Orson Welles masterpiece is screening at MoMA this week as part of month-long look at 1941
CITIZEN KANE (Orson Welles, 1941
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
May 4-6, 1:30
Tickets: $10, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www2.warnerbros.com/citizenkane
Citizen Kane is the best-made film we have ever had the pleasure to watch — again and again and again — and it is even more brilliant on the big screen. A young, brash, determined Orson Welles created a masterpiece unlike anything seen before or since — a beautifully woven complex narrative with a stunning visual style (compliments of director of photography Gregg Toland) and a fabulous cast of veterans from his Mercury radio days, including Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Paul Stewart, and Agnes Moorehead. Each moment in the film is unforgettable, not a word or shot out of place as Welles details the rise and fall of a self-obsessed media mogul. The film is prophetic in many ways; at one point Kane utters, “The news goes on for twenty-four hours a day,” foreseeing today’s 24/7 news overload. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen it and you know what Rosebud refers to; the film is about a whole lot more than just that minor mystery. Like every film Welles made, Citizen Kane was fraught with controversy, not the least of which was a very unhappy William Randolph Hearst seeking to destroy the negative of a film he thought ridiculed him. Kane won only one Oscar, for writing — which also resulted in controversy when Herman J. Mankiewicz claimed that he was the primary scribe, not Welles. The film lost the Oscar for Best Picture to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, but it has topped nearly every greatest-films-of-all-time list ever since. Citizen Kane will be screening May 4-6 at 1:30 as part of MoMA’s ongoing series “An Auteurist History of Film,” focusing on the director as creator and which this month looks back at that banner year of 1941 with How Green Was My Valley (May 11-13, 1:30), John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (May 18-20, 1:30), and Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve (May 25-27, 1:30).