Mereghetti’s testimony Orson Welles’ masterpiece and the many faces of truth (score 10) – Corriere.it

You could say: Blessed are those who have never seen it Citizen KaneOrson Welles’ debut film (in Italian Fourth power), and you can discover and enjoy it now in the original, restored and subtitled edition, in cinemas on Thursday March 24th I wonder pictures. Blessed, because if their eyes aren’t ruined by too many bad movies, they’ll realize they’re ahead a masterpiece who, despite being 83 years old (he turns 83 on May 1st), still has a lot to say. From the very first recordings, as the approach to the Xanad Castle It destroys the illusion of reality on which the cinema of yesterday, but also of today, was based (what are the most sophisticated digital effects if not to give us the impression that what we see is true).

The castle with his window on Always there, at the top right of the picture, but what is seen in the foreground is constantly changing: a decorated gate, a monkey cage, two gondolas in the water, a drawbridge, a golf course, an ancient temple, everything falling apart any credibility: How does this window always stay in the same place when the observation point changes? Because – Welles tells us – it no longer exists a single visual point Whoever you look at and the camera lens can be deceiving, it may say something more contradictory
and more complex. And this will be the case throughout the film, with the aim of breaking the viewer’s habit passively accept what the screen tells him.

He does it from a narrative perspective by unleashing a journalist to find out the meaning of the last word spoken Billionaire Charles Foster Kane on his deathbed: Rosebud. And it’s certainly not a spoiler to say that he won’t find out (unlike the viewer), because that’s exactly what the film is trying to tell us There is no single truth, because he showed us that there is more than just one way to photograph the same illuminated window. Each of the witnesses the journalist interviews tells a different side of Kane, contradictory, surprising, sometimes irritating and sometimes touching. Throughout the film, Welles, who gave himself the role of Kane, builds by entrusting his Mercury Theater colleagues – Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Erskine Sanford, Ray Collins, Ruth Warrick – to the other roles , around the central figure one Multiplication of reflectionsof perspectives, of confusing combinations.

The known world, the world that we are used to seeing in the cinema (which we were used to in 1941 but which we still see today), disappears. More specifically, it appears under a constant camouflage, all the stranger precisely because it is still the same world. And he also carries out this reversal visually by asking cameraman Gregg Toland to continue his experiments depth of field. Until then (and even after), the image projected on the screen usually focuses only on the person or object that the director wants to draw attention to, leaving unclear what is around or behind it. And instead the search for adjust the goal the camera on the human eye (which always focuses on the entire room) becomes a tool for Read the space within the frame in a new way and destroys the single focus on which the entire Hollywood cinema was built.

Of course not alone, because the editing by Robert Wise, the sets by Perry Ferguson, the music by Bernard Hermann (the composer so beloved by Hitchcock began here, with Welles) as well the screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz (which Welles worked on) played a fundamental role in its construction under the direction of the director Faustian portrait of a 100% American, the film – said Truffaut – that gave birth to Pi Film careers in the world because it is taken into account the most beautiful of all.

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