Essays on Orson Welles

Citizen Kane (1941) Film Viewing Assignment

Director: Orson Welles Film Editor: Robert Wise The one major and the three main supporting actors and their character names: Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane, a rich and successful publisher of newspapers

Joseph Cotten as Jedediah Leland

Dorothy Comingore as Susan Alexander Kane Everett Sloane as Mr. Bernstein Let us consider the cult film “Citizen Kane” shot by young Orson Welles in 1941. The film is based on the script of the same Orson Welles in a duet with Herman Jacob Mankiewicz. The leading role in the film played Orson Welles himself as Charles Foster Kane, a ...

Shot in 1941 by Orson Welles, Citizen Kane stays one of the best films in the history of cinematography. After more than 70 years, the film is still admired by the critics and the audience and inspires dozens of filmmakers. The film’s numerous phenomenal artistic and intertextual codes testify of the merited fame. Calling Citizen Kane “a discourse on method”, Andre Bazin probably meant the unlimited source of the cinematographic devices the film represents for the ordinary cinema lovers and the professional filmmakers. First of all, it is significant to understand the reasons why the film had such ...

The film Citizen Kane was produced on September 5th 1941. The lead actors were Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton and Dorothy Comingore. The film was directed by Orson Welles who was also the lead actor in the film. The head of cinematography was Gregg Toland. Charles, the lead actor in the film, is depicted as a man who is so engulfed in his search for material things that he loses his humanity and soul and becomes a greedy man . The plot of the film is developed through the eyes of the young Charles, giving the audience a window into the ...

The two passages written by Bordwell and Toland provide the analysis of different aspects of Citizen Kane, one of the most legendary products in the cinema industry. Gregg Toland, an outstanding cinematographer, primarily famous for his work with Orson Welles on the movie Citizen Kane, in the paper “How I Broke the Rules in Citizen Kane” makes the analysis of his collaboration with Welles as well as the analysis of major achievements which were made in terms of this collaboration during the shootings of the film (Toland 569). Firstly, he explains the differences between the terms “commandment” and “convention” ...