Orson Welles
Citizen Kane

Let's clarify one thing right away: Orson Welles was the greatest of them all. More than Chaplin, more than Kubrick, more than Hitchcock, more than anyone. He was the one who transformed cinema, bringing it to its current grandeur. If the great artists of the past (think of Murnau, Ophuls, Pabst) had somehow 'invented' the cinematic message, Orson Welles modernized it. He invented camera movements and shots that no one had ever dreamed of realizing (but that everyone uses today), revolutionized the very concept of scriptwriting and brought cinema to its primordial form: focusing on the image and neglecting, or at least not obsessing excessively over, the plot. The big mistake that we've all more or less made (and that many still make today) is thinking that a film, to be beautiful, needs a plot. In reality, cinema is image; its strength lies in the power of vision, in being gigantic through just a detail, leaving the plot in the background or sometimes not considering it at all. Not for nothing, the greatest films in history are almost all devoid of a plot: "2001: A Space Odyssey", "8½"; "Foolish Wives". Not to mention David Lynch! But the greatness of Orson Welles is not limited to these things: he was the first to skillfully use the flashback as we understand it today; he created modern editing (much faster and brisker than the norm), made wide-angle lenses a sort of psychological transfer with the viewer, and tried to get as close to reality as possible, perhaps leaving aside the truth.

All this at only 26 years old, on the occasion of "Citizen Kane," translated by us as "Quarto potere." It was 1941. "Citizen Kane" is rightly considered the greatest film of all time. The plot, if you will, is trivial: Charles Foster Kane, a publishing magnate, whispers a word before dying: "Rosebud." A journalist investigates the mysterious word. He will interview Kane's second wife, best friend, and right-hand man: each will tell their own truth. Those who have seen the film know the ending; for the others, I leave the surprise.
"Citizen Kane" is a film strongly desired by Welles (it is, after all, his debut), but at the same time wanted by RKO. Welles was coming off the success of his radio show "The War of the Worlds." And even here, a parenthesis could be opened: during a famous radio broadcast (highly followed in the USA), Welles played a prank on the American population. He spoke of an imminent alien landing on Earth. Americans took the news as real and attempted to flee to the Canadian and Mexican borders. Telling it today makes one smile, but this event was, for the USA, even more tragic than the Wall Street Crash of 1929 or the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

RKO signed Orson Welles with an extraordinary contract: he would be the producer, actor, director, and screenwriter of his films. "Citizen Kane" was the capital work: a story of a pure and tough American, a story that tells the ambiguous love of power, denouncing the evils of the Greatest Systems (among other things, still very current today), but absolutely innovative from a technical standpoint: relentless use of flashbacks, situations repeated multiple times with always different shots, depth of field, tilted and oblique shots for the first time, dizzying shots from top to bottom; the role of the "director," the true engine of such a fascinating and complex operation.
Two authoritative opinions would suffice to understand the greatness of such a work. Jorges Luis Borges said: "It suffers from gigantism, pedantry, boredom. It is not intelligent, it is genial: in the darkest and obscurest sense of the term." François Truffaut replied: "It is the absolute film, the film that brings together every cinematic genre without being like any other."

One could talk for hours about Orson Welles's filmography, about the character Welles for years. The anecdotes about "Citizen Kane" are endless (just to mention one: in Rome, the film stayed in theatres for only three days because the audience began booing due to the, in their view, low quality of the film). Nevertheless, "Citizen Kane" is cinema, and everything that came after cannot help but be inspired by this masterpiece. What was before was grand, but perfection belongs only to the titans.