Citizen Kane : What impressed me.

Overall after viewing Citizen Kane I was very impressed by the level of detail and work that went into such an old film. Orson Welles really created something wonderful with the limits in cinematography that they had back then which is made even more impressive by the fact that it was his first movie that he had ever done and that he co wrote, produced, directed and starred in it.

One of the coolest aspects in the film I thought was the editing and how it was done so wonderfully for that day and age. Welles' use of deep focus in nearly every shot of the movie provides something that we don't usually see in movies, be them older or contemporary. Almost every shot is vivid where every detail can be seen. Where with a conventional film camera you could see for example the foreground with the background blurred out, in Citizen Kane you can see everything that is going on in the foreground, the mid ground, and the background. A great example is in the above screen cap from the beginning of the movie when Kane's parents are about to send him away.

You can clearly see Charles parent's in the foreground, his future guardian in the mid-ground, and Charles playing with his sled in the snow out the window in the back ground, nothing blurred out. According to the wikipedia article about the film, they used In-camera tricks to make the deep focus shots work. For example, they shot the foreground of the frame first, then rewound the tape and shot the mid-ground over it, then finally doing the same thing with the background to make it one consistent shot. This technique was very groundbreaking and advanced for this time, and is overall what makes the cinematography of the movie the most impressive to me.