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Film Series – Citizen Kane
February 17 @ 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Beat the dead-of-winter blues with seven relaxed evenings viewing and
discussing quality films at a historic venue facilitated by retired educator, Bob Thornley.
Get beyond “I liked” or “I didn’t like” the film. Learn and discuss basic filmmaking techniques and thematic/symbolic methods used by filmmakers to enhance meaning.
Tickets available at the door – Walk-ins welcome!
Arguably the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane will be the final film of the series. When he was only 25, Orson Wells co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in this classic 1941 film that has repeatedly been upheld as a masterpiece of American cinema. Revolutionary in its time, the film begins at the end with the death of its title character, and then flashing back to various periods in the protagonist’s life, gradually moves forward to where it began. The plot, loosely based upon the life of William Randolph Hearst, follows Kane from his early childhood when the deed to an abandoned mine is left as payment by a boarder at his mother’s boarding house. When the mine becomes one of the richest gold mines in existence, we follow Kane through his life, raised by a banker-guardian, as he becomes one of the wealthiest men alive.
Following the tremendous Broadway success of his Mercury Theatre and the 1938 radio broadcast “The War of the Worlds”, Welles came to Hollywood and signed a contract with RKO Pictures in 1939. Almost unheard of at the time, the boy genius was given total freedom to
develop his own story, to use his own cast and crew, and have final cut privileges on the film. Asa result, Welles gave us Citizen Kane, a film that creates so many film conventions and does so many things so well, it is sure to live on as a cultural touchstone and, to many, as the
greatest film ever made.
