film

Of course, in the eyes of cinéphiles around the world, Welles has always been “with it” to one degree or another. Indeed, it has become banal to say that Citizen Kane launched more directorial careers than any film before or since. But, like most things banal, it is nonetheless impossible to deny. Welles, with his myriad forays into almost every medium of the performing arts, is not fully of cinema, even as he remains its most potent avatar

Orson welles

A great deal of that formidable reputation rests, as everyone knows, on a single film. Even to speak the name of Citizen Kane is to invoke something like the cinematic equivalent of the Mona Lisa – a work of art everyone knows and understands to be an unqualified masterpiece. It is, perhaps, an unfortunate fate. More than a few visitors to the Louvre have been disappointed by the Giaconda’s tiny size and physical inaccessibility. In the same manner, Citizen Kane is everywhere adored and rarely enjoyed. When the film was released in Argentina, the not-yet-blind Jorge Luis Borges presciently remarked that it was a film more likely to be admired than seen. In this, he was mistaken. Citizen Kane remains widely attended. But the film is, unfortunately, so weighed down by its own reputation that it has become one of those ossified classics placed on a pedestal so high that it loses the magnificent immediacy that put it there in the first place.