The Most Famous Film You May Have Struggled to Finish

Citizen Kane occupies a peculiar position in cinema culture. It regularly tops lists of the greatest films ever made, is cited endlessly by directors and critics, and yet many first-time viewers find it — puzzling. Slow, perhaps. Oddly structured. Certainly not the thrilling experience the reputation promises. So what is really going on, and why does this 1941 film continue to matter so much?

The Story Behind the Story

Orson Welles was 25 years old when he made Citizen Kane — a radio and theatre prodigy handed an unprecedented degree of creative freedom by RKO Pictures, which gave him final cut on his debut feature with almost no studio interference. Welles had never directed a film before. He used that ignorance brilliantly, asking his cinematographer Gregg Toland not what was conventional, but what was possible.

The film's thinly veiled portrait of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst prompted Hearst to use his media empire to suppress it on release. Despite critical acclaim, Kane was a box office disappointment and Welles never again had the same freedom in Hollywood. The film was rediscovered — and properly canonised — over the decades that followed.

What Makes It Technically Revolutionary

Deep Focus Photography

Working with Gregg Toland, Welles used deep focus lenses that kept both foreground and background in sharp detail simultaneously. This was technically demanding and visually extraordinary — it allowed scenes to be staged in depth, with action happening at multiple distances from the camera at once, giving audiences more visual information and more freedom to look where they chose.

Non-Linear Narrative

The film opens with the death of Charles Foster Kane and the mystery word "Rosebud." What follows is a journalist's investigation told through a series of interviews and flashbacks — each unreliable, each incomplete. This fragmented, investigative structure was genuinely novel for mainstream American cinema in 1941.

Ceilings

Almost no Hollywood films of the era showed ceilings. Sets were built open-topped to allow lighting rigs to operate. Welles and Toland built sets with ceilings and lit them from below, creating low-angle shots that made characters loom large and menacing — and made rooms feel oppressively real.

What the Film Is Really About

On the surface, Citizen Kane is about the rise and fall of a media mogul. But its deeper subject is the impossibility of truly knowing another person — and, by extension, the impossibility of truly knowing oneself. The "Rosebud" mystery is not a puzzle to be solved; it is a meditation on how the things that shape us are often invisible to everyone, including ourselves.

"Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. What's important is that he never knew what he wanted."
— Orson Welles

Does It Still Hold Up?

Honestly? For modern audiences accustomed to fast cutting and visual spectacle, the pacing requires adjustment. But once you attune yourself to its rhythms, Citizen Kane is a deeply compelling and surprisingly emotional experience. The final revelation lands differently the second time you watch it. The third time, it's devastating.

How to Watch It

  • Watch it on the largest screen available to you — the compositions deserve space.
  • Don't chase Rosebud as though it's a thriller clue. Let the film's portrait of loneliness wash over you.
  • A second viewing, knowing the ending, transforms almost every scene.
  • Roger Ebert's written commentary on the film remains one of the finest pieces of film criticism ever published — well worth reading after your first watch.

Citizen Kane is not the greatest film ever made because it is the most enjoyable. It is the greatest film ever made because it is the most cinematic — because more than almost any other film, it could only exist as a film, and it uses every tool the medium possesses in the service of something true.