5. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, USA, 1941)

This film is widely acclaimed as the greatest movie of all time. Both critics and directors in last Sight and Sound poll declared it as the best. Even imdb users rate it very highly (8.6/10). To say something new about this film is almost impossible, but I'll try to say a couple of words about its original screenplay because everyone knows everything about Toland's really great and innovative cinematography.

Maybe the most amazing point of the movie is the fact that this technically brilliant and emotionally powerful masterwork was created by 25 (!) years old actor, director, producer and screenwriter Orson Welles. Today perspicaciousness of young author is becoming more and more obvious: on the base of contemporary for him material (he used destiny of newspaper owner Hurst) he created mythological personality. Inconceivability of Kane is in the narrative structure of the film: it used almost impossible for that time aesthetics of fundamental mismatching between chronological order of events and order of constituent parts of the work (they are five different stories by different people which thought they had known Kane). Besides, formal plot is not corresponded with so called "time of narrator".

Some critics find Citizen Kane to some extent close to Proust's concept of time (although some episodes repeat we can see his life in its natural evolution). Word "rosebud" as told by dying Kane becomes initial point in the plot development - like in Proust's work the cookie "madeleine" in the cup of tea stimulates recollections. "Empirical time" dissolves in "subjective time". 

It seems that simulated newsreel in the beginning of the movie should bring in historical objectivity. However it turned out to be a mythological situation: like in Joyce's "Ulysses" Dublin inhabitants correspond with heroes of "Odyssey". And Kane's attempt to build huge castle "Xanadu" with collection of art masterworks is an aspiration for running from the present to the past for the sake of creating of mythological world, "neverland". But after his death - it's a useless world, like a storehouse of forgotten, useless things. 

And far childhood of the hero loses its entity like his sleigh with rosebud - just a thrown out and burned down forever piece of wood. And glassy ball with winter landsape falled out Kane's hand is evidence of unavailability of that part of his being. Actually Orson Welles created not the secret of Kane's life but the greatest cinematic puzzle which becomes every day more and more unresolvable. There is a peculiar "time of a viewer" in the complex narrative structure of the film that allows to carry on a dialogue with this cinematic masterpiece, which makes multiversion nature of human destiny and many-sided origin of human personality an aesthetical principle of fixing of the eternally changing reality in the film.