Is Citizen Kane the greatest film of all time? I usually shy away from such arguments because when it comes to art, it’s just an exercise in futility. But somehow it’s become the greatest film no one wants to see.

Acting almost as a biopic, Citizen Kane portrays a long period of time realistically, allowing the characters to age as the story goes on. Instead of being told in a linear, completely chronological manner, Kane’s story unfolds in overlapping segments that add more information as each narrator adds his or her story.

But the problem with looking at Kane in 2012 is that we’re so used to seeing the techniques that it pioneered, the paradigm shift in filmmaking that Kane caused is almost lost on us.

Kane has been dissected, analysed, studied, and reviewed by so many critics and film students over the past 50 years that it’s difficult to add much more of any significance to help others better understand it. From it’s superior cinematography, its groundbreaking achievements in low-angle shots and deep focus, to its elaborate circular plot structure and numerous memorable images and moments.

I cannot recall any black-and-white film that is as cinematically interesting. The storytelling techniques succeed in painting Charles Foster Kane as an enigma, a tortured, complicated man who, in the end, leaves viewers with more questions than answers and inevitably invokes sympathy rather than contempt.

The camera angles alone are worth studying. Welles was not satisfied with traditional, static, flat angles. Consistently, the camera varies from low-angle shots to straight shots to high-or overhead-angle shots while also changing distance. The use of deep focus at one point allows us to see a “defeated” Kane walk toward the windows (this makes him appear diminutive), then allows us to see him recover his size and power when he returns to the table.

One notable scene occurs during the famous breakfast-table montage, with Kane and his first wife — where the intimacy gets colder and the sitting distance gets larger with each vignette. The storytelling techniques that Welles used then have since been adopted by some of the greatest filmmakers of our time.

An instance of this was the use of the “Rosebud” type motif — a puzzle piece is presented near the beginning of Kane that ties the plot together. Hitchcock used this idea over and over, though he termed it the “McGuffin” and its been seen in movies from Quintin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, to the titular Maltese Falcon and even recently byMartin Scorsese in Hugo.

Also Spielberg’s homage in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark as the Ark is loaded into a warehouse — a parallel to the final scenes of Welles’ Kane.

Critiquing Citizen Kane is a lot like reviewing Shakespeare or Mozart. I might as well go to the Sistine Chapel and review Michelangelo’s “Creation,” or critique Da Vinci’s “Last Supper”.

But Welles masterpiece is required viewing, and film lovers are destined to revisit this masterpiece many times for the rest of eternity.

Sadly, he was victim of his own work as his other works failed to live up to the Kane standard and he famously quipped, “I started at the top and worked my way down.”

The writer is a reporter at Dawn.com