0:00 Does Citizen Kane still compel us as a living, breathing piece of cinema, or has it finally hardened into an untouchable museum piece?0:08 Last week we argued over whether The Godfather still carries genuine dramatic danger or simply coasts on its prestige.0:16 And here we are at the foundational text itself.0:19 I am standing right on the line with this one, Oliver.0:22 Look at the Empire readers poll published just days ago, on November fifth.0:27 Eighty-five years after its release, Kane dropped all the way to number fifty-two.0:33 That is confirmed on the boards.0:35 And honestly, when you put it in front of someone this hour, it feels less like a movie and—0:41 And yet, that is not the whole picture.0:43 It is a remarkable story, Nadia, but dropping down a popular poll merely proves how thoroughly it conquered the medium.0:51 When Orson Welles walked onto the RKO lot at twenty-four, he fundamentally rebuilt the grammar of film.0:57 If it feels like a textbook today, it's only because nearly every great director—1:03 I hear you, but that is the exact trap!1:05 You're praising its influence, not its impact on a viewer right now.1:10 The deep-focus cinematography from Gregg Toland, the ceilinged sets, the sweeping long takes—at the time, yes, completely radical.1:18 But today, an audience watches those tricks and they feel like...1:22 well, tricks.1:23 It's a technical demonstration.1:25 It keeps the viewer completely outside the emotional core of the story, and—1:30 But that emotional distance is PRECISELY the point of the narrative.1:34 The film isn't a sentimental melodrama about Charles Foster Kane; it's an autopsy.1:40 It begins with his death, and then we follow a reporter trying to assemble a man out of contradictory fragments.1:47 Welles isn't trying to make us weep for Kane.1:50 He is demonstrating the terrifying impossibility of ever truly—1:54 Okay, but consider what that actually produces on the screen.1:58 It produces an intellectual puzzle, not a human drama.2:01 We watch Thompson interview five different people, we hopscotch through fractured timelines, and at the end of two hours, what do we have?2:10 A warehouse full of statues and a burning sled.2:13 It's colder than Xanadu itself.2:15 You admire the architecture, but you freeze inside it.2:19 Cold?2:19 Consider the breakfast montage between Kane and his first wife, Emily.2:24 In under three minutes, using brisk pans and silent shifts in wardrobe, Welles maps the slow, agonizing death of a marriage across sixteen years.2:33 It's devastatingly modern.2:35 Most contemporary dramas take two hours to articulate what Welles captures between the passing of a morning newspaper.2:42 That breakfast table sequence is brilliant editing, but it's brilliant shorthand!2:48 It's a diagram of an estrangement.2:50 When you look at the central performances, especially Welles playing Kane across fifty years of age, it feels theatrical.2:58 It's roaring radio bravura.2:59 You never forget for one second that you're watching a twenty-five-year-old prodigy buried under layers of greasepaint showing off just how brilliantly he can play an old tyrant.3:11 I must cut in—that swagger, that theatricality, is the character.3:15 Kane is a media titan who treats his entire existence as a public performance.3:20 He creates the news, he buys an opera house for a wife who cannot sing, he builds an empire out of pure ego.3:27 Welles's performance isn't an accident of youthful arrogance; it mirrors the monstrous, hollow ambition of William Randolph Hearst and every press baron who followed.3:38 That part is confirmed—Hearst certainly felt the sting enough to try to burn the negatives.3:44 But here's the rub, Oliver: when a film's innovations become the air we breathe, the film itself loses its electricity.3:51 The radical becomes standard.3:53 When you watch that famous shot where the camera glides through the skylight down to Susan Alexander at the nightclub table, it doesn't shock anymore.4:03 Every prestige television show does that before the opening credits.4:07 If the shock is gone, what's carrying the weight?4:10 What carries it is the profound skepticism at its heart.4:14 Most Hollywood films promise you an answer.4:17 Citizen Kane gives you Rosebud—a cheap, sentimental trinket—and then immediately tells you it explains nothing.4:24 The reporter says it plainly at the end: Rosebud is just a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle.4:30 It doesn't summarize a life.4:32 Welles made a big-budget studio film about the failure of narrative itself.4:37 That isn't standard; it's still dangerous.4:39 Wait, you can't have it both ways!4:42 You can't say Rosebud is an empty gimmick to mock Hollywood conventions, and then expect an audience to lean in for two hours waiting for the reveal!4:51 It's playing a trick on the viewer.4:53 It's Welles the magician grinning from behind the curtain.4:57 But cinema IS a magic act!4:59 The question, of course, is what the trick leaves behind in your hands.5:03 Does it leave mere spectacle, or a haunting question about what we trade away for power?5:09 Hh.5:09 Look, I will give you this much: the theme of a press baron poisoning public discourse to fill a hole in his own soul has not aged a single day.5:19 You see that headline Kane prints about the Spanish-American War, manufacturing reality out of thin air, and it feels like this morning's feed.5:28 The politics of it are razor-sharp.5:30 But cinema is also about rhythm, empathy, and immediate communion.5:34 And when I look at contemporary audiences encountering it, I see them studying it.5:40 They respect it.5:41 They take notes.5:42 But their pulse never changes.5:44 Perhaps that reveals the real tension underneath this entire debate, Nadia.5:49 We've conditioned modern audiences to demand total emotional immersion, to confuse craft with mere warmth.5:55 Citizen Kane demands something far rarer from a viewer: detachment.6:00 It asks you to act as an investigator, sifting through bias, vanity, and myth.6:05 If it feels foreign today, it's not because Kane has faded, but because we've forgotten how to watch a movie that refuses to comfort us.6:14 Or maybe it reveals that a landmark can teach a medium how to walk, and then watch the medium run right past it.6:21 That is the picture from here.6:23 Back to you in the studio.
