Citizen Kane - Theatrical Trailer (1940)
At work today, I saw someone flicking a load of envelopes and it made me think of the scene in Citizen Kane, where the critic has made the fan-like thing out of the programme, during the play. I can’t find that scene on YouTube, but the next best thing I can find is the trailer for the film.
How brilliant is this for a trailer made almost 70 years ago? The humour, the intelligence, the one scene with the mirror (you’ll know it when you see it), the mastery of film when it was still relatively new.
It’s like Orson Welles showed people the way, but no-one really listened. I’ve read before that the reason Citizen Kane was so innovative is that Welles didn’t know much about movie-making, and he wasn’t tied down by its traditions, so he just did whatever he needed to do to get what he saw in his mind.
On Orson Welles’s Wikipedia page, I saw this quote:
When asked to describe Welles’s influence, Jean-Luc Godard remarked: “Everyone will always owe him everything.”
I haven’t seen Citizen Kane since I bought it on VHS over 10 years ago. I’m buying it and watching it this weekend.
