Welles writers on THE TRIAL

[mteal]

For the 50th anniversary of Orson Welles's film adaptation of Kafka's THE TRIAL, I'll be presenting a series of excerpts from various Welles writers and scholars concerning Welles's interpretation.

First up is James Naremore, from his 1989 revised version of THE MAGIC WORLD OF ORSON WELLES:

Doors are among the chief symbols of K's dreamworld..The "next room" in THE TRIAL always suggests a repressed psychic horror - either a forbidden sexual desire...or a hidden guilt, or a fear of retribution. Every entranceway portends some kind of shock...and his anxiety inevitably increases. In the concluding scenes, however, his entrances and exits become more purposeful, reflecting his transformation into an angry, more active character. Near the climax, after he has witnessed the debasement of the Advocate's client Bloch, he leaves the room by defiantly breaking down a locked door. At the conclusion, the inhibiting walls and boundaries have become more fragile, at last yeilding to an open space.

It is clear that K's guilt is mainly sexual...K's room is institutionally white and functional, except for an unframed print of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" hanging near his dressing table, the mad blossoms suggesting an inner torment.
This bedroom scene makes the connection between State and superego nearly explicit, and shows K's anxiety growing out of his willing participation in a repressive social hierarchy.

And here's from Roger Ebert's review of the film:

Kafka published his novel in Prague in 1925; it reflected his own paranoia, but it was prophetic, foreseeing Stalin's gulag and Hitler's Holocaust, in which innocent people wake up one morning to discover they are guilty of being themselves. It is a tribute to his vision that the word "Kafkaesque" has, like "Catch-22," moved beyond the work to describe things we all see in the world.

Perkins was one of those actors everyone thought was gay. He kept his sexuality private, and used his nervous style of speech and movement to suggest inner disconnects. From an article by Edward Guthmann in the San Francisco Chronicle, I learn that Welles confided to his friend Henry Jaglom that he knew Perkins was a homosexual, "and used that quality in Perkins to suggest another texture in Joseph K, a fear of exposure."

"The whole homosexuality thing--using Perkins that way--was incredible for that time," Jaglom told Guthmann. "It was intentional on Orson's part: He had these three gorgeous women (Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Elsa Martinelli) trying to seduce this guy, who was completely repressed and incapable of responding." That provides an additional key to the film, which could be interpreted as a nightmare in which women make demands Joseph K is uninterested in meeting, while bureaucrats in black coats follow him everywhere with obscure threats of legal disaster.

But there is also another way of looking at "The Trial," and that is to see it as autobiographical. After "Citizen Kane" (1941) and "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942, a masterpiece with its ending hacked to pieces by the studio), Welles seldom found the freedom to make films when and how he desired. His life became a wandering from one place to another. Beautiful women rotated through his beds. He was reduced to a supplicant who begged financing from wealthy but maddening men. He was never able to find out exactly what crime he'd committed that made him "unbankable" in Hollywood. Because Welles plays the Advocate, there is a tendency to think the character is inspired by him, but I can think of another suspect: Alexander Salkind, producer of "The Trial" and much later of the "Superman" movies, who like the Advocate, liked people to beg for money and power that, in fact, he did not always have.

[Glenn Anders]

Congratulations, Mike: I think your presentations give us some keys. As you Ebert suggests, Orson Welles was dependent upon older men from the time he was a small child. They directed his education, his travels, the setting up of his artistic apparatus. [He drew his creativity from women, particularly his mother, but also his lovers and actresses he worked with, such as Agnes Moorehead and Jeanne Moreau (neither conventionally beautiful nor sexually attracted to him), and his daughters, who seem to have been his markers, which he drew himself to, yet retreated from.] But it was also the men -- Skipper Hill, his father, Dr. Bernstein, John Houseman, Louis Dolivet, and of course, Alexander Salkind, whom you mention, George Schaefer, Harry Cohn, Darryl F. Zanuck, even John Huston, who was more often a stimulating partner . . . on and on -- with whom he had to compete, produce for, and often, compromise with, whether he wanted to or not. And after CITIZEN KANE, nothing was ever quite good enough for those who were left. It may be another reason for the explosions with which he ended many of his films.

That setting you present for Welles' inspiration in THE TRIAL is most persuasive.

Glenn

[mteal]

True Glenn, the "older man/younger man" relationship does seem to be one of the cores of Welles's work, as is the theme of betrayal, which Welles obviously experienced both sides of. What's interesting, and not that much remarked on that I know, is the physical resemblance between Anthony Perkins and Keith Baxter, Welles's Prince Hal in FALSTAFF. Both are young men on their way up who fall under the influence of an older man. Both Hastler and Falstaff get rejected at the end by their young would-be followers, although Welles had a different attitude towards each character, considering Hastler a "Mephistophelian" figure, while Falstaff was a "Christmas tree decorated with vices."

