All movie critics are asked two inevitable questions: (1) “How many movies do you see in a week?” and (2) “What’s the greatest film of all time?” Gene Siskel found that it didn’t matter what his reply to (1) was: “I can say one or a dozen–it doesn’t matter. The real answer is between four and ten, but they don’t really care.” The answer to (2), as we all know, is “Citizen Kane.” When naming that film, I sometimes even joke, “That’s the official answer.” The most respected “best film” list in the world is the one the UK film magazine “Sight & Sound” runs every 10 years. They poll the world’s directors, critics, festival heads, archivists and others. Ever since 1962, the top film has been “Kane.”
“Citizen Kane” is arguably the most important film, for two reasons: It consolidated the film language up until 1941 and broke new ground in such areas as deep focus, complex sound, and narrative structure. The other reason is that it demonstrated the auteur theory 25 years before it was being defined (of course that theory was already being demonstrated in silent days). It was “a film by Orson Welles.” It dramatized that the controlling author of a film, especially a great film, is usually its director, not its studio, producers, writers or financial backers. A movie studio, Welles said, is the best toy train set a boy could ever hope for.
Read the rest from Roger Ebert’s Journal
Tags: favorite movies, roger ebert
