted the first time i saw it in the utsa library.

Welles is sooo fat in Touch of Evil, it's even more funny than de-gringoed Heston.

"Didn't you bring me any donuts or sweet rolls?"

halfway into the movie i was entertaining the seriously baked suggestion that welles' casting of heston as a hispanic guy was some profound commentary on the social construction of race.

xp to self

i can't wait for morbs' disquisition on baked welles

just watch citizen kane, it really is awesome, you will love it, the end.

Abbott, you are talking silly nonsense or something.

Have you guys seen other films w/ Welles around that time? He wasn't THAT fat -- had to have been padded for Quinlan. Even the "I Love Lucy" he did wa sfrom maybe the year before, I think, and he was not mega-corpulent, just jowly.

The Ambersons Welles made might have been better than Kane, but the one that survives? No way.

(I think I like The Lady from Shanghai and Othello better than either.)

abbott see them in this order:

1) kane (really entertaining; really, honest - there's a reason it's been parodied ad infinitum on the simpsons, and there's a reason pauline kael - much as i hate quoting her - called it "the most fun of any great movie ever")
2) f for fake (crazy fun, and gives a good sense of welles's sense of humor)
3) touch of evil (crazy, baroque)
4) chimes at midnight/falstaff (best movie ever)
5) macbeth (funniest shakespeare ever - othello is better objectively but i still prefer this one)

ambersons is wonderful but a very frustrating watch. it's still better than almost any movie ever even in its current form but maybe hold off on that til you see these.

this film has a lot more going on than most top-ten all-time classic snoozefests.

OTM, i think kane is a way deeper film than, say, the bicycle thief or potemkin or city lights or the seventh seal or the godfather, not to mention funner to watch (tho i like all those).

I saw CK for the first time just a few years ago, with all the attendant baggage, and it rocked me.

he was hot back then, Abbott.

OTM! the picture james naremore uses on the cover of "the magic world of orson welles" is quite fetching

JD's list is pretty solid except 1) falstaff/CoM is very hard to find (tho it rules), and 2) i'm not crazy about his othello

also, the third man, for some more great welles/joseph cotten fun, even tho it ain't a welles film as such

Why do I feel that

the bicycle thief or potemkin or city lights or the seventh seal or the godfather

weren't the "top-ten all-time classic snoozefests" enrique was referring to?

funny, that's exactly what i thought he had in mind.

Maybe Potemkin, but I figured he was talking about Bresson and Antonioni and Godard.

D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Soporific"

yeah it basically is, except 'the godfather'.

not bresson/antonioni/godard. well, maybe bresson -- but the pre-1960 canon. maybe early antonioni.

ie griffith, chaplin, stroheim, lubitsch, murnau, lang, pabst, eisenstein, pudovkin, dreyer, carne, rossellini, de sica, bergman, fellini.

'kane' was like the one american sound film permissible back then -- a couple of fords, maybe, but not the westerns, that kind of thing.

changed end of the 50s -- discovery of 'regle du jeu', french new wave, rediscovery of hollywood genre cinema, blah blah.

'ambersons' would be the best if done right, and it's still yoga flame as is, but the more you see it, the more the ending just betrays the whole thing, and i say that without being able to remember how it 'should' end.

It's great no matter how much people want to rearrange the canonical furniture.

Citizen Kane = Magnificent Ambersons = Chimes at Midnight = F for Fake = Touch of Evil

You'd need a big room for all that furniture.

esp if Orson is living there

Saw this at MoMA tonight, forgot how funny Susan's vocal coach is.

also you *do* see William Alland (the reporter)'s face out of silhouette on a big screen.

Oh, this isn't original point, but the movie announces its theme:

"It's the greatest curse that's ever been inflicted on the human race: memory."

The Film Doctor records the reactions of his students to CK:

E: "It had really nice cinematography, but I felt that the plot was not there. They built up this whole two hour thing about 'rosebud.' You want to find out the meaning of 'rosebud' is, and then they drop it in five seconds, like, oh, we didn't find it. Whatever. Not a big deal."

FDr: "And you didn't find it was enough of a payoff at the end."

E: "Yeah."

D: "That's like part of the beauty of the movie, that you can make it the focus of a two hour movie. 'Rosebud' is not really the focus of the movie. It pulls all of the characters together. It's really amazing that you can make an entire film about one word, which ends up being not that important at the end."

FDr: "According to Pauline Kael, 'rosebud' was basically a gimmick. It still unifies the movie. Other people's thoughts?"

K: "I think Kane wasn't very popular in this class because it dealt a lot with newspapers, and that's not very big in our generation."

B: "Most movies now are just made for teenagers, and this was made before that."

FDr: "Yes, it was made more for adults. Since it doesn't cater to your age group enough, you don't like it as much?"

E: "We're so used to big action films."

FDr: "Yes, one could say that all started with Star Wars in which you've got to have a climax every ten minutes."

E: "Yes, when you come to Citizen Kane, it's just the story of a man's life, but there's no big explosions, which we've gotten so used to."

http://filmdr.blogspot.de/2015/04/the-jigsaw-puzzle-vs-explosion-student.html

FDr: "That would be my fault. Guilty as charged. Of the various films we've studied so far, what has been your favorite? What would you say is better than Citizen Kane?"

L: "Moonrise Kingdom."

