On Citizen Kane: film-critical and film-historical video essays

Paul Malcolm's Notes Towards a Project on Citizen Kane (2007) [8 mins 14 secs - be sure to watch right through to the end for valuable reflections on the critical video essay form]

Film Studies For Free today showcases two video approaches to Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). The below video is a recording of film historians and writers Leo Braudy and David Thompson speaking at length about the film in a symposium entitled "Citizen Kane in Retrospect" held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, San Marino, CA, on May 31, 2008 [51 minutes long].

The video embedded above takes an entirely different tack in studying Welles's film. But it is one of the most successful examples yet, FSFF believes, of the emerging form of the online film-critical video essay.

Paul Malcolm's wonderful work came to this blog's attention entirely thanks to a comment left by Christian Keathley (who knows rather a lot about these matters) in a fascinating and valuable discussion stream still going on at Girish Shambu's blog on the subject of DVD audio commentaries and video essays. The discussion has, in part, been fuelled by a FILMKRANT column just published by the peerless film critic (and frequent DVD commentarist) Adrian Martin, in which he raised some very important doubts about these (in the case of audio commentaries, necessarily) very 'word-centred' forms.

Film Studies For Free has a whole stack of video essays in production which are each negotiating, in different ways, some of the issues Martin has raised, but it won't be too long now, hopefully, before they can be posted at this blog... More on that very soon.

"Citizen Kane in Retrospect" with Leo Braudy, David Thompson and William Deverell