According to Empire it is the 28th most beautiful film in the history of cinema. On Metacritic it was voted the best film ever. There is no film critic who does not mention it in his personal top ten. It is with this business card that Citizen Kane, Fourth Power for the Italian public, the first work of that giant Orson Welles and considered by all to be a very important piece, if not the most important of all cinema. We are talking about a work dated 1941, entirely shot in black and white and that in many young people, young people or anyone who loves cinema, risks continuously postponing its vision because of that unconscious skepticism that sees us a little distant from a cinema apparently so distant. If you are part of that group of people who have this film in their drawer but find it hard to press play, do yourself a favor, press that button on the remote control and make yourself comfortable, you will see a film that has nothing to envy to modern, contemporary cinema. Among the many merits of Welles' primordial work there is also that of having been modern in times far, far away from us. There are films to which cinematography owes so much, to which every director owes so much. Fourth Power is certainly one of them. Orson Welles had the courage to write a film that was completely uncontextual at the time, in form and substance. What may seem to us an excellently shot and excellently scripted work is actually much more than that. Approaching the vision of this film we cannot prescind from the contextualization of the same, we cannot prescind from imagining this film written and directed in 1941 with the means of the time, within the film industry of the time and within that society in the middle of the Second World War. Citizen Kane uses a new language, he manages to search and find new spaces in the shots, he brings to the fore a complex main character, stratified and three-dimensional compared to the classic characters of the time who had little to add to the 2-line synopsis made to launch a film. The film tells the story of a man, a powerful man who, at the helm of a daily newspaper, quickly manages to open up new editorial offices, earn money, visibility and influence to the point of even being able to direct public opinion at will, to create opinions to become what today we would call an influencer or even better "opinion maker". Man will live a life of enrichment, accumulation of wealth and material goods, until he builds a real fortress, a castle, an ivory tower inside which to take refuge among his relics, his statues, his puzzles, his empty rooms behind that NO TRESPASSING sign that opens and closes the film. Do not pass through that gate, those walls because behind them will hide an indecipherable world, a world built by a complex man that nothing and no one can really frame. It won't be a word like "Rosabella" that defines who Charles Kane was, it won't be all his wealth, his statues, his wives, his newspapers that define a man of that magnitude.

NO TRESPASSING

The sign warned us and not in the sense of intimidating us but in the sense of warning us that every human being is not the sum of his actions or his words but a complex puzzle made of pieces irreparably missing to those who look at that life from the outside. The final dolly on that sign only goes back to telling us: I warned you. That's because the whole film is a long investigative documentary that starts from the death of the tycoon to discover his life through 5 interviews and continuous flashbacks with a superb montage that breaks down Kane's life piece by piece. It wasn't enough, it wasn't enough to understand who Charles Kane was. No Trespassing, don't go beyond that imaginary fence that separates the public from the private one, the hidden one that so much nothing will be able to allow you to reconstruct a man's life, no matter how detailed the information you can gather. With Quarto Potere we see the first cinematographic work in which we try to focus on the human, psychological side of the protagonist. No man can be identified in a few actions or words. In the film we try to dissect the figure of this sacred monster of publishing and the American society of the time. A colossus who built an empire, married 2 women, created a castle to live in, tried to win elections, climbed society, fought against someone, fought alongside someone. But who was Charles Kane really? For us today it seems obvious to have TV or cinema characters to know the mind rather than the life, emotions, motivations behind the choices of this or that character. To do it in 1941 was to upset the cinematic rats of the time and not at random...

Future in black and white

Doing it in 1941 meant upsetting the topoi of the cinema of the time and it is no coincidence that the film was greatly appreciated by critics but not loved and not understood by the masses until it was declared a flop at the box office. Why did Kane do what he did? It's not an easy answer and the film doesn't help us in this sense either, it doesn't help us deliberately because Welles assumes that there can't be an univocal answer to this question, neither for Kane nor for any other man. But we can all find a key to reading it, a reading that is made up of continuous references and mysteries, of small clues scattered during flashbacks encapsulated in 5 stories through the mouth and memory of those who were important to Kane as Tatcher or his wife Susan, his friend Leland or the wizard. Kane did everything for love because he didn't have much love and everything brings us back to that short childhood that saw Charles at only 10 years old forced to separate from his parents and his mother's warm and tender affection to marry a cause not his own, the one that saw him ready to study and establish himself in the most prestigious universities in order to one day become rich and powerful and ready to manage all that fame and wealth. And Charles will succeed, he will manage it at best and increase it powerfully, but in all that shining weakness he will find himself hungry for love, trying to show his interested love for people, readers, wives or friends, except to take refuge in silent sorrow every time people betrayed him, friends did not understand him, wives disappointed him. It was a devastating loneliness dictated by the need to be loved and the drive to try to be loved through works that showed love for others. A twisted quid pro quo that led him to isolation and that drew all his strength from past traumatic events, which had taken away the simplest of treasures: the affection of a mother, of a father to his son. The extraordinariness of the Fourth Power is in having created a film that embraced universal themes that are still very topical today, such as the importance of holding information in one's hands in order to manipulate the masses and have power, the real power all for itself, or the hope of being remembered and loved, or the more complex one concerning the identity of the individual. To this must be added some important innovations in the use of depth, fading, editing.

In short, an epochal film that every cinema enthusiast should see and should push to see.