I suspect a lot of people (including some film instructors) have done the film a disservice by calling it the greatest movie ever made, which is the kind of comment that is bound to generate instant resistance and backlash. As I tell my intro to film students, what makes it a great film for me is that you can take any of the various aesthetic elements we discuss throughout the semester and see/hear them being used in an innovative way in Kane. I also tell them before the screening that this is just as much a special effects film as a lot of the movies they are watching today, and after viewing the film we talk about several of the trick shots (including where a pterodactyl appears in Kane and why it's there). I had the good fortune several years ago to meet Linwood Dunn who gave some great insights into a lot of the shots that were created on the optical printer. If anyone is interested in Kane and can find it, I highly recommend the segment on Welles at RKO from the series Hollywood: The Golden Years that ran on A and E years ago. It includes interviews with a lot of people who worked on the film (including Dunn) and addresses areas not covered in a lot of the other documentaries on Kane.
Dunn was one of three people who worked on Kane that I had a chance to meet while writing entertainment articles for a campus newspaper. The others were Ruth Warrick (Emily) and John Houseman, who worked on the script but is not credited on the final film because of a falling out with Welles. Needless to say, Houseman had a lot of great stories to tell about his years working with Welles and the Mercury Theater.
There's a scene in Three Days Of The Condor where Houseman is having a chat with Higgins (Cliff Robertson) about the good old days when "shooting wars" meant you could see your enemy, and how he missed the "clarity" that went with those times. Houseman also mentions, within the fiction, how he also sailed the Adriatic with a "movie star." It seems Pollack himself couldn't help anecdotes or parts of anecdotes from creeping into his own movie!
I think it was Dennis Muren who, in the Star Wars Cinefantastique, recited the optical printing process involving red and blue printing light used at various stages to generate mattes. It involved bi-packing and all sorts of carefully threaded and synchronised bits of film going through the contraption. That Linwood Dunn - he was a clever feller. His successor is probably Douglas Trumbull - taking the art and science to the next generational step.
