![]() ![]() ![]() But the tale’s tragic trajectory felt older, darker: the hero dies broken and alone, unredeemed, a predatory rich man made increasingly phantomlike by all his possessions, as if a curse has been placed on him. Kane was that most American of stories: a child comes from nothing and becomes a great businessman. It was at once the peak achievement of Hollywood’s golden age and a rebuke of it-the work of an auteur thumbing his nose at the studio system even as he took full advantage of the resources it provided him. Thus, Kane is an explosion of form, combining effects and techniques and stylistic flourishes from the preceding decades of filmmaking (and coming up with several of its own), all in service to an audience-unfriendly downer of a story that offers no uplifting messages or clear moral vision. Upon his arrival in Hollywood, Welles famously called his studio “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had,” and he proceeded to use it like one. Indeed, that is what has made it so essential for so long-and continues to do so. ![]() That historical irony is fitting for a film that has always thrived on contradiction, from its inception. Once blinding in its freshness and invention, Citizen Kane had come to represent for some the stodgy, unchanging nature of the canon. Even so, the fact that Hitchcock’s most complicated and personal film overtook Kane made it seem as if, at long last, anything was possible. And of course, Vertigo wasn’t exactly a shocking rejoinder to mainstream taste or a striking blow for inclusiveness-it was a widely beloved, endlessly written about, beautifully problematic classic from a director who was way more conservative in his worldview (not to mention more financially successful) than Welles ever was. In the year 2012, when more work from all over the world was more readily accessible than ever before, cinephiles seemed to be questioning, more loudly than ever, the value of a canon in the first place.įor decades, these all-time-top-ten lists had been dominated by the usual suspects: a rotating, exclusive club of consensus classics (made mostly by American and European men) that rarely allowed in new entries. all the way down to second place), which seemed to represent more than just one film’s edging out the other by a few votes. But more symbolic than Vertigo’s rise was Kane’s fall (. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of critics in 2012, it felt like the culmination of a decades-long process, one that saw Hitchcock’s initially maligned masterpiece slowly inching up the ranks until finally overtaking the movie that had sat atop the list since 1962. In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. ![]()
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