Is Kane the greatest movie ever made? Between 1962 and 2002 that was its reputation and the consensus view: it topped Sight & Sound’s poll for four consecutive decades, only to be displaced by Vertigo in 2012. This year, it polled #3rd, behind Jeanne Dielman and Vertigo. Is Welles’ reputation in eclipse then? Does his first and most accomplished Hollywood movie withstand the test of time? Does it still speak to us, intellectually and/or emotionally, or has this vaunted classic accumulated too much dust sitting on top of the canon?
Orson Welles’s debut is an extraordinary piece of work whichever way you look at it. This was the most sophisticated movie to come out of the Hollywood studio system to that time, and it opened up the creative possibilities of the narrative feature film on an unprecedented scale.
Nor is the film “only” an aesthetic tour-de-force. Thematically, it’s just as complex. It’s the life story of media magnate Charles Foster Kane, or William Randolph Hearst, or George Orson Welles, but someone else is always telling it, and then someone else is retelling it from a different perspective. “’Rosebud”, Kane’s enigmatic last word, remains a potent symbol because the different meanings ascribed to it aren’t wrong, they all have value, even if none of them gives us the whole story.
The impossibility of accounting for someone’s life may be the key Welles’ theme, along with the equal impossibility of measuring up to your own aspirations. There is a terrible emptiness at the heart of such a project, and Welles’ dynamic, baroque style can be interpreted as a rush to deny or stave off that knowledge, just as Kane himself fills warehouses with objets d’art.
Sunday’s screening in our PANTHEON series will feature free refreshments and a short introduction by an expert in the field.
Dec 17: Introduced by VIFF Centre programmer + a special guest
The former champion still feels like a grand summation of film’s early development as an artform and a glimpse of the future, too. At the same time, it’s a hugely entertaining portrait of the media narcissism and demagoguery that underscore American politics.
Scott Tobias
Sadly, it’s fashionable now to chip away at its greatness. This temptation should be resisted. The audacious American masterpiece of the 20th century, not only for its cinematic innovations and storytelling vigour, but for how accurately it dissects the ’American character’.
Eddie Muller
film that amply rewards repeated viewings, revealing new depths, new nuanced details, new mysteries. There is no greatest film, but if there were, for me this would surely be the strongest contender.
Geoff Andrew
Orson Welles
Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane
USA
1941
English
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Credits
Producer
Orson Welles
Screenwriter
Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles
Cinematography
Gregg Toland
Editor
Robert Wise
Original Music
Bernard Herrmann
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