Here are some more excerpts:


OW interviews ( From the 1982 Megahey interview):

I don't believe in an essential reverence for the original material. It's simply part of the collaboration. And I don't feel the need to be true to Kafka in every essence. I'd thought it was important to capture what I felt to be the Kafka atmosphere, which is a combination of modern horror creeping up on the old Austro-Hungarian empire. I saw it as a European story, full of old European bric-a-brac, with IBM machines lurking in the background.

Chuck Berg & Tom Erskine, THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ORSON WELLES

The action suggests, in light of the dreamlike prologue, and K's somnolent state, that what follows may be not only a nightmarish experience but also a real nightmare...logic is not valued in this nightmare. The growing assumption is that K. is indeed guilty until proven innocent, but proving one's self innocent is impossible, as K. discovers.

When K. goes to work, the setting is reminiscent of Fritz Lang's M, a very expressionistic set of countless robotlike employees at their desks; it's resemblance to a bureaucratic prison rather then an office suggests that the entire society is a prison.

K. launches into a futile verbal attack on the system and suggests that the "establishment" is behind his accusation. When his denunciation receives ambiguous applause, K. leaves the room, dwarfed by a huge door.

K's escape route takes him directly to a huge cathedral...when the Advocate repeats the words of the guard in the illustration ("And now I'm going to close it [the door]), the advocate and the guard become one.

The woman in the film are deformed or decadent...and eroticism is mingled with physical decay that mirrors the emotional decay of the Nazi-like state.

Clinton Heylin, DESPITE THE SYSTEM:

The Trial was as avante garde as Welles ever got...yet the funding to make such a blatantly uncommercial work came about, in part, because of his growing reputation as one of the Hollywood greats. "K's crime is in surrendering to the system that's destroying his individuality". Joseph K discovers, as Welles put it in Twilight in the Smog, that "an individual is a downright nuisance in a factory."

Brett Wood, ORSON WELLES: A BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHY

Early in the film the setting is finite, and it is possible to orient one's self within K's world. His bedroom is surrounded by normal features...There is an identifiable order to the setting which may not seem noteworthy until one has experienced the confusion later in the film.

The first scene in which K talks to the investigators is a three and one half-minute shot with no cuts. While the scene is claustrophobic and intimidating to K...it is straight reality, without the disorienting editing which Welles later uses to scramble narrative, logic and reality...There are several other long takes early in the film while K's world is still somewhat ordered. Early in the film K. follows a daily routine but later these ordered situations change. The halls and chambers through which K travels become a labyrinth of no logical design...The scene in which K visits the pinter Titorelli, best exemplifies the deranged logic which is established.

Welles illustrates the overbearing nature of K's ordered world in the office scenes...hundreds of desks are lined up with clerks typing mechanically at them...K is not trapped in this rigid world. He is a part of it. He is perfectly happy with his oppressed life until he is arrested for an unspecified offense. Welles said "K is a little bureaucrat. I consider him guilty."...This explains why most audiences have trouble associating with the central character...Like an insect under glass, K is to be studied as his situation worsens.

K is plagued by uncertainty about his job, relations with his family...and most obviously, sex. Women in the film are both threatening and seductive and are almost always presented at one time or another through windows, doors or other barriers through which K must cross to reach them...K seperates himself from the landlady, Mrs. Grubach, by a sliding glass door...when he goes to see Miss Burstner, a stripper, he throws open the door...when K recieves an unwanted visit from his cousin Irmie in the office she is seperated from him by a huge pane of glass...when K follows Leni through the Advocates' chambers, he finds her standing behind a row of mirrors, with one pane broken out, so that K sees her and not himself in the opening...the young girls peer and reach between the vertical slate which form the walls of the man's quarters.

He is constantly shown passing through doorways...the significance of the doorways, windows, and barriers which obstruct K is stated in the fable which forms the prologue of the film...Near the end, he points out the fate of a society that so intimidates it's people, "That's the conspiracy, to persuade us all that the whole world's crazy...formless...meaningless...absurd. That's the dirty game. So I've lost my case. You...you're losing too."...K is the only one who seems to have any pity or sympathy for others...the whole world of The Trial is neglected of humanity. It is a society of self-interested individuals with no concern for others, very much like the fascist state Kafka forecast just before WWII.

Welles shows that the corrupt state is crumbling. The stacks of files and shelves of volumes in the Advocates' chambers are in one room orderly and in another scattered in piles on the floor...the role of the victim in this society is clear. In one shot Welles shows a row of "the accused" sitting on a bench, beneath a rack of meathooks. The Advocate, who cares nothing about his clients but lives to manipulate their lives, first appears devilishly enshrouded in steam vapors which cling to his face. The chamber is lighted by many candles and a thunderstorm rages outside. K's final consolation and act of rebellion is that he does not kill himself with the knife (as the computer had predicted).

