Citizen Kane

i mean yeah it’s that good visual storytelling is incredible. something i thought was interesting is welles blocks scenes in such a way that he doesn’t build up tension to reveal information. he builds tension to reveal emotion, or reaction. for example, the scene where suzy tries to OD— we start with hearing her slow breathing in the dark, then we bring in the lights and we see the medicine and the glass, then we hear kane trying to break into the room — and the last thing we see in the shot is his reaction. i think a lot of directors would start with the locked door, then have kane break in, then reveal her sleeping and breathing slow, and finally reveal with with medicine i guess that’s basically hitchcock’s bomb theory, but the effect is we have our own response to her suicide attempt, and then there’s enough separation so we see kane’s. if we saw it at the same time as him, we would empathize with him or project our emotions on to him. but kane is different from us. he is stunted and sociopathic— and we can get into his head and understand him without assuming he feels like us. real cool kind of the inverse of that is the scene where gettys and emily confront kane and suzy, welles doesn’t tell us if they slept together or it’s just a slanderous lie. everything we saw from the scene where suzy invites muddy kane in was wholesome and pure and ends with him talking about his mother. this makes that confrontation scene play out in a really interesting way— we can see all sides. and then literally the next line when we cut back to suzy’s narration is “i shouldn’t have slept with him that first night”— almost a throwaway! really great way to like reel us in to empathize with kane then realize he’s a shitbag literally moments after haha mary comingore is fantastic— somehow charming despite the fact all her character does is screech. and orson welles is so goddamn charming even though he’s basically playing proto-logan roy you can tell why this basically reshaped how films are shot and edited also it’s edited by robert wise! who directed the sound of music which i watched yesterday and whose hollywood star i happened upon yesterday as well. i might be hypomanic but i’m taking that as a sign from the universe to watch more of his stuff 35mm at the american cinematheque