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Welles and Ford Fan, well done: you have succinctly and enjoyably expressed what I would have said. The visual and audio links you note are something I have not detected previously; now I want to play the disc again.
Likewise, whenever the beginning of the film plays I want to sit down and watch the whole thing, knowing what good stuff is going to follow. My age is close to your own and much of my love of film stems from what I could catch as a youth in front of the tube. In college and post graduation I spent many hours traveling to the LA County Museum of Art for retrospectives, or searching out revival houses so as to see those movies I fell in love with. With dvd, I can own in virtually indestructable form so many of the films I enjoyed.
But to Kane: is it my favorite film? It's probably in a three way tie for third. But it never ceases to amaze me. The story telling is within a single film both brash and subtle, first telling us and then showing us, dropping cinematic hints, jarring us with sudden visuals and sounds (the bird's eye double exposure, the scream of a woman in the aural background at the beach party, and so on), and treating us to what sometimes amounts to a filmed play(note how sometimes, as has been observed, we appear to be watching the film from front row center, thanks to up tilted camera shots).
The film does bear multiple viewings, looking for hints and clues in the cluttered sets (see the snow ball dome on Susan Alexander's dressing table when Kane first meets her?). The acting of all the Mercury Theatre personnel is the result of stage experience and the high quality of the radio broadcasts. But it is Welles' concious or unconcious mixture of stage acting with the mechanics of camera and film that sets Kane apart.
If there is a fault, it is that there is no sympathy for the character of Kane. Is there pity? Welles plays Kane as monster born of abandonment, literal and emotional: he wants to be loved, but on his own terms. He can't love or won't love, having lost his mother/been rejected by his mother as a boy. When he dies, we don't feel sorrow for the lonely old man: we never embrace him to ourselves for his meglomanical control over everything and everyone.
Favorite part of Citizen Kane: watching a 25 year-old call all the shots, aging from youth to elderly tycoon without a misstep, and letting the fun of it all come across the screen to us.
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