Citizen Kane

In the 1920s and 1930s, motion pictures became a big business in the U.S., and most were produced like products on an assembly line. Often, Hollywood films did not have distinct personalities. They instead fit into genre types western, musical, horror, gangster, and comedy. Exceptions, like Orson Welles Citizen Kane (1941), were rare. In Europe, motion pictures remained a smaller scale business that was also seen as an art. In 1925, the London Film Society was founded to promote motion pictures as an art form. 

Citizen Kane deserves to appear on a list of Top Movies of All Times because of its excellent ensemble acting, its fast-paced script, and its innovative editing. 

Writers can facilitate transitions by simply repeating a phrase. In Citizen Kane, the repetition of "Merry Christmas" and "Happy New Year" allows us to leap 20 years into the future. Of course, the time shift can be more modest. Either way, the writer can use repetition to alert the viewer that one scene or location is related to the next. 

Feature films can be very helpful, if you watch, as I do, feature films all the time and you enjoy the structure. I just watched Citizen Kane again. It has an amazingly good structure, that. It s been imitated endlessly, but it s a brilliant, formal piece of filmmaking, so beautifully structured. I admire that more than anything else in a film a well-structured piece of storytelling. It s about telling a story the best way that you can. 

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