Rubin Museum screening of Orson Welles masterpiece focuses on memory
CITIZEN KANE (Orson Welles, 1941
Cabaret Cinema, Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, March 30, free with $7 bar minimum, 9:30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org/cabaretcinema
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 March 30 at 9:30 as part of the Rubin Museum series “You Must Remember This,” focusing on memory in conjunction with its current Brainwave series and will be introduced by Israeli journalist Rula Jebreal. Admission to the Rubin is free on Friday nights, so you should also check out the exhibitions “Hero, Villain, Yeti,” “Modernist Art from India,” and the outstanding “Casting the Divine.”