Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Trial. Orson Welles is a cinema genius whose flops are more fascinating than the hits of lesser men, and in this eerie piece of esoterica, an adaptation of Franz Kafka's parable of the Anxious Age, he has produced the most fascinating failure of his career, a madhouse matinee that...
...Trial. Orson Welles is a cinema genius whose flops are more fascinating than the hits of lesser men, and in this eerie piece of esoterica, an adaptation of Franz Kafka's parable of the Anxious Age, he has produced the most fascinating failure of his career, a madhouse matinee that...
Orson Welles, who wrote and directed the first film version of Kafka's masterpiece, has wisely declined to decide. He accepts every possible interpretation as a limb of the author's allegorical monster, as a circle of the Hell in whose image he imagined man is made. Into this pit, his cameras rolling like the eyes of Lucifer, Welles plunges with tartarean energy; and if he cannot quite get to the bottom of it all he nevertheless comes up with a film of infernal brilliance, perhaps the most exciting picture he has made since The Magnificent Ambersons...
...blackout is easier to follow than Kafka's story line, but Welles keeps right on its tail. One fine morning, "without having done anything wrong," a bank clerk named Joseph K. (Tony Perkins) is arrested-or is it all just a bad dream? Two plainclothesmen burst into his bedroom, order him to dress, refuse to say what law he has broken, badger him for bribes, steal his best shirts, subject him to an apparently pointless "interrogation." And then breeze off, leaving K. in a sweat. Were they really plainclothesmen-or were they crooks? Is he really arrested...
...analogy is trite, to say the least, but it is also valid. Welles often belabors the author's meaning, but nowhere betrays it, even though he tries too hard to keep the story hoppin' like Hellzapoppin, galloping like a nightmare. Like Kafka, Welles adapts the methods of nightmare to narrative. Time at times turns rubber in his hands, and images live a violent private life; even Welles has seldom matched the visual bravura of The Trial. Much of the film was shot on one of the most spectacular sets a camera ever saw: the abandoned Gare...