The themes of a loss of innocence and realization of corruption which can be applied in some way to all of Welles's films are again relevant. K realizes that a perversion of justice exists in the society in which he had happily resided for so long. (is this why Welles has him "waking up" at the beginning?)...because of the emotinal distance between the viewer and K...the cries of laughter which preceed his death...leave it questionable whether K understoood at last his role in his plight or merely went insane...the purposefully wooden performance by Perkins keeps the viewer distanced.

The Trial is the least enjoyable of Welles's films for the very reason it is one of his best-directed: he applies his talent with meticulous calculation, without regard to the emotional indentification of the audience to which he was often enslaved.

[mteal]

Here are some excerpts from THIS IS ORSON WELLES pertaining to THE TRIAL. Welles's comment about playing the priest seems to me to add some plausability to the idea that Welles himself could have ordered the animated prologue cut from the film for the 1984 version mentioned in another thread:

From This is Orson Welles

PB: The fable that opens The Trial-

OW: -is from Kafka, but it doesn't open the novel; it's told toward the end, by the priest in church. It's his sermon.

PB: Weren't you going to play the priest in the movie?

OW: I shot it, but when we couldn't find an actor for the Advocate's part, I cut those sequences in which I play the priest and started again...the fable at the start would have made more sense if I'd been the priest.

****************

OW: K is not metaphorically guilty at birth as conceived of by Kafka, since Kafka was a Jew. The idea of guilt at birth is Christian...The point is not whether he's guilty or innocent. It's an attitude toward guilt and innocence - that's the point of the story. Because what is the guilt?..What counts is the attitude, not the fact...It's totally without meaning whether he's guilty or not...It's a study of the various changing attitudes towards guilt, the way they can be used.

OW: We don't know why they're executing him. It's a murder, but so is an execution, and it has the quality of both - of an assassination and of an execution - as indeed it does in Kafka; that's very true to the book. But not his defiance at the end. That's mine. In the end of the book he lies down and they kill him. I don't think Kafka could have stood for that after the death of the six million Jews. That terrible fact occurred after the writing of The Trial and I think made Kafka's ending impossible. If you concieve of K. as a Jew, as I did. I don't mean as a Jewish Jew, but as a non-Christian. It just made it morally impossible for me to see a man who might even possibly be taken by the audience for a Jew lying down and allowing himself to be killed that way.

PB: Is Israel fighting that past now too, nationally?

OW: Yes, sure they are. And it's admirable, but...all nationalists are terrible bores if you have to talk to them. I'm certainly for them in principle, though I wish they hadn't given up the Yiddish culture, because I'm so pro-Yiddish...The Yiddish theatre, of course, is divine nonsense, but the Yiddish literature is beautiful. The plays were all riotous - I used to go to them night after night. God, I'm a great expert on the Yiddish theatre.

PB: Where did you see these plays?

OW: Everywhere. The Yiddish theatres were everywhere - London, Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires. It was the only international theatre in history. Movies are the second. The first was Yiddish, because there were these great Yiddish-speaking communities all over the world.

**********

PB: What was the Katina Paxinou scene about?

OW: K. has his fortune told by the computer...It was my invention. The computer tells him his fate.

PB: And it's correct.

OW: You don't know what it is, and neither does he. It's just a piece of punched tape...

************

PB: You've said you don't like symbolism.

OW: Hate it.

PB: But I felt like The Trial...

OW: It's the kind of subject maybe that makes you feel you ought to look for symbols. It smells and looks like the sort of Middle European dream world that should be loaded with them...it's full of do-it-yourself stuff. You can make your own symbols if you want to. But there isn't a single symbol in it...it's a dream - a particular nightmare - inspired by Kafka. It's surrealist, if you want. But the good surrealists aren't symbolists.

OW: It's a dream and dreams aren't specific...it's the very formlessness that is the horror of that story...a feeling of formless anguish, and anguish is a kind of dream which makes you wake up sweating...it's all those things we have anguish about...What made it possible for me to make that picture is that I've had recurring nightmares of guilt all my life. I'm in prison and I don't know why...It's the most autobiographical movie that I've ever made, the only one that's close to me...It's much closer to my own feelings about everything then any other picture I've ever made.

PB: ...I think it is like some terrible dream

OW: But it isn't a reproduction of a dream - that's a very important point to make.

PB: It gives you the feeling of a dream.

OW: Yes, related to the experience of dreaming...the magical part of dreaming is what I was looking for, trying to achieve. Because dreams do have something to do with magic, and I believe in magic as the main source of poetry*. We create entire worlds in our dreams - full of people we've never seen, places we've never been to - that seem to echo and reverberate with worlds and memories that we've never experienced. And yet, there they are, real, within the context of that sleeping experience - when we're in touch with whatever we're in touch with, which people have only begun to guess at. And so it would have been disastrous to have symbolism, in the ordinary sense of the word in it, because a symbol is my statement to you and the audience, and I'm not there. I mustn't tell you anything. I must make you think that there are things happening in the next room that you don't know about; that's the thing of a dream. That they are richly happening. Totally ambiguous, you know. Signalling to us magically, but never in the sense of the egghead symbol, only in the symbolism of magic. That symbolism is very valid, and I prefer not to talk about it...it's an invocation of something.

