![Citizen Kane: What A Newspaper Can Do To A Film Ab](https://cdn.slatesource.com/e/4/6/e463874f-00a9-48f0-8073-3a1231c0e2c3.webp)

# Citizen Kane: What A Newspaper Can Do To A Film Ab

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/citizen-kane-what-a-newspaper-can-do-to-a-film-ab)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Oct 1, 2026

![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/e/4/6/e463874f-00a9-48f0-8073-3a1231c0e2c3.webp)

## Citizen Kane (1941)

A first time director got final cut at twenty five, and the man he was writing about tried to have the negative burned.

Runtime

119 minutes

Director

Orson Welles

Budget

$839,727

Cinematography

Gregg Toland

## The Deep Focus Argument

Welles arrived at RKO from radio with a contract nobody else had and made a film about a newspaper magnate who acquires everything and reaches nobody. The structure is the innovation people copy: a newsreel obituary lays out the whole life in ten minutes, then a reporter interviews five witnesses whose accounts overlap, contradict and never resolve, so the film is an argument about whether a life can be summarised at all. Gregg Toland's photography keeps foreground and background in focus simultaneously, which lets Welles stage whole scenes in one shot with a child visible through a window while adults sign away his future. William Randolph Hearst recognised himself, banned mention of the film across his papers, and Louis B. Mayer offered RKO cash to destroy the negative.

journey·6 Parts

# Watching Citizen Kane

Curiosity

/

Part

Rosebud

Withheld

"A man dies alone in a palace he built, drops a glass globe and says one word that the rest of the film will chase."

Gregg Toland asked for the credit to be shared on the same card as Welles, an almost unheard of gesture, and his deep focus work here rewrote what a studio camera department was expected to attempt.

It won a single Oscar, for the screenplay, and lost Best Picture. It then topped the Sight and Sound critics poll for fifty years, from 1962 until Vertigo displaced it in 2012.

> I don't think there's one word that can describe a man's life.

[Citizen Kane on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033467/?utm_source=slatesource)