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Citizen Kane (BFI Film Classics)x$7.50
  (3 reviews)
Best Price: $7.50
30 b&w illus. Citizen Kane's unchallenged reputation as one of the greatest films in all cinema is matched only by the accumulation of critical commentary that surrounds it. What more can there be to say about a masterpiece so universally acknowledged? As Laura Mulvey shows in a fresh and original reading, the richness of the film, both thematically and stylistically, is inexhaustible. In a lucid and perceptive critique she investigates the psychoanalytic structure that underlines the film's presentation of Kane's biography, for once taking seriously what Orson Welles himself disparagingly referred to as "dollar-book Freud." She also illuminates the film's historical context, revealing it to be a prescient commentary on the isolationist politics of prewar America.
This is a brilliant introduction to what many consider to be the greatest American film. Critic Laura Mulvey provides new insight into the creative collaboration of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, cinematographer Gregg Toland, and writer-director-star Orson Welles. She sheds new light on the relationship between the fictional Kane and the character upon which he is based, legendary newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Mulvey is especially sensitive to the way Citizen Kane--and Hearst--negotiated liberal and conservative politics; for her, Kane's psyche mirrors the political unconscious of the United States in the early 1940s. The appendix reprints a press statement by Welles himself in which he describes his reasons for making the film.
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Customer Reviews
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Feminist analysis of "Citizen Kane"
By A1ZZK6NE239OBJ on 1998-05-12
Laura Mulvey writes well, and her analysis of "Citizen Kane" is, in several aspects, a joy to read. But, for an in-depth coverage of the subject, I really recommend Ronald Gottesman's "Focus on Citizen Kane", or, better yet, his "Perspectives on Citizen Kane", which I think should be required reading on the film, along with Carringer's "The Making of Citizen Kane". In other words, if you needed to read just one book on the subject, this one would not be it.
A wonderful film that deserves a book like this.
By A1LDMWESFNGS6L on 2000-02-26
This is an example of what the BFI classics should hope to attain for each of their forthcoming books.A great insight into the film and the events surrounding it. Praise, I suppose, is due to the fact that there was so much that went on around the making of this film that it would be hard to write a bad book about it.
A formal treatment of the psycoanalytic aspects of the film
By A1IA3S0H1AT5C6 on 2004-10-17
This book has laid a fundation for understanding the film from a psychoanalytic perspective. The author re-examined the visual style of the film, its narrative structure, the historical context during production and the director's political activities, discovered new facts and finally came to an interpretation in psychoanalytic terms in which all the clues would fall into places. Although some of the arguments were not given in full length and rigidness (there are only 87 pages), this book certainly built a new system of meanings regarding the film that includes many facts discovered in the past several decades.
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