Many critics place Citizen Kane at the top of their list of best films of all time. I think it would be best described as the most influential film of all time.

Personally, I have no great love for the film. I find it hard to have empathy for the central characters and it leaves me rather cold. But I do have tons of admiration for it. Orson Welles’ film was ground-breaking in many senses of the word. Its greatest gift was that of a new grammar for film-makers.

There are so many technical and stylistic innovations in the film that any audience at the time of its release would have been wowed by the “special effects”. Do you remember seeing Star Wars or The Matrix for the first time? Something like that!

Just to list a few of the innovations (mainly cinematography):

• Camera Angles - upward and downward camera angles to help create moods and points of view
• Depth of field - camera shots that show the back and the foreground in focus to create space and depth between the characters
• Tracking shots - camera movement over buildings, through windows to follow the action
• Use of flashbacks - creative use to dramatise the narrative
• Editing - different types of editing to convey pace and time and place

I am sure that there are many more if you analyse the film in detail but the point to be made was that it provided film makers who followed a broader range of techniques to call on to enhance their story telling and set the mood of their films. Welles was pronounced a genius after the opening of the film but it is Greg Toland’s photography that sets it apart from the films of that time. Was it Welles or Toland that was the genius?

Citizen Kane has its rightful place in history because it moved the film community forward and lit the fire of imagination for many generations to come. And in that respect it is by far the most influential film of all time.

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We have all seen these lists published everywhere. You will have your own list. I have mine. The British Film Institute will have theirs. The Screen Actors Guild will have theirs too. But how do you arrive at this list? It’s a very subjective thing isn’t it? My list will be very different to yours (I can assure you). And there are reasons for that. The main factor I use in my analysis are the effect that film had on me when I saw it for the first time. The emotion that it evoked in me. After all, most of us go to the cinema to watch films that will entertain, thrill, shock, frighten, educate us or make us laugh and cry. Good films help us forget about the humdrum here-and-now and take us to another place for a couple of hours or so. An issue arises though when some one or some body wants create a list of the top 10 BEST films of all time. How do you make a choice between Citizen Kane and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the Seven Samurai and The Seventh Seal or Some Like It Hot and Casablanca? Best in what terms? Biggest audience viewing figures? Gone With The Wind would be at number one under that criterion. Biggest grossing film - isn’t Titanic number one here? Best acting, best cinematography, best story/ narrative etc? Do you see what I mean. There used to be a poll every so often amongst film critics and they would ruminate on their best 100 films. These results would be aggregated and, hey presto, a definitive list would come out. These must be the best, right? There is a degree of objectivity being brought into the process but, after all, the raw data is still only various people’s subjective evaluations. But what you tend to see in these lists are older and more esoteric films with Citizen Kane being at number one. However, in the past few years there has been a trend of television companies doing large polls of their audiences (more likely to be representative of you and me) and coming up with lists like The 100 Best War Films of All Time etc. Here the general film going public has its chance to have an opinion and the results tend to differ significantly from the critics. But again it’s all subjective. People are not using the same criteria to judge the films, not every body has seen the same films. I don’t know whether it would be worth trying to come up with a sound formal method for evaluating a film based on objective criteria so that we could come up with THE BEST FILMS. I suspect that there will always be elements of the process subject to criticism by people like myself. So, why don’t we keep it as an interesting entertainment in itself and a topic of conversation and not take it too seriously. After all, your opinion is as valid as mine. But appreciation of film, in my terms, is knowing why you liked or disliked a film and being able to express it; being aware of the criteria you yourself use in judging a film; and listening to and considering alternative views. I won’t list my Top 10 Films of All Time yet but there is a picture from one of them at the top of this post? Any guesses?