Citizen Kane (1941)

Nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. This film is precisely that labyrinth.

— Jorge Luis Borges (1941)

Trump is not Kane, he is not even his corrupt rival Boss Jim Gittes (whom Kane is all set to defeat in the gubernatorial race before Gittes traps him in an affair with the nightclub singer Susan Alexander) because Gittes works in the shadows. Trump is post-Kane and post-satire: he advertises his own cruelty and mediocrity because they garner him support. The main difference between Trump and Kane is that Kane is a human tragedy and Trump is an American one. Both were raised in privilege, but Charlie Kane had brains, talent, and charm: all qualities which eluded Trump. The tragedy of Kane is how he misused them. The tragedy of Trump is that he was trapped time and again by numerous Gittes of his own (Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, Billy Bush…), but he still won high office, because Americans were past caring about all that.

— Julien Allen (Reverse Shot)

One reason why Donald Trump can call this his favourite movie is that while it is critical of power, it’s also in thrall to power, and isn’t capable of imagining a world outside that power.

— Will Sloan

In the very opening of Citizen Kane, the music really tells you what ‘Rosebud’ is. When Kane is dying, all the musical motifs and atmospheres of his childhood are presented and the search for ‘Rosebud’ has really been told to the audience right away. At the end of the film, before the camera discovers the sled, the theme is given out again. And of course it also recurs at key moments of conversation between Kane and all the leading characters. [And for the disastrous opera debut,] we needed something that would terrify the girl and put the audience a bit in suspense. I wrote the aria in a very high key which would make most performances sound strained. Then we got a very light lyric soprano and made her sing this heavy dramatic soprano part with a very heavy orchestration which created the feeling that she was in quicksand. Later on, that aria was sung many times by Eileen Farrell, who had the voice to sing it absolutely accurately in that key, and it sounded very impressive. Some writers have said that the singer in the film performed it deliberately badly, but that's not so. She was a good singer performing in too high a key.

— Bernard Herrmann (Sight and Sound, 1971)

Citizen Kane remains as hard to talk about as ever, due largely to its symbiotic relationship with its own making and its reception forever complicating and deepening the psychological and philosophical valleys that exist within the proper narrative. You may stare at it, amazed and entertained, but feel dwarfed by the very idea of attempting to untangle the crow’s nest that’s formed through its ever-expanding histories. And what continuously stupefies this critic is that time works no miracles on the film: Scenes remain familiar, but the narrative seems to shift every time that you return to it. No wonder it’s such a pain to pin down. It sounds hyperbolic, but I might as well be trying to say something new about the life of Jesus.

— Chris Cabin and Eric Henderson (Slant Magazine)

Kane is an explosion of form, combining effects and techniques and stylistic flourishes from the preceding decades of filmmaking (and coming up with several of its own), all in service to an audience-unfriendly downer of a story that offers no uplifting messages or clear moral vision. It was at once the peak achievement of Hollywood’s golden age and a rebuke of it—the work of an auteur thumbing his nose at the studio system even as he took full advantage of the resources it provided him. [A] work of the left that still seemed to understand the allure of money and power.

[…]

François Truffaut, a teenager at the time, recalled in reverential tones his experiences seeing Kane over and over again alongside fellow cinephiles. Immediately following the war, France was overwhelmed with American films from the years of the occupation, and a generation of movie lovers had binged on the work of Hollywood’s golden age in record time. For them, Citizen Kane seemed to be not just the culmination of the American cinema they had recently become obsessed with but a quantum leap forward for the medium as a whole, the kind of work that both demonstrated immense technical expertise and laid bare the cinematic collision between art and technology. Kane was the rare American film to be shown undubbed in France, which allowed viewers to appreciate Welles’s experiments with sound even as they were marveling at the movie’s visual style. [Citizen Kane] offered international viewers a dark vision of America that, in the wake of the war, was starting to cut deep—a vision of unchecked power and individualism. This became particularly resonant in subsequent years, as Europe entered an economic recovery that saw the rise of a vibrant, sophisticated middle class, which in turn fed feelings of unease and ennui. These so-called boom years would go on to inspire cinematic works depicting the existential crises fueled by acquisition, competition, capitalism—everything from Ermanno Olmi’s Il posto to Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita to Michelangelo Antonioni’s and Jean-Luc Godard’s many eviscerations of bourgeois culture.

[…]

For all its chiaroscuro condemnation of Kane’s ossified wealth, the film never quite settles on a vision of him: he is alternately noble and petty, self-reflective yet deranged. We see him delusionally and angrily clapping for Susan Alexander’s opera performance on the same night that he goes back to the newspaper offices and almost cheerfully finishes the drunk and incapacitated Jed Leland’s vicious review of her performance. Which of these is the real Charles Foster Kane? The mad millionaire or the principled newspaperman? That both images of the man feel plausible is a testament to Welles’s performance and the behavioral acuity of the script. The real Kane is elusive, maybe even unknowable, but each version of him is furiously compelling and believable.

[…]

Kane, a child raised by a bank, seeks a symbolic return to his mother, thereby revealing the inadequacy of the patriarchal order to give his life meaning and fulfillment.

— Bilge Ebiri (Criterion)