FDR's golden touch extended to children, I see.

at least no one complained that it was in black and white

lol, but actually not so bad a class discussion

teacher’s condescension maybe worst look of all:

Does messing with a figure of power not matter to you all? If there's no magical hammer for a character to throw around, or a comic book shield, then you don't get involved? Superheroes on motorcycles jumping out of jets as things explode--that's all you respond to?

yeah that didn't seem warranted

FDr: "Yes, it was made more for adults. Since it doesn't cater to your age group enough, you don't like it as much?"

leading question

tbh the general public's attitude toward kane in 1941 doesn't seem to have been terribly different from these students' responses. the preview-audience responses to ambersons (before it was hacked up) are really depressing to read.

I have talked about Citizen Kane with 12-year-olds, and shown clips from it. Many of them were very interested. One year, I remember two or three of them pleading to tell me what Rosebud was (which I of course wouldn't--"One day you'll watch it"). I don't know the Film Doctor, but if he can't get students interested in Citizen Kane, maybe that says more about him than the students.

Should read "to tell them," as I'm sure you figured out.

i first saw CK when i was about 10 and loved it (despite not understanding much of it), but i always assumed i was just a weird kid.

@NickPinkerton
Citizen Kane spinoffs I would watch include 'Boss' Jim Geddes, Girl on the Jersey Ferry in 1896, and Two Techs in the Rafters During Salomé.

that guy has the best twitter.

so long as he keeps the quotation marks around Boss

KANE FOUND IN LOVE NEST WITH 'SINGER'

"He wanted to take the quotes out!"

SIIIING SIIIING

Kathryn Trosper Popper, Welles' personal assistant and last living cast member of CK (two lines), died Sunday at 100.

Several versions of the script vary, but in the version of the film that was released, Mrs. Popper is uncredited, but she can be seen taking a flash photograph directly into the movie camera, then from afar, climbing off a ladder. According to Mr. Lebo, she says, “Yeah, all in crates,” referring to curios that Kane shipped to Xanadu and never unpacked.

“You put all this together, the palaces and the paintings and the toys and everything, what would it spell?” a newspaperman asks.

“Charles Foster Kane,” Jerry Thompson, another reporter, replies.

“Or Rosebud?” the first reporter says. “How about it, Jerry?”

“What’s Rosebud?” Ms. Popper’s character asks.

“That’s what he said when he died.”

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kathryn-trosper-popper-dead-last-873587

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/09/movies/kathryn-popper-who-had-tiny-role-in-citizen-kane-dies-at-100.html?_r=0

Her first visit to New York was with Welles to promote “Citizen Kane.” She moved to the city a year later, befriended many celebrities, wrote a hibachi cookbook and never left.

a bunch of Kane 75th anniversary stuff here

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-citizen-kane-75-and-bordwells-rhapsodes

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/04/29/celebrate_citizen_kane_s_75th_anniversary_with_this_supercut_of_homages.html

I got the new Callow bio on hold.

on YT, for now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDgSgCo6z3Q&feature=youtu.be

that doc has a lot of bullshit about kane being based on welles

Mank?

This is a thread

My long-awaited (by two people) CITIZEN KANE story:

After NYU, I was working in a film restoration lab in NYC. It had two employees. Me. And a crazy, secretive Yugoslavian chemist that had devised a treatment that could remove most scratches from film.

THREAD pic.twitter.com/WmNpJNygOi

— Nicolas Falacci (@NickFalacci) February 26, 2021

my students are writing about it this weekend!

"OR ELSE!" "Yes Mr. Soto. *whimper*"

Mr. Soto’s last warning.

I've seen every episode. Power to the people!

Okay so

https://www.criterion.com/films/32250-citizen-kane

New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and three Blu-rays with the film and special features
Three audio commentaries: from 2021 featuring Orson Welles scholars James Naremore and Jonathan Rosenbaum; from 2002 featuring filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich; and from 2002 featuring film critic Roger Ebert
The Complete “Citizen Kane,” (1991), a rarely seen feature-length BBC documentary
New interviews with critic Farran Smith Nehme and film scholar Racquel J. Gates
New video essay by Orson Welles scholar Robert Carringer
New program on the film’s special effects by film scholars and effects experts Craig Barron and Ben Burtt
Interviews from 1990 with editor Robert Wise; actor Ruth Warrick; optical-effects designer Linwood Dunn; Bogdanovich; filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Henry Jaglom, Martin Ritt, and Frank Marshall; and cinematographers Allen Daviau, Gary Graver, and Vilmos Zsigmond
New documentary featuring archival interviews with Welles
Interviews with actor Joseph Cotten from 1966 and 1975
The Hearts of Age, a brief silent film made by Welles as a student in 1934
Television programs from 1979 and 1988 featuring appearances by Welles and Mercury Theatre producer John Houseman
Program featuring a 1996 interview with actor William Alland on his collaborations with Welles
Selection of The Mercury Theatre on the Air radio plays featuring many of the actors from Citizen Kane
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: Deluxe packaging, including a book with an essay by film critic Bilge Ebiri

And yet still we wait for the colourized version!

WHEN WILL TED TURNER'S DREAM BE REAL

From beyond the grave: "What is it you WANT? In the depths of your ignorance?"

will we see a colorized version at last

I think the dream is now a 3D version.