Citizen+Kane+and+the+History+of+Film


 * //Citizen Kane// and the History of Film**

While looking into the history of film and the biggest influence that go along with it, I noticed the constant allusion to the film //Citizen Kane//. I have noted that the film was important before, but I never really knew how important it was to the development of film away from just a sort of hobby that imitated plays to an actual art form. And the more I researched it, I found a glaring irony surrounding the film that I think would work extremely well for this paper.

The thing is I'm not going to just talk about //Citizen Kane//. I'm going to talk about where film was before //Citizen Kane//, and what the movie did for films after it by raising questions of what the problem surrounding the film was. I made a in-progress template:

The film was incredible and revolutionary, but it has a glaring problem. -Was it the storytelling? -No, Brand new way of storytelling, an unreliable narrator, worked in flashbacks and other people’s testimonies -Was it the cinematography? -No, it was revolutionary:

First film in existence was two seconds long in 1888: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1i40rnpOsA First film to really start the bandwagon of film came from 1895 and the Lumiere brothers with Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjtXXypztyw

Not just apples and oranges, even though it came out fifty years later. Movies were still filmed as if they were on a stage, with a camera pointed in one direction, focused on one thing, and on one action. Look even at //a scene from The Wolfman//, a movie released the same year (1941) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q4Wn63uof8 as opposed to the dynamics of just a conversation scene of Citizen Kane http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAHaRDlUrLw

speak of train pulling into station, Moliere, and it not moving forward from that. Wells attributes to nothing but dumb luck. -Was it the film itself? -It was nominated for six Academy Awards, considered the greatest film of all time by AFI, the story is still referenced and used by filmmakers today (think //The Social Network//)

Of course, I'm not going to list the inconsistency here, but I am very excited about it.