Film Studies Daily Log

Monday, December 7

We continued to address questions which were raised Friday regarding film as a storytelling art and the techniques it employs. The careful choice and presentation of details -- and the embuing of those details with emotive and other meaning -- through visual and other means was compared with the purely verbal resources of literature.

After this discussion we turned our attention to a new film, Citizen Kane, directed by and starring Orson Welles -- many film lovers' choice as the finest American film. We began not with the film itself, however, but with the first few minutes of a documentary about the making of the film containing information about both Welles and the person on whom the central character Charles Foster Kane is largely based, the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst.

HW due Friday:
Second outside viewing essay.