New Season Online
For our third film of 2021 we’ve decided, at long last, to justifiably enhance our archive of nearly one thousand film titles with possibly the most famous of them all, Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles.
Released in 1941, when Welles was aged only 25 years, Kane was simultaneously his debut feature film and an undoubted cinematic masterpiece.
For fifty years, Citizen Kane reigned supreme as the Greatest Film Ever in five consecutive ten-year polls of the top 100 films by Sight&Sound’s critics, until displaced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in 2012 (which we screened in 2017).
Maintaining past ABCD practice, we’ve produced a Programme Note for the film which is attached to this Newsletter, with March 25th at 7.30pm being set for a Zoom meeting to exchange your impressions of it. If you wish to partake in this event, please access the link in the Programme Note for the meeting particulars. (You will of course need to have the Zoom ‘app’ installed on your computer.)
For those who wish to send in reactions individually, please Email info@abfilms.org.uk with your score (A → E) and comments. These reactions and comments will be published on the ABCD Website (https://abfilms.org.uk) and/or included in the Zoom discussion relevant to the film. You will also find the scores and comments for February’s film Morvern Callar on the Website.
Reviewing Citizen Kane in 2002 for BBCi Films, David Wood wrote “A potent metaphor for the betrayal of principles, the souring of the American Dream and an intelligent meditation on the corrupting nature of power, the film’s reputation is nothing short of gargantuan. […] What is beyond doubt is that Welles and his collaborative troupe […] and fantastic cast of leading players managed to invent a whole new cinematic vocabulary […] that influenced the future of cinema and [became], in many ways, the benchmark of film production.”
The film is available to stream now on BBC iPlayer.