[mteal]

Joseph McBride's book ORSON WELLES focuses on the moral and spiritual aspect of the film, in tune with the idea, held by some, that Kafka's THE TRIAL is the story about the relationship between Man and God:

Kafka’s heroes are driven by an inexplicably malevolent force that has fallen on them totally at random; it is a dark parody of the doctrine of original sin. There is punishment and guilt but no underlying cause. The ‘sin’ is assumed as a prior condition of existence…what is tragic in Kafka is existence in general…K submits to the knife, unable to even kill himself, which would imply an acknowledgement of responsibility. “The responsibility for this last failure of his” the narrator writes “lay with him who had not left him the remnant of strength necessary for the deed. “…It is Kafka who has not left K the remnant of strength necessary to act of his own volition. It is Kafka who denies meaning to his characters’ lives and refuses to consider the possibility of a higher order…his characters’ impotence…is but a comic statement of their creator’s preordination of defeat as the universal principal.

This, of course, is the exact inverse to Welles’s position…He forces his characters to choose between responsible self-determination and god-like arrogance…”I hate all forms of Faust, because I believe it’s impossible for man to be great without admitting there is something greater then himself - either the law or God or art - but there must be something greater then man. I have sympathy for these characters - humanly but not morally.” Given this conflict between Kafka’s material and Welles’s philosophical attitude…the story proceeds through rhetorical interplay. Welles treats the Kafka theme of preordained defeat as a constant challenge to the stability of his own moral order. Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man is closer to Kafka’s world.

To understand the full complexity of Welles’s point of view here, we must assess the exact nature of his rhetoric. A crucial point is his dual presence both as director and in the person of the Advocate…who assumes a more important function then in the novel…in the film he becomes a demonic embodiment of the temptation against which K must struggle. This is confirmed by the Advocate’s reappearance in the cathedral at the end, taking over the interrogatory function Kafka assigned to a priest…Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Welles’s Advocate presents the hero with a vision of chaos that makes possible the hero’s moral victory.

Welles does not assume that his audience has read Kafka’s novel; such an assumption would place the work in the realm of criticism rather then of artistic expression…Instead, Welles is careful to keep us constantly aware of a philosophical position inimical to his own. We can see this most clearly in the cathedral scene, which has the Advocate reciting Kafka’s parable of the law…and K interrupting him to speak for Welles’ position: the need for an admission of personal responsibility. The scene was written almost entirely by Welles, and precipitates K’s immediate destruction.

Welles endorses K’s principle that an individual has the power to prove the existence of an order greater then himself…Society for Welles is a projection of the hero’s conscience (hence the projector in the cathedral?); in a profound image he has K’s executioners make their final appearance by emerging from behind his body on the steps of the cathedral. But Welles’s K lets nothing outlive him…In the very act of proving that there is an order to the universe, K presumes to judge the universe. It is fitting that he realizes his responsibility for his individual actions, but when he extends his responsibility to the universe in general, he oversteps the boundary between man and superman.

K is guilty first of all because he has allowed himself to function as part of a system destructive of free will…his guilt is the sin of pride. On realizing that he is not helpless and has moral power, he uses it to destroy the universe.

[mteal]

Here are some selected quotes by Welles from his unfinished documentary/essay FILMING THE TRIAL. What a shame that this Q&A session was the only part of the project to be filmed, although it is very fascinating in itself:

Virtue and integrity illuminate western civilization, and hopefully they're only temporarily out of fashion. The physical outlook of mankind does not change virtue.

It is not a man against society story, it is not about his conflict with society. It is about his failure to flourish and flower in society. K. is basically a conformist, and yet society is killing him even though he's not fighting it. He fights each issue as it comes along, but you don't see a man in an aggressive position against society. Society rather, is in conflict with him.

The fairy story (the parable of the law) at the beginning is the attempt to destroy him, to destroy his faith and character. The story is part of the plot against him. We are all told fairy stories- in TV commercials, in presidential addresses, in editorials. This Brothers Grimm fairy tale is repeated later when the advocate tried again to corrupt Joseph K. The advocate is his chief corruptor, the devil. Joseph K's life is contained within a lie. The Trial is not a novel in which a character leaves a real or benign world and enters a world of nightmare. He was born into it, conceived in the womb of horror. He can't escape it any more then a baby born in Bangladesh can escape dying of starvation. Welles fools us into believing that it is his own voice narrating at the beginning when he is actually playing the voice of the devil in order to create a sense of doom. It is the devil's dream of Joseph K. we are watching.

