, but this is the dark side of individuality. By the end of the film, Kane has isolated himself behind the walls of Xanadu and embodies the dark side of individualism in his lonely death.
Roger Ebert recently gave an assessment of the importance of the film when he wrote,
Citizen Kane is more than a great movie; it is a gathering of all the lessons of the emerging era of sound, just as Birth of a Nation assembled everything learned at the summit of the silent era, and 2001 pointed the way beyond narrative. These peaks stand above all the others (Ebert).
The story itself is not as remarkable as the way the story is told. Films had been made about rich and powerful men before, but the more common approach to making a film was to do so in a linear fashion. Citizen Kane presented its main character as a true character study, analyzed from outside by an investigator who then hopes to put all the pieces together. The story comes from a variety of sources, all after-the-fact, since Kane is dead at the beginning of the film. His life is revealed th
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