Customer Reviews

Citizen Kane (BFI Film Classics)

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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.

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.

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.