I wanted K to make a final gesture of defiance even if it was fruitless - existentialist if you like - and I couldn't bear to have him have his throat slit like a pig. He throws the grenade back, which is a way of saying "No". Putting him in a hole with a bomb and having him try to throw the bomb out was the simplest way to express that.

I'm more interested in politics then anything else in the world. In the 40's I was politically engaged when I had a chance to be, when the world was open to young people being involved in politics. Stalinists used to say, and a lot of unregenerated leftists still say, that it is the duty of every artist to make a political statement. The truth is that every work of art IS a political statement. When you make it you usually fall into the trap of rhetoric, and the trap of speaking to a convinced audience, rather then convincing an audience. I think some movies and some books, and some painitngs have changed the face of the world. But I don't think it is the duty of every artist to change the face of the world. He is doing it by being an artist. That just automatically goes along with it, and he may be doing harm when he doesn't mean to. But oh God, deliver us from the people who want to tell us what is right and wrong, or what is moral and immoral. From a political point of view, it's just as inexcusable as from a sexual point of view. Of course we hate the real vices of the world like racism and oppression. If you didn't agree with that, you wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be getting along. The majority of people are in agreement about those basics, rather then dogmas.

The camera is a kind of mirror, and so turning a mirror on it seems a magical thing to do. I can't tell you why.

I find repeated indications in the book that K. is a pusher on his way up the beauracracy, not Mr. Zero in the adding machine, not the poor little faceless accountant, but a young man very anxious to get ahead in this awful world. Therefore, he is in a state of real neurosis, because he is both terrified of, and anxious to conquer, the same thing.

I believe in the existence of evil, and in that I'm at odds with most of the people of my generation. I think evil is a force so great, that is beyond me to decide whether it is generated entirely within man, or whether it is a contagion as well as something we generate within ourselves. The power of it is so great that the metaphysics are beyond me.

I don't think Kafka intended the story to be like a dream, but in trying to make the story accessible to an audience of millions of people, I said it was a dream.

I'm not Jewish, but we are all Jewish since the Holocaust, and I couldn't bear for K. to submit to death as he does in Kafka, masochistically. It stank of the old Prague ghetto to me.

The cut computer scene was designed to show man's slavish relationship to something which is only his tool.

The idea that women find K. attractive is Kafka at his most narcissistic ("Look at my beautiful blood as it streams down"), and the advocate says K. is attractive too, but nothing the advocate says should be believed.

I didn't want to be in it, but I couldn't get Gleason for the advocate, and there was no other actor of my caliber that I could afford.

Many foreign actors don't learn English anymore because movies have ceased to be international. Think of how few foreign films play in England and America nowadays. They may play at festivals, but not in theatres.

No fine movie was ever made by a director who wants everything to be perfect, because every bad painting has every leaf in the tree, and every great painting makes you see a tree.

I am a profound pessimist, with a sentimental inclination towards hope, and this pessimism is why I worship bravery as one of the most important virtues. Bravery is not the same as macho.

Part of the fascination of the book is the insistent, almost onanistic eroticism in which sexual symbolism and the seduction of beaurocracy goes hand in hand with the sense of oppression. The eroticism in Kafka is very strong, inevitable. Sexuality is the antagonist along with the beaurucratic oppression.

My K. is less passive then the characters in Kafka, and my worldview is different from his. He was a creature of the Austro-Hungarian empire, of his own people, his own religion, between the two world wars. There's no way we could see the world in the same way.

I light a set, and then decide where to put the actors in it. The set is all we have besides the actors, so the only way to give it a chance is to begin with it.

American and British traditions of law would not allow for the kind of legalistic nightmare seen in The Trial. It couldn't happen here. It is a story of Middle Europe, and that is Kafka's prison. There is no escape from it. There is nothing in Kafka that would support American traits. His world is totally European.

The great fairy tales were invented in forests before electric light.

Q: When you are speaking at the beginning of the film, you are not in character as Hastler, you are playing the voice of Orson Welles, as you are playing (the voice of Orson Welles) at the end of the film.

A: "That's the magician. I'm tricking the audience into believing that that's a point of view. That kind of trickery is legitimate I think, because I want the audience to feel the doom into which K. is born, and to believe that it is there. It's the voice of the devil. But it's not my voice. It's not my dream."

*

[mteal]

Here are some excerpts from Frank Brady's CITIZEN WELLES:

The Trial was written by Kafka in 1923, but it is totally apropos for the anxiety-ridden 1960s...It is all at once a prophetic vision of the totalitarian state, a labyrinthine nightmare, a parable of the law, a study of paranoia, and a paradigm of the inability of man to communicate.

Welles chose Yugoslavia for it's natural settings, which most viewers would find difficult to place and...because the faces in the crowds had a Kafka look to them, and the hideous blockhouse, soul-destroying buildings, were somehow typical of modern Iron Curtain architecture...the huge office (is where) K. lives out his daily death of insignificance, inhabiting it as the real world of a faceless nightmare.

