Perspectives On Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane has generated a significant amount of critical scholarship since its release in 1941. Orson Welles' work continues to be recognized as a singular artistic achievement, and this collection of reviews, articles and essays reveal the entire history of the film - from its conception, pre-production, and previewing, to its critical reception and influence. Included in this volume are many essays by such scholars as Morris Dickstein, Bruce Kawin, Robert Carringer and Robert Wise.

Citizen Kane, widely considered the greatest film ever made, continues to fascinate critics and historians as well as filmgoers. While credit for its genius has traditionally been attributed solely to its director, Orson Welles, Carringer's pioneering study documents the shared creative achievements of Welles and his principal collaborators. The Making of Citizen Kane, copiously illustrated with rare photographs and production documents, also provides an in-depth view of the operations of the Hollywood studio system. This new edition includes a revised preface and overview of criticism, an updated chronology of the film's reception history, a reconsideration of the locus of responsibility of Welles's ill-fated The Magnificent Ambersons, and new photographs.

Citizen Kane is arguably the most admired and significant film since the advent of talking pictures. No other film is quite so interesting from both artistic and political points of view. To study it even briefly is to learn a great deal about American history, motion-picture style, and the literary aspects of motion-picture scripts. Rather than presenting a sterile display of critical methodologies, James Naremore has gathered a set of essays that represent the essential writings on the film. It gives the reader a lively set of critical interpretations, together with the necessary production information, historical background, and technical understanding to comprehend the film's larger cultural significance. Selections range from the anecdotal --Peter Bogdanovich's interview with Orson Welles--to the critical, with discussions on the scripts and sound track, and a discussion of what accounts for the film's enduring popularity. Contributors include James Naremore, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Robert L. Carringer, François Thomas, Michael Denning, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, and Paul Arthur.

"Through detailed examinations of passages from classic films, Marilyn Fabe supplies the analytic tools and background in film history and theory to enable us to see more in every film we watch"--Page [4] of cover.

Provides advice for aspiring screenwriters on how to write scripts for television and motion pictures, including what topics are popular, how to rework scenes, and how to sell screenplays in Hollywood.

In A Modernist Cinema, sixteen distinguished scholars in the field of the New Modernist Studies explore the interrelationships among modernism, cinema, and modernity. Focusing on several culturally influential films from Europe, America, and Asia produced between 1914 and 1941, this collection of essays contends that cinema was always a modernist enterprise. Examining the dialectical relationship between a modernist cinema and modernity itself, these essays reveal how the movies represented and altered our notions and practices of modern life, as well as how the so-called crises of modernity shaped the evolution of filmmaking. Attending to the technical achievements and formal qualities of the works of several prominent directors - Giovanni Pastrone, D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, F. W. Murnau, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Luis Buñuel, Yasujiro Ozu, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, Leni Riefenstahl, and Orson Welles - these essays investigate several interrelated topics: how a modernist cinema represented and intervened in the political and social struggles of the era; the ambivalent relationship between cinema and the other modernist arts; the controversial interconnection between modern technology and the new art of filmmaking; the significance of representing the mobile human body in a new medium; the gendered history of modernity; and the transformative effects of cinema on modern conceptions of temporality, spatial relations, and political geography.

This York Film note discusses the film from a broad academic and critical perspective, setting plot, themes and techniques in context and exploring the film's significance. The book encourages students to appreciate differing interpretations of each film and to develop their own critical thinking.Key Features*Film Reviews *Background to the film *Biographies of key players *Form and Narrative *Style and Technique *Culture and cinematic contexts *Bibliography for further study *Glossary of cinematic terms

At the age of twenty-five, Orson Welles (1915–1985) directed, co-wrote, and starred in Citizen Kane, widely regarded as the greatest film ever made. But Welles was such a revolutionary filmmaker that he found himself at odds with the Hollywood studio system. His work was so far ahead of its time that he never regained the wide popular following he had once enjoyed as a young actor-director on the radio. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career challenges the conventional wisdom that Welles’s career after Kane was a long decline and that he spent his final years doing little but eating and making commercials while squandering his earlier promise. In this intimate and often surprising personal portrait, Joseph McBride shows instead how Welles never stopped directing radical, adventurous films and was always breaking new artistic ground as a filmmaker. McBride is the first author to provide a comprehensive examination of the films of Welles's artistically rich yet little-known later period in the United States (1970–1985), when McBride knew and worked with him. McBride reports on Welles's daringly experimental film projects, including the legendary 1970–1976 unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, Welles’s satire of Hollywood during the “Easy Rider era”; McBride gives a unique insider perspective on Welles from the viewpoint of a young film critic playing a spoof of himself in a cast headed by John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich. To put Welles’s widely misunderstood later years into context, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? reexamines the filmmaker’s entire life and career. McBride offers many fresh insights into the collapse of Welles’s Hollywood career in the 1940s, his subsequent political blacklisting, and his long period of European exile. An enlightening and entertaining look at Welles's brilliant and enigmatic career as a filmmaker, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? serves as a major reinterpretation of Welles’s life and work. McBride clears away the myths that have long obscured Welles’s later years and have caused him to be falsely regarded as a tragic failure. McBride’s revealing portrait of this great artist will change the terms of how Orson Welles is understood as a man, an actor, a political figure, and a filmmaker.