85 years later, Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles, isn’t merely a film that has survived, but rather one that has become part of the vocabulary of filmmaking.
Written by Sarah Abraham
The film looks at the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane (played by director Welles), a fictional character based on American media barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, as well as Chicago tycoons Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick. When the film premiered on September 5, 1941, it wasn’t immediately the universally acknowledged masterpiece we now imagine it to have been. Citizen Kane faced enormous controversy surrounding its resemblance to Hearst; it struggled to secure theatres, and ultimately underperformed during its initial run. Thankfully, its reputation grew substantially in the years that followed, and that actually makes its longevity more remarkable. Citizen Kane didn’t arrive fully formed as one of "the greatest movies ever made." It grew into that through decades of critics, filmmakers, scholars, and audiences actively returning to it.
The cinephile with a keen eye can detect Kane’s DNA everywhere: fractured timelines, stories reconstructed through multiple perspectives, protagonists whose public identities obscure private lives, newsreel or mockumentary techniques, dramatic low-angle photography, deep-focus compositions, montage sequences, and so much more. These weren’t all inventions of Welles, but the film displayed how powerful they could be when treated as a true dialect of cinema. That is why the film’s influence feels almost bigger than its individual innovations. Modern filmmakers don’t merely imitate Citizen Kane; they aim to borrow from it.
Directors ranging from François Truffaut, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese have cited Citizen Kane as an influence. Even filmmakers who aren’t consciously trying to make "their version" of the film end up using techniques it helped establish as part of our modern cinematic grammar.
Citizen Kane is a film about media that somehow keeps becoming more relevant as our current media changes.
Kane is a newspaper magnate who constructs an enormous public image while becoming increasingly isolated from the people around him. He’s obsessed with controlling what the world sees, while the film itself spends two hours demonstrating that no single version of a person can ever completely explain them. Believe it or not, this is incredibly modern.
The film begins with Kane’s death and then essentially asks: "Who was this man?" Every forthcoming answer contradicts or complicates another. That’s one reason Citizen Kane remains so fascinating in an age of celebrity culture, billionaires, media empires, carefully curated public personas, and endless attempts to turn people’s lives into narratives. The film’s subject isn’t just a "rich newspaper guy." It’s the relationship between power, publicity, memory, and identity. It’s about confronting the impossibility of reducing an entire human’s life to one explanation.
After 85 years, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Citizen Kane is that it has become almost impossible to watch cinema without seeing something that has resulted from this little giant of a classic. It remains revered because it is technically beautiful. It remains studied due to its endlessly rich construction. Above all, it remains emotionally compelling because beneath all of the formal experimentation is a painfully recognizable story about a person who acquires almost everything except the one thing he actually wants.
In 1941, Orson Welles made a film about a man attempting to leave an incredible mark on the world. Eighty-five years later, Citizen Kane has done exactly that.
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