Citizen Kane: H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds

Citizen Kane was written, directed, and produced by a young Orson Welles. Welles was only 24 years old at the time he made his first feature film, Citizen Kane, and had already garnered notoriety for his 1938 radio episode depicting the H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds, which created mass panic. In making Citizen Kane, Welles introduced many new filmmaking innovations that changed the way movies were made. Welles used innovative storytelling, cinematography, lighting, framing, and sound techniques that were different from anything Hollywood had produced to that point. Because of these innovations employed by Welles, the mold for making movies was broken. Movies before Citizen Kane were mostly told in chronological order, however, Citizen Kane was one of the first movies to utilize flashbacks, revealing the ending of the story at the beginning of the film.

This parallel narrative structure, where a journalist interviews several of Kane’s former friends and associates, made up nine narrative sequences including five flashbacks, created a fascinating cinematic structure (Lewis, 2008). Also, Welles use of depth of field, or deep focus was different than the traditional mise-en-scene’s of the time. Traditional cinema evenly distributed characters and props throughout a scene, and lighting was normally three-point breaking the scene into a foreground and background. In Citizen Kane, Welles utilized deep focus in nearly every scene, bringing the foreground, background and everything in between in sharp focus. In addition to deep focus, Welles used low and high camera angles, as well as mobile cameras to take the audience from place to place. Welles did this in place of narrative transitions, which were common in film to that