Citizen Kane

Orson Welles - 1941
Sadder than ever, slower at the beginning.
Pictorially, and this is far from being the point, it is incredibly beautiful. Often with blacked out sillouhettes, which helps depth, but also great plays in the composition. And shadows on the faces of main actors; still wild.
Welles can do long takes, but his camera is less still than Ambersons. Many tracks in and out, movements of desire, of the search. Their are zig-zag compostions that are developed in these moves. The over-the-shoulder of Thompson investigates the very poissbility of that shot; what can we know about either side of an SRS. In truth, nearly every device is used at some point; closer shots, longer ones, quick cuts, and slow.
Note the huge divergences in the sound design; famously the overlapping dialogue, pure noise, put also quiet dialogue, low in the sound mix, and smart uses of silence for emphasis. And of course the smash cuts to parrots and so on.
And of course Toland's depth, with the precise compostions. After half an hour the impression is gained of time being passed through, as though by making such of the space the film manages to make time visual, or tactile, or rather more, just there.
Time pushes one way, on a single line, but it brushes against, things stick before ;ater falling; it is not truly linear. The montage sequences are like Godard's jumps, no importance between moral decisions. Yet parts are also like rolling a marble down a cathedral hall; time is seem to move. This film is architectural, if it can be related to other art forms; one can see time in its huge distances, of space and of time.
There are 1000 views that can be made on it, but that doesn't mean there is more than one object. Welles repudiates Freud and the pre-modernist novels linear, single chronology, as he does Faulkner's time shattering in 1000 pieces. There is only one way, Kane is imbued with past and future always (the end at the start). Yet neither are every really 'there'; time always marches to its own beat, it can't be frozen and surveyed (statues, photographs). This is modernist art, as it reacts to the problems of time. And it answers that question as a film. Like all the great films, it could only be cinema, and it is an argument for the singularity and greatness of the cinema. Only in images that move can this sense of unstobbable movement, yet tracked to a past, (slow motion?) continue. In a novel, describing something in two ways, thanks to language's referential function (at least in our minds, at the present) means two different things. The cinema does something different.
The strange thing is, I remembered Kane's story, and still do, chronologically? Why does memory work like that? How are moral decisions singular events, and in time? Why can cinema answer this in a way nothing else can?