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Orson Welles

Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin on May 6, 1915. Though he rarely spoke about his childhood or his family, it is known that his parents separated when he was 6 years old, his mother died when he was 9, and six years later, Welles's father, an alcoholic, also died, leaving Orson Welles an orphan by the age of 15. By 16, he had left school to pursue an acting career. As a result, Welles "essentially didn't have a childhood" (Lennon et al). His creative skills were...

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Orson Welles Essays

College

Citizen Kane

In Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, (1941) the cinematography utilizes deep focus shots to demonstrate the importance and power dynamic between the characters in the frame, while the heavily varied angles highlight one character at a time. The contrast...

Citizen Kane

Director Orson Welles, along with Cinematographer Gregg Toland and others, expertly controlled the atmosphere of Citizen Kane through the heavy use of long take and the occasional instance of conventional shot-reverse shot passages. Through...

College

Citizen Kane

The technical innovations of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane range from the depth of focus to his lightning mix. He utilized graphic and acoustic matches to depict the narrative of a man’s meteoric rise to power and his painful slip into oblivion....

11th Grade

Citizen Kane

The movie Citizen Kane depicts the life of the successful businessman Charles Foster Kane through a series of flashbacks derived from interviews of his acquaintances. Through these interviews, Thompson, a newspaper reporter, attempts to solve the...

12th Grade

Citizen Kane

Texts continue to be valued long after their composition by virtue of their exploration of contextually pertinent universal concerns. The timelessness of Orson Welles’ 1941 feature film Citizen Kane lies in its treatment of enduring human flaws,...

College

Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane seeks to identify the true essence of Charles Foster Kane from the perspectives of other people and the memories they had with him. It presents the multiple layers to Mr. Kane as the protagonist, and–through a series of flashbacks–...

F For Fake

In his free-form documentary F for Fake, Orson Welles, through interview, speculation and illusion, states that art itself can in no circumstance be purely “genuine” in the traditional sense, and that truth, by nature, is relative, and, in many...