Citizen Kane Film Analysis

Citizen Kane’s director Orson Wells and Double Indemnity’s director Billy Wilder both used specific techniques to create an intensified form of realism in their respective films. This realism was developed in order to ensure the delivery of their film’s message about human nature that people will do anything if they truly feel that they can get away with it. Both directors worked to establish a world in their films that would seem believable to audiences so that their ultimate truths would have a larger impact on those who watched. Wilder used his world of film noir to reveal the truth that a law-abiding man such as Walter Neff could be persuaded to commit murder with little influence because he believed that he could manipulate the system and not receive punishment for his crime. Wells created a world that would allow for a “larger than life” persona such as Charles Foster Kane who felt that he could do as he pleased and use the influence of his vast wealth to make it happen. Throughout the rest of this paper I will illustrate how each director used techniques associated with realism in film to show the audience why the characters believe they can act without consequence, the process in which they act, and finally that the events transpired are truthful because the audience is seeing them in retrospective.
As previously stated, the thriller of Double Indemnity occurs in a world known as film noir. This style of film has very specific characteristics that let it achieve a more realistic feel to audiences than other studio productions. In Carl Richardson’s book Autopsy: An Element of Realism in Film Noir he states that the film style “depicted life in odd ways, distorted for the sake of entertainment, but they also allowe...

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...he news. The audience sees that the men have already committed their acts and are now dealing with the consequences, even though they had thought they would escape them.
The hyper-realism that Orson Wells and Billy Wilder established in their films helped them create a believable truth for their audiences that people with do anything if they feel they can escape the consequences. The realistic film environments that they created allowed them to show an audience why their characters believed they could act this way, the process in which they acted, and finally that they had already committed the acts because the audience was merely hearing the recollection of events. The men may have not gotten the results that they had planned for, but Wells and Wilder were successful in creating a realistic world that would help their message better be received by their viewers.