Citizen Kane (Bfi Film Classics)
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
This is a brilliant introduction to what many consider to be the greatest American film. Critic Laura Mulvey provides new insight into the creative collaboration of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, cinematographer Gregg Toland, and writer-director-star Orson Welles. She sheds new light on the relationship between the fictional Kane and the character upon which he is based, legendary newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Mulvey is especially sensitive to the way Citizen Kane--and Hearst--negotiated liberal and conservative politics; for her, Kane's psyche mirrors the political unconscious of the United States in the early 1940s. The appendix reprints a press statement by Welles himself in which he describes his reasons for making the film.
Book Description
30 b&w illus. Citizen Kane's unchallenged reputation as one of the greatest films in all cinema is matched only by the accumulation of critical commentary that surrounds it. What more can there be to say about a masterpiece so universally acknowledged? As Laura Mulvey shows in a fresh and original reading, the richness of the film, both thematically and stylistically, is inexhaustible. In a lucid and perceptive critique she investigates the psychoanalytic structure that underlines the film's presentation of Kane's biography, for once taking seriously what Orson Welles himself disparagingly referred to as "dollar-book Freud." She also illuminates the film's historical context, revealing it to be a prescient commentary on the isolationist politics of prewar America.
Citizen Kane (Bfi Film Classics)
Citizen Kane (Bfi Film Classics),Laura Mulvey,University of California Press,0851703399,Cinema/Film: Book,Citizen Kane (Motion picture),Film & Video - History & Criticism,Film Criticism,Pop Arts / Pop Culture
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