Kaned
I brought Citizen Kane up yesterday as one of those films that you can’t quite believe didn’t get a best picture/director Oscar. It’s got a funny old reputation, that film, and it’s not helped by the constant “bestest film ever” title it’s given on endless lists and articles, not just in places like Empire magazine (where you expect that kind of thing) but in the general media. That’s not to say it isn’t one of the greatest films of all time, because it is. Much like music recording technology and pre-CGI special effects, Orson Welles and his crew had to put an incredible amount of skill and effort into crafting the techniques to create shots and set-ups we take for granted in movies these days because technological advancement has made it so much easier for us. The sheer craft of what the crew had to pull off is mind-blowing. They were using what was essentially state-of-the-art special effects just to frame shots correctly. And it’s not just the technical prowess, but also the script and the acting. There’s nothing about the film that isn’t engaging and exceptional.
Problem is, that kind of weight it carries around can be discouraging to someone coming to the film for the first time. There’s an expectation that if the film-student crowd like it then it must be unpleasantly challenging and hard to watch. God knows it made me reluctant to watch it, and if me and a buddy at University hadn’t happened to catch it one lazy Saturday afternoon, we probably wouldn’t ever have seen it. Much like Raging Bull, in fact; another film rated so enthusiastically by The Critics to be off-putting. And the thing about both of them is that I was completely blown away when I finally got round to watching them, not because of the dazzling artistry but because, first and foremost, they were both excellent stories, completely engaging and never boring.
Tangentially, the film-maker today who (in my subjective opinion, as always) is probably Welles’ spiritual heir? Peter Jackson. Seriously.
The thing about Welles isn’t just that he was a great writer and actor (because he was), but that he put so much skill and craft into the job of directing. It was all about prep and craft at a technical level. As far as I’ve observed, today’s art-housey films are very minimal, viewing the techniques of film-making as secondary, as a way of distancing themselves from the nuts-and-bolts side of things, technical achievement (and technical achievement alone, sometimes) being the defining characteristic of the Summer Blockbuster.
Regardless of what you may think of Lord of the Rings (book or script), the sheer amount of effort, care and design that went into Jackson’s trilogy was awe-inspiring, which by itself would have been a thing. What made it truly great was the addition of a fantastic cast to an excellent script. That’s Welles, and that’s Citizen Kane, through and through.
And another thing, you know who doesn’t help matters? The Things Used To Be Better brigade, who want us all to realise how far the Cinematic Arts have fallen. Horse-shit. If anything brought down the amazing cinema of the 70s, it was the creators themselves, devolving their own work into a self-indulgent mess. It’s no-one’s fault but Scorcese’s that he’s been crap since Goodfellas, and Jesus Christ is that an over-rated film. The fact is, Scorcese has never made anything as good as The Wire. Do I wish there were more grown-up films like Gone, Baby, Gone out there? Sure. But it’s not the end of the world, because I’m perfectly fine with the rise in quality of everything else we’ve had in recent years.
