I think filming Franz Kafka is probably more difficult than filming Ernest Hemingway. Getting all the meaning out of Hemingway's sparse prose has certainly been a challenge. But with Kafka and The Trial, how do you film inside a man's mind in an unnamed existential world?
Well Orson Welles certainly gave it a try. The first time I watched The Trial I started a few times and gave up. I was determined to see it through and did this time. I did see it through and came away still not sure of what I saw.
Anthony Perkins is the protagonist Jozef K. He's a nameless toiler in what Kafka correctly sees as a future age of information. Had the film been done today you would see Perkins as a nameless drone chained to a computer. But he's done something that has whatever authority there is most upset. He's under arrest though for a moment free on some futuristic version of bail on an unnamed charge.
Civil liberties have certainly gone out the window. Kafka was not writing about an Anglo-Saxon society where one's innocent until proved guilty. Guilty as charged with little or no chance of proving yourself innocent.
I'm not sure Welles had any fixed notions about filming this in the way he firmly knew his mind with his other and better films. He was experimenting here with some stream of consciousness type technique and I think he was attempting the impossible. He wrote some interesting vignettes for people Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Akim Tamiroff who offer varying degrees of sympathy for Perkins's plight, but all can really do nothing.
The Trial is an interesting experiment, but it doesn't make it in my book.
Well Orson Welles certainly gave it a try. The first time I watched The Trial I started a few times and gave up. I was determined to see it through and did this time. I did see it through and came away still not sure of what I saw.
Anthony Perkins is the protagonist Jozef K. He's a nameless toiler in what Kafka correctly sees as a future age of information. Had the film been done today you would see Perkins as a nameless drone chained to a computer. But he's done something that has whatever authority there is most upset. He's under arrest though for a moment free on some futuristic version of bail on an unnamed charge.
Civil liberties have certainly gone out the window. Kafka was not writing about an Anglo-Saxon society where one's innocent until proved guilty. Guilty as charged with little or no chance of proving yourself innocent.
I'm not sure Welles had any fixed notions about filming this in the way he firmly knew his mind with his other and better films. He was experimenting here with some stream of consciousness type technique and I think he was attempting the impossible. He wrote some interesting vignettes for people Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Akim Tamiroff who offer varying degrees of sympathy for Perkins's plight, but all can really do nothing.
The Trial is an interesting experiment, but it doesn't make it in my book.