The modern American sensibility for evaluating films is to look at them as visual novels and respond accordingly. A great film is a great story told through the experiences of great characters. Great acting is the ability to develop and execute a great character faithfully, great direction the ability to create a panoramic view of a great story that pulls the audience into it's world for the duration of the film.

There is a lot to be said for this school of thought. It gets the big things like story and character right, while placing technical workmanship in a subordinate position (with the sometime exception of special effects). This school of thought misses things though. It is a doctrinal viewpoint that says Michael Bay is an idiot who would be better off working in the special effects department, or James Cameron is less idiotic but still just a special effects guy with a possibly offensive affinity for painting humanity as the bad guy in all of his films.

The fact that Michael Bay is a high functioning genius who has completely changed the way we look at storytelling, the "rules" of narrative structure as relates to internal believability, and has completely changed the relationship of camera to subject is missed in the "it's all about the story and characters all the time" school.

I mention all of this because it is important to understand why so many insiders consider Citizen Kane an all time great, and so many casual viewers find this utterly baffling. In terms of story and characters Citizen Kane hasn't aged particularly well, imo. As much as some subsets of the population obsess about Fox News and George Soros funded media operations the whole media mogul as a dangerously corrupt power broker bit just doesn't resonate the way it used to when newspapermen dominated public discourse. It's about as titillating as the whole interracial romance angle that made King Kong so scary in it's original form and so blah when Peter Jackson tried it years later. If you look at Citizen Kane as story and character only it's so-so at best.

A movie isn't just story and characters though. The techniques used to create the story and characters, organizing the scenes into a narrative structure then filming and presenting them as images constructed of color and light in a theater are where Citizen Kane earns it's stripes. When Orson Welles made this film he shattered some of the main preconceptions filmmakers had about the process of crafting movies.

Pre Citizen Kane movies were still largely filmed stage plays, with the camera given the perspective of the audience member, or used for flat close ups of actors faces. Focus was always flat, 2 dimensional, with only the items at the depth of the cameras main focal point in focus. Welles pioneered deep focus, a method of showing items in both the foreground and background in sharp focus along with the subject to create depth. This made movies appear in three dimension space, instead of looking like flat two dimensional paintings, literally motion pictures as pictures with motion. This was an astonishing breakthrough, one that is now hard to credit because it is so commonplace.

Welles also used camera angles that had not been used before. He particularly likes having the camera look over a characters shoulder, or setting it very low looking up at the action to create a sense of scale. Before Welles cameras were basically on a flat stand and their main motion was to pan left or right (if at all). This is important not just because it's new, or because we can tell old movies on sight from the flat camera angle focused in a two dimensional space around the main character.

Placing a camera over a characters shoulder "looking in on" the scene doesn't just change the look, it changes the audience members perspective. Instead of viewing a flat diorama from a comfortable distance in a theater you are in the room, watching the action from within instead of without. You become part of the story. When the camera is placed low you get a sense of scale that can make the characters look larger than life, or make the space around them look larger in life. This sense of grandeur makes the story on the screen more compelling because it adds a sense of visually emotional drama to heighten the sense of the characters and stories drama.

Here is a video of a scene from Citizen Kane showing some of these pioneering techniques. Notice that objects in the room outside of the characters immediate area are clearly in focus, giving a constant sense of scale and space. Notice the very low camera angle looking up at the large Kane creates a sense of a large man brooding over this empty space, the camera angle as we watch another man approach Kane from across the room, this time in a flatter perspective allowing him to grow and fill the empty space next to Kane as he approaches. As a viewer you feel you are in the room, not speaking to the characters and having them respond to you, but still inside the action.

http://youtu.be/ReHAg29c-64

Now look at Michael Bay's Transformers, the scene of the first time Optimus Prime transforms on screen. This brilliantly choreographed scene is practically an homage to Citizen Kane. Look at the camera angles carefully. See how you are given a shot right over the shoulder of the main characters to give you a sense of their space, and of sharing that space with them. Watch how Bay alternates the perspective of the camera from low to the ground to high in the air to create motion, and scale. See how he alternates the view of the main human characters, aiming from low behind them to create a sense of awe at the large creature unfolding above them, then viewing them from high above to show them as small and practically overloaded by the mass looming over them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWmntegbxMc

These two scenes show clearly why Kane is revered: Orson Welles, by changing the way movies were shot changed the way movies are experienced in ways that define a film-goers perspective to this day. This one film is why he will always be seen as one of the truly great innovators of cinema. This also shows you why Michael Bay, that frequent butt of scornful jokes, is seen by many as a man who will likely be viewed by history as a masterful artist who is his generations Beethoven or Mozart. His ability to keep the viewers POV in constant motion by moving the cameras location and angle 360 degrees both horizontally and vertically and to build a sense of drama through that motion is almost shocking to watch. He is able to choreograph constantly moving parts and do so without losing the viewer or creating any confusion of spacing and interaction. This shows him as a worthy heir to Welles and the natural outgrowth of Welles groundbreaking work in cinematography as a storytelling device. Of course it all starts with Citizen Kane, a tired story but the template filmmakers still use for camera work that tells the story instead of merely filming it and draws the audience member inside the film as it unfolds instead of watching it after the fact.