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On many lists of the five or ten greatest movies of all time, you'll find "Citizen Kane" right up there as #1. Although it was made more than 65 years ago, it is still revived at film festivals and studied at universities for its brilliant writing, staging, symbolic images and technical innovations.

For today's audiences, accustomed to the miracles of computerization, Orson Welles' visual manipulatons seem a bit obvious, stilted and old-fashioned. However, when the movie was seen in 1941, many of the camera movements and effects Welles and his brilliant camera director, Gregg Toland, created, were nothing short of revolutionary.

There was the stark black and white contrast throughout the story. In an era that was blossoming with MGM musicals in brilliant color, Welles' villain-hero Kane lived in a bleak emotional world of his own making. Toland used red and green filters over the lenses, which made the blacks blacker and the whites more glaring throughout the film.

The famous camera positioning and angles still affect the viewer today with their emotional impact. Low cameras shot up into faces and glaring lighting added dramatic shock. High cameras showed the staging of the scene below as if the audience was looking on from a theater balcony, detached, yet involved emotionally.

Long before zoom lenses, the camera moved smoothly in and out from tight close-ups to extra long shots. Several showed the excessive size of Xanadu, Kane's enormous estate. Others intensified dramatic scenes such as the famous burning of the child Kane's sled, Rosebud, after the old Kane's death, and the young publisher Kane's victory dance with chorus girls.

Another innovation was what was called then, "deep focus." In a dramatic pre-zoom zoom shot of what seems to last several minutes, the camera moved from the opera house balcony to a close-up of the on-stage singer without losing any of the sharp focus. The irony of the scene was that the balcony shot showed the unhappy Kane watching his mistress make her opera debut, and he and the audience soon realized she was a terribly inept singer.

One of the most interesting aspects of "Citizen Kane" is that every scene seemed to have several meanings. Film experts still argue about them, and many of the nuances will never be fully explained. Welles' entire career as actor and director was dedicated to keeping audiences guessing about his work.

The film, which was a thinly-disguised biography of publisher William Randolph Heart, showed Welles' great

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