Word: kafka
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When Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened in Prague recently, its title was changed to Who's Afraid of Franz Kafka? The switch was significant. Not only did it mark Czech officialdom's resurrection of Kafka from the Communist limbo of "degenerate individualism," but it also reflected the intellectual ferment behind the Iron Curtain that made Kafka's redemption possible...
Gallu, said Belli, is "working like a pregnant beaver" editing the film. "I've got some awfully goddam good stuff," said Gallu. "There's the hotel suite where the defense lawyers stayed. It became a Kafka room. It was a weird kind of a thing, like you're in some body's mind. I got Belli naked in a steam bath, Belli and Tonahill looking out of the window where the shot was fired, Judge Brown talking during a re cess. Once when the court was not in session, I put the camera in the judge...
...Kafka to Pasternak. A dynamic, contemporary society above all demands a degree of decentralization. Indeed, Russia no longer has the idle hands and lands to afford the manic wastage, inspired inefficiency and brontosauric unresponsiveness of an economy nannied from Moscow. Its real gains in the future will have to come through increased individual efficiency, even if efficiency in turn demands a degree of freedom that Russians have not yet attained...
Clearly, though, Russia is no longer the passive pastoral society that quivered before Stalin. The Kremlin will increasingly feel the pressures of an urban culture that is no longer resigned to an indefinitely receding Utopia. Communism's Kafka-and-abacus stage is already being overtaken by its Pasternak-and-hi-fi era. Affluent Communists might not be any easier to live with. But they would certainly have more to live...
Actually, this big hunk of nonsense is one of the year's most entertaining films. It's main achievement is molding into one story the ideas of Franz Kafka, Ian Fleming, and whoever writes those Doris Day scripts...