ABSTRACT
Well, then, let’s talk once more about Citizen Kane (1941).1 Today, as the last echoes from the critics seem to have faded away, we can take stock of their judgments. I’ll leave aside those who have understood nothing, and I’ll challenge the testimony of the film’s assistant directors, cameramen, and designers, who could barely contain themselves in the face of such a provocative achievement. For the rest, the opinions range between these two extremes: Orson Welles reinvents filmmaking, Citizen Kane is as important as Greed (1925, dir. Erich von Stroheim), and Welles is a great man; nonetheless, however talented he may be, his film is only an intelli gent bluff. Georges Sadoul, for example, talks about some monstrous puffball that probably owes its existence to a deluge of dollars during one of those long Hollywood nights. He can’t see anything new in the style; on the contrary, he finds
an excess of feebly assimilated reminiscences. The film is an ency clopedia of old techniques. One can find in it all of the following: the simultaneous clarity of the foregrounds and the most distant backgrounds, as in Louis Lumiere’s Arrival o f a Train in the Station at La Ciotat (1895); Melies’ taste for special effects and cardboard sets; the mixing of accelerated montage and superimposition, which was the latest fashion in 1920; the acrobatics of the traveling shot, which goes back to 1935; the sets with ceilings taken over from G reed..., the newsreel montage invented by Dziga Vertov... One senses that Welles is intoxicated with the apparent novelty of his means and technique.2
