{"id":3777,"date":"2012-07-27T10:44:26","date_gmt":"2012-07-27T16:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=3777"},"modified":"2012-07-27T10:44:26","modified_gmt":"2012-07-27T16:44:26","slug":"citizen-kane-still-the-greatest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=3777","title":{"rendered":"Citizen Kane Still The Greatest?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nOrson Welles\u2019s 1941 feature tracks the rise and fall of an American media mogul from the Colorado backwoods to a lonely death in his fairy-tale palace. Every 10 years Sight and Sound magazine has canvassed a caucus of critics for their top 10 films. Every time since 1962, Kane has taken the top spot. The results of the latest poll will be published on August 2. And for the first time in 50 years, there is a distinct possibility of a Kane mutiny.
\nThis week I finished making a radio documentary about the 50-year reign of Welles\u2019s masterpiece \u2013 and heard how it might all soon be over, thanks to a change in constituency boundaries. The last time the survey was conducted, 145 mainly anglophone critics were polled. This time an 1,800-strong body of writers, curators and directors have been asked, a group representing the film cultures of most countries in the world. An electorate as broad as that might not feel the critical anxiety of influence that has kept Kane on its pedestal. Tellingly, the longlist, at 2,000 titles, is already much longer than its predecessors.
\nA decade ago, Hitchcock\u2019s Vertigo, Renoir\u2019s La R\u00e8gle du jeu and the two Godfather films were the principal threats to Kane\u2019s status. Eisenstein\u2019s Battleship Potemkin also had Welles\u2019s picture in its sights \u2013 along with Singin\u2019 in the Rain and Fellini\u2019s 8\u00bd. But this year it might have to reckon with younger masterpieces. The bleakly brilliant Austrian director Michael Haneke may see his Cach\u00e9 or The White Ribbon flutter into the top 10, for example.
\nNick James, editor of Sight and Sound, isn\u2019t quite knitting beside the guillotine, but he does think that it would be good for the medium of cinema to hear that its endeavours did not reach their zenith 71 years ago. \u201cI do think it will be great for younger critics if they didn\u2019t have to do due obeisance to Welles, who\u2019s been at the centre of an industry of admiration for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

James has never put the film on his own top 10. He describes it as \u201cestimable\u201d. (You can imagine Welles\u2019s eyes narrowing at a glacial superlative like that.) \u201cIf Kane doesn\u2019t win,\u201d he says, \u201cpart of me will want to leap for joy \u2013 and the other part of me will be slightly sad for Orson.\u201d
\nIt\u2019s an appropriate response. Being slightly sad for Orson is part of the reason why the film achieved its primacy. Welles was 25 when he directed, starred in and co-wrote Kane. He was the boy genius who persuaded America that it had been invaded by Martians (with his radio version of War of the Worlds) and persuaded RKO studios to turn itself into his personal toybox. By the late Fifties, however, he was considered \u2013 somewhat unfairly \u2013 to be profligate, unreliable, difficult. He spent much of his later years pretending not to see the embarrassment in the eyes of producers who wouldn\u2019t invest in his next picture.
\nThese wilderness years coincided with the rise of a new generation of European critics and directors who were ready to celebrate him as a prophet of their own ideas. Welles was the consummate auteur \u2013 they loved consummate auteurs. The canonisation of Kane was a kind of consolation prize: if the studios wouldn\u2019t give him his due, then his fans would celebrate him instead.
\nJean-Luc Godard, Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol \u2013 the forces of the French New Wave \u2013 were ready to carry him aloft. But, chief among his fans was Peter Bogdanovich \u2013 the director of The Last Picture Show \u2013 who became Welles\u2019s staunchest supporter. \u201cKane is a picture that announces its own greatness,\u201d he tells me. \u201cWhen someone asks you \u2018what is the greatest film ever made?\u2019, it\u2019s pretty easy to say, \u2018well Citizen Kane looks like the greatest film ever made, we\u2019ll call it that\u2019.\u201d
\nTo Bogdanovich, though, the question is pretty vulgar. \u201cIt\u2019s an absurd game we\u2019re playing,\u201d he says. He has declined to draw up his own list, preferring to file a piece to Sight and Sound on the futility of the exercise. And he has a prediction to make: Kane will be toppled.
\n\u201cI don\u2019t know what it\u2019ll be,\u201d he admits, \u201cbut if it\u2019s something made recently I\u2019ll throw tomatoes. If it\u2019s Star Wars or The Godfather or Saving Private Ryan there will be a scream from me that will be heard around the world.\u201d
\nNot all, however, are so sure that Kane is about to be fired. \u201cI just don\u2019t see what would take over from it,\u201d reflects Welles\u2019s biographer David Thomson. \u201cNeither Vertigo or The Godfather is exactly a new film.\u201d But if Kane does win, he reasons, its rule will be eternal. \u201cIt\u2019s clear that by 2022 this medium will be so different that you probably won\u2019t be able to call it cinema anymore \u2013 so Kane may be the all-time classic movie when cinema is regarded as something that\u2019s not done anymore, like Commedia dell\u2019arte, or cathedral-building.\u201d
\nCharles Foster Kane raised an empire and lost an empire. Orson Welles did something similar. Kane, though, has never undergone a comparable collapse in fortune. And if Thomson is right, being hailed for 50 years as the best film ever made may simply be the first stage on the road to a higher status \u2013 as the emblem of the medium that made it.