William Cappel (Titorelli): The deserted and crumbling Gare D'Orsay, that triumphantly florid example of the Belle Epoque that looms so splendidly across the trees of the Tuileries gardens...Welles explored the lunatic edifice, vast as a cathedral: the great vulgar corpse of a building in a shroud of dust and damp, surrounded and held together by a maze of ruined rooms, staircases and corridors. He had discovered Kafka's world, and the genuine texture of pity and terror of it's damp and scabrous walls, real claustrophobia in it's mournful rooms; and also intracacies of shape and perspective on a scale that would have taken months and cost fortunes to build.

The ghostliness and baroque massiveness of the station seemed an inspired choice for the filming of The Trial; it was symbolic of the phenomenon that dominated the 19th century and was responsible, in Kafka's terms, for many of the ills of the 20th: the Industrial Revolution.

Film critic Eliot Stein has suggested that Welles's sets and locations for The Trial emerge as the first important fruition of Kuleshov's pioneering 1923 montage expiriments in creating arbitrary filmic space.

Welles press release: "The Trial is contemporary nightmare, a film about police bureaucracy, the totalitarian power of the apparatus, and the oppression of the individual in modern society. I've told the story of a particular individual. If you find a universal parable behind this story, so much the better. "

Welles made every attempt to create the feeling that Joseph K. was encapsulated in a nightmare and the image of the world as a madhouse, of a time or world once remembered. (My note: Gare D'Orsay as Amberson mansion or Praca Onze, or Hall of Mirrors)

Welles original narration: "This is a story inside history...the error lies in believing that the problem can be resolved merely through special knowledge or perspicacity - that it is a mystery to be solved. A true mystery is unfathomable and nothing is hidden inside it. There is nothing to explain. It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream. Do you feel lost in a labyrinth? Do not look for a way out. You will not be able to find it. There is no way out."

As the advocate, Welles whispers the word "Guilty" in almost exactly the same voice and inflection as does Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil.

One of the disturbing qualities of Kafka's novel is that most of it's surrealistic happenings occur against an ordinary, everyday, realistic background, while Welles in The Trial has been criticized for establishing a world that is in itself surreal, baroque and bizarre. But Welles's recreation of Kafka was an interpretation of his own nightmare...an expression of one man's inner landscape of hallucination.

The film is an attempt to create a nightmare world, rather like that of 1984...a melange of 19th century monumentalism, now decayed, and some twentieth century counterparts that seem to give the film...the landscape of a totalitarian nightmare...little by little, as K. is drawn into an obsession with is possible guilt, he and we learn more about the weirdly hierarchical world of the film.

[tonyw]

Yes, a great and relevant work proving Welles a great artost whose work is timeless.

[mteal]

Here are a few excerpts from one of the 33 (!) different editions of Peter Cowie's book A RIBBON OF DREAMS: THE CINEMA OF ORSON WELLES, first published in 1963, only a year after THE TRIAL was first released:

THE TRIAL, Orson Welles's film of Kafka's terrifying vision of the modern world, was hailed as a masterpiece by a majority of continental critics, but with few exceptions it was dismissed as a boring failure by the British and American press.

The opening narration says that the logic of the story is the logic of a dream of a nightmare, and as we hear this, we see Joseph K waking up from a dream into a nightmare. One has the feeling that K awakes, or is born, guilty. Guilt is a disease, and the idea of pre-ordained guilt, or original sin, begins to creep insidiously into the film, as it also does into MACBETH. THE TRIAL is an expressionist film, if Expressionism can be described by Karl Hauffman's definition that "the phenomenon of the screen are the phenomenon of the soul."

Welles remembered that he had once been offered the Gare Dorsay as a movie location, and his curiosity was aroused. His choice was a stroke of genius: the monstrous perspectives, dwarfing the characters, the vistas of imprisoned glass, the iron stairways and myriad corridors combined to form a symbolic background to the film, that is an equivelent to the labyrinthine ways and mournful buildings of Prague. For the shy Kafka, the perimeter of Prague was an unexplored, obscure world of proletarians.

As the scope of the interrogation expands, one notes that Welles has located K's world in an ultra-modern apartment block, the kind of buildings that seem to encroach on the human beings in their midsts, as in Antonioni's LA NOTTE. Here, K carries on a Harold Pinterish conversation about free will with Miss Pittl, a friend of Miss Burstner's, who is dragging a trunk from one building to another. The camera accompanies the couple as they move slowly over this eerie landscape. In this sequence, consisting of one long take, one can distinguish the difference between the style of Kafka and the style of Welles. In the words of Eliot Stein, Kafka's novel presents a realistically described world, but it is inhabited by dream people. In Welles's film, real people inhabit a nightmare world.

K is guilty in advance, and human society, as represented in the courtroom scene, regards him as a scapegoat. He belongs, like all else, to the court. He is doomed in advance. The monstrous door of the court dwarfs him as he leaves. After this scene, he has been engulfed by the storm. From now on, his sole preoccupation is with his case.

One should never forget, that one clear implication of both the book and the film, is that K is made aware of his guilt by suggestion. But Welles, having lived through an epoch where the torture chamber and the concentration camp became law, has, not unnaturally, a more bitter viewpoint then Kafka's. His use of the music of Albinoni lends an air of inevitability to the whipping sequences.

Welles himself plays the crucial role of Hassler the Advocate. Hassler's long, lofty chambers are illuminated by hundreds of candles, as if signifying the eternal vigilance of the law. He represents Lucifer; he is evil incarnate, like Harry Lime. The nubile Leni wraps K in one of the advocates black coats, metaphorically stifling him in the folds of authority. She shows him how her hand is deformed, with a web of skin between the fingers. The prominance given to hands by Welles in this film is fascinating, and recurs in a later scene, where Bloc kisses the Advocate's hand. It is as if the hand were a symbol of tyranny, from whose clutches no one may escape.

With a storm raging outside, the immense silhouette of the Advocate moves behind the glass partition of the junkroom, demonstrating his impalpability and shadowy power. Suddenly, quite by chance, Josef K catches his first glimpse of Bloc, and in that moment K has foreseen his fate; Bloc might as well be a prefigurement of K in twenty years time: downtrodden by the law, and bereft of all will to escape, resigned to perpetual imprisonment. The man come from the country to seek admittance to the law, no less.

Later, one sees an entire hall filled with silent men, and Josef K now has his first encounter with other fugitives from the law, like himself. K talks with one of them and is frustrated by his naive, trusting attitude. Towards the end, when K rejects the Advocate's services after being repelled by Bloc kissing the Advocate's hand, Hassler's warning, "To be in chains is sometimes safer then to be free", marks K as a man to be eliminated.

K's flight leads him into a huge cathedral, but even here Welles strikes a frightening note by covering the pillars of the building with tactile ribbons. The advocate makes an unexpected appearance and projects on a screen the allegory of the law, with which the film began. K, caught in the projector's light, is superimposed on the screen, like the man in the story. When Hassler repeats the words of the guard, the audience senses that Hassler is the guard.

In this scene lies the key to THE TRIAL. On the one hand, the cry of an entire world in the knowledge that it is guilty of allowing such an evil administration to gain power. Hassler says, "You are a victim of society?", and K in response, "I am a member of society." And on the other hand, the defiant gesture of a Wellesian hero refusing to surrender meekly in the style of Bloc.

"The human mind isn't that complex." complained Albert Schweitzer to the author when he returned to him a copy of The Trial. But human society is as complex as Kafka maintained, and the inablility of the human mind to understand that complexity is the tragic moral of both the novel, and of this extraordinary, hallucinatory film.

[mteal]

Here's an attempt at a precis of the "Last Man" chapter of Peter Conrad's book ORSON WELLES: THE STORIES OF HIS LIFE, which cleverly ties in THE TRIAL with several other projects Welles was involved in around that time:

Allegorical to the end, Welles at the AFI speech compared himself to a driver on a side road, content to move more slowly then others on the freeway. When he looked at the conformist society whose values he continued to flout, he often wondered if we weren't on the road to the extinction of humanism and humanity. The end comes when machines appropriate the creative and destructive capacities that once belonged to the gods..dismissing the idea of the individual - that proud Rennaissance invention - and seeing only dots, like Kindler or Harry Lime looking down from on high. A stark choice is proposed for humans: either mutation into machines or regression into beasts. Welles showed us the new world that came into existence when machines trampled nature...like the oil derricks in Touch of Evil, as insatiable as the blood-sucking Martians...pumping up money.

Society had outlawed the spirit of idiosyncracy. Now Ionesco's Rhinocerous, like a herd of armoured vehicles, symbolized the herded conformity of the masses. Tynan criticized Ionesco for ushering in 'a bleak new world from which the humanist heresies of faith in logic and belief in man will be banished forever.' To comment on the 'collective psychosis' of a mass society, Rhinocerous alludes to Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast when the first rhino sightings are dismissed as 'a myth - like flying saucers'. Berenger, a bueaucrat who refuses to follow fashion and become a rhinocerous, becomes instead the last man hanging on to his individuality. His argument near the end with his friend Jean is similar to the conversation between Proffessor Pierson and the national guardsmen in the War of the Worlds. Jean favors capitulating to the mob and, like the guardsmen, replacing moral laws with the imparative of the jungle. "Humanism is all washed up", he says.

One critic said Ionesco's play was like a cartoonish enlargement of Kafka's cockroach in Metamorphosis, and Joseph K. is another version of the last man, surrendering to his arresting officers in yet another suburban junkyard. K. also defends humanism, to the advocate, trying to assert the rational nature of man and the universe only a few years after the Holocaust had revealed the depths of man's inhumaneness. But to the Advocate, the universe is absurd, and therefore protest (and humanism itself) is pointless. Welles changed Kafka's ending to give K. some of Berenger's defiance. But he also chided Ionesco in a letter for his political nuetrality, and noted how such ivory tower defeatism had helped lead to the concentration camps, and a world where privacy is a crime, and the sovereign individual is outlawed. Welles complained that, by showing the incapacities of language, Ionesco was trying to show the incapacities of man himself, and he condemned Ionesco's political apathy, as well as his advice to the rest of the world to abandon liberal values just because they had been suppressed in his native Roumania.

In The Trial, the abolition of private space is explicit...there can be no escape from survellience. In Psycho, Perkins had peeked through a crevice in the wall to look at a woman. In The Trial, he is the one in a cage, being studied by a pack of lewd schoolgirls. He is the last of his species and of his gender: what further use does this gynocracy have for a man? Men had become expendable in a society run by machines, and equally expendable in a world of liberated women. An alliance between woman and machine doubly alarmed Welles. In F For Fake he assailed technocrats and their priestly prestige: “Experts are the new oracles. They speak to us with the absolute authority of the computer, and we bow down before them. The scientist in the cut scene from The Trial, with her fortune-telling computer, is an oracle like Tanya, the fortune-telling madame from Touch of Evil. When K asks her whether computers will one day make legal decisions, she replies, “You don’t think we’re going to start telling fortunes, do you?” All the females in The Trial are manifestations of the White Goddess. The goddess, according to Graves, directs the progress of men from one stage to the next, and constructs subterranean labyrinths like those Graves identified in Wales or Ireland - in which these mysterious changes take place.

In the novel, K laments to the priest how the lie has become fundamental to world order, the dirty game of politicians. But the film’s implication is not political; the outburst Welles wrote for Perkins is aimed at the insanity of modernism and it’s desire, as Andre Bretton wrote in his famous surrealist manifesto, to “escape from the human species”. Welles, imagining himself inside Kafka’s bad dream, wanted to show how a modern vision warps and disfigures the world we recognize. Picasso wracked bodies into new shapes, Dali caused them to melt…Both, like Welles, were specialists in metamorphosis, the Kafkaesque magic that can turn a man into a beetle. Looking through the camera, Welles saw a world deformed by the lens, like Grisby using a spyglass to spy on Elsa, or Sancho Panza trying to look through the telescope, or the proprietor of the flea circus and his magnifying glass in Arkadin.

Tynan lamented modern art’s abandonment of our visible, habitable world…the end of that line, being action painting, which staged an event rather then replicating a scene. Welles’s action paintings were made with light, like the Hall of Mirrors, where there is no way of telling the real person from his or her simulacrum. Those mirrors, like the camera, reproduce people and multiply them indefinitely. In the Trial, the seductive nurse breaks the mirror and K, like Orphee entering the underworld in Cocteau’s film, steps through it to join her, just as Don Quixote in the movie theatre attempts to join the action on the screen by slashing it to ribbons. When Berenger in Rhinocerous refuses to join the pack, he is compared to Don Quixote, although he is actually more like Falstaff, whose liberal, humanist vices were transformed into weapons of the mind.

Cubism showed objects from a succession of jarring inconsistent angles. This is how Welles wanted to show his characters, and for the soundtrack for The Trial, he presents a similar cubist pileup of music…a clash of idioms and ages. Albinoni’s Adagio funereally announces that a solemn, implacable ritual is underway, conducting men from one world to the next…it represents K’s acceptance of determinism…but whenever he tries to amend or outrun his fate…the syncopation of jazz expresses a slangy American liberty, a refusal to accept hallowed, customary rules. 

After the slideshow, K wakes up from this dream and his bedroom door, like all the other doors in the film, becomes a port of reverie, granting entry to the unconscious mind. K, like Michael O’Hara in the funhouse, is groping for an exit (from modernism?). K wants to ‘reject everything but facts’, but what reassuring facts are there in a crazy house? O’Hara reels through a room that looks like Caligari, as if it were controlled by the same mad diety. K’s landlady tells him his arrest is something abstract. Modern Art abstracts us from ourselves and from a reality that owed it’s appearance of rationality to the conscientious lies told by art. (Art’s lies helped create the illusion of rationality in life). “It happens” Camus said in describing the advent of truth, “that the stage sets collapse”, and a man awakens to find his daily routines absurd and his existence pointless. Welles’s original designs for The Trial acted out this vastation. The sets were to gradually disappear…as if everything had dissolved away. At the end of the Advocate’s slideshow, a white screen expresses the final destination of modern art…as bleakly averse to human feeling as the whiteness of Moby Dick. Enlightenment is the absence of images: a white canvas, a blank screen…

In I’ll Never Forget What’s His Name, Welles’s Johnathon Lute is a Faