Gil Kane

Citizen Kane – Charles Forster Kane and Susan Alexander SHOT 1: Dissolve into an over-the-shoulder close up of Susan working on a jigsaw puzzle. She is completely dressed up as if she was getting ready to go out for a night on the town with an expensive gown and jewelry. The lighting design is very high contrast with Susan in white, while the background falls to solid black. Susan is in the left foreground of the shot as Kane’s booming voice can be heard saying “What are you doing?” While the…

Citizen Kane (1941) is the debut work of Orson Wells and is considered as a turning point of the way of making movies. The technical innovations, due especially to the director of photography Gregg Toland who introduced the depth focus, the choice of a character that stress the ambiguity of the American dream and the narrative structure that develops itself through flashbacks, is what brought the movie to reach the definition of “The best movie ever made”. The first scene of Well’s Citizen Kane…

World War One to American Patriotism: Success by the United States’ Film Industry Watching movies in the early twentieth century served as America’s convenient entertainment, but the American film industry also played as an important factor into the initiation of America as a dominant and thriving country. As much of Europe was in distress during World War One, the United States’ decision to stay neutral until the brink of the war (in 1917) allowed room for the American film industry to…

Orson Welles ' Citizen Kane is a widely acclaimed film and said to be one of the greatest American films. The film is more than 70 years old, but it is still considered as a classic. So what makes Citizen Kane so remarkable? I believe the technical aspects are part of why it is so well regarded. He uses camera angles, audio, lighting and many other techniques effectively to convey the message. This paper focuses on how Welles ' has conveyed the theme of “corrupting influence of power and wealth”…

The film industry has produced awesome movies and some of it are so epic viewers beg for a second and even a third installment. Of all the famous and best trilogies in the history of cinema, 10 of the best were listed below. 10. The Jason Bourne Trilogy ("The Bourne Identity", "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum") Former CIA assassin Jason Bourne played by Matt Damon amazed the viewers with action-packed scenes based on Robert Ludlum’s book series. Peter Greengrass directed…

In the essay Casablanca:cult movies and intertextual collage, from the collection of essays titled Travels of Hyper Reality,Umberto Eco has taken the case of the 1940’s popular American movie Casablanca,directed by Michael Curtis to explain how and why it gained the status of a ‘cult’ movie.He has given a number of reasons in the essay as to why people liked it so much.Eco begins by making it clear that the movie according to him is not a very artistic movie and that despite that the movie has…

Imperfect movies: example Dogma 95 – The Idiots and other perfect imperfections. Are planned imperfect movies still imperfect? Rankings and Top 100's of the best movies of all time are very popular. Many sites on the internet offer statistics and numbers about box office takings and cinema attendance. But not only numbers are important. Besides questions of taste, there are a few characteristics for a successful movie. Costumes, camera handling, scenery and acting are just a few of this…

On February 26th, 2017, Barry Jenkins' sophomoric feature, Moonlight, received the highest accolade of Best Picture, from one of the most prestigious ceremonies to celebrate film, the Academy Awards. In accomplishing two inaugural milestones, the first all-black cast to win such high regard, and the first LGBTQ-topic to be awarded Best Picture, Moonlight in context proves to be a memorable classic in performance, box office (for an independent feature), and universal critical acclaim. However,…

The film, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” directed by Sergio Leone, the father of Spaghetti Westerns, is considered one of the best Westerns of all time. It launched Clint Eastwood into stardom as, “The Man with No Name” also known as Blondie “The Good”, through his interactions with his co-stars Lee Van Cleef, Angel Eyes “The Bad”, and Eli Wallach, Tuco “The Ugly”. The hero here, Blondie, is not the typical hero that you would expect, but through an analysis of several scenes, one begins to…

In Cléo de 5 à 7, Varda follows more closely to the filmmaking techniques that are used by most classic Hollywood cinema. The only major difference, other than the context of the film, would be Varda’s use of temporality by having a film set in a two hour time period and of trying to keep the action of the film almost in the exact lifetime of two hours. It takes the idea of Classical Hollywood continuity to an extreme. Another difference is that Cléo takes on more French political issues such as…