Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Citizen Kane's reputation as one of the greatest films of all time is matched only by the accumulation of critical commentary that surrounds it. What more can there be to say about a masterpiece so universally acknowledged? Laura Mulvey, in a fresh and original reading, illuminates the richness of the film, both thematically and stylistically, relating it to Welles's political background and its historical context. In a lucid and perceptive critique she also investigates the psychoanalytic structure that underlies the film's presentation of Kane's biography, for once taking seriously what Orson Welles himself disparagingly referred to as 'dollar-book Freud.'
In her foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Laura Mulvey focuses on the film's politics, highlighting the contemporary 'rhymes' in Kane's portrayal of a scandal-prone press baron in a time of economic crisis.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The British Film Institute continues its series of Lasky-ite books featuring famous authors on famous films with the recent publication of Laura Mulvey on Citizen Kane, Peter Wollen on Singin' in the Rain, Colin McArthur on The Big Heat, and Taylor Downing on Olympia. Previous books in the series, which will ultimately comment on 360 film classics, include Ed Buscombe, Stagecoach (1992), Penelope Houston, Went the Day Well? (1992), Richard Schickel, Double Indemnity (1992), and Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (1992). Mulvey provides an accessible account of previous scholarship on the 1941 Orson Welles classic, as well as a psychoanalytic reading of the film that sees Kane as "suspended between a pre-Oedipal love for his mother and rivalry with his father and the post-Oedipal world in which he should take his place." She explores Welles's anti-fascist politics in terms of the film's implicit critique of conservative media magnate William Randolph Hearst. Wollen situates Arthur Freed's Singin' in the Rain (1952) within a history of American dance, the evolution of the Freed unit at MGM, and post-WW II investigations by the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee ("a plot to blacklist Kathy Selden launched by an informer"). His analysis of the title number makes astute observations about the use of sound and Kelly's ecstatic descent into the pleasures of infantilism as he splashes about in puddles. McArthur looks at Lang's Big Heat (1953) in terms of its relation to the William P. McGivern novel on which it is based, to its production, distribution, and marketing by Columbia Pictures, and to its reception by the press. The book concludes with a scene-by-scene analysis of the film's narrative and dramatic structure. Olympic documentary filmmaker Taylor Downing recounts the history of the making of Olympia (1938), Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's record of the 1936 Olympic games, held in Berlin. Downing is particularly good at describing how certain shots were made. Though he acknowledges the political nature of the film, he argues that it transcends the political context which led to its creation, refusing to see that its celebration of physical beauty and athletic prowess is integral to a fascist aesthetic. The Mulvey and Wollen volumes are recommended for general and academic collections at all levels; Downing and McArthur, more narrowly, to general readers and undergraduates. J. Belton Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick

Author notes provided by Syndetics

LAURA MULVEY is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), and Visual and Other Pleasures (2nd edition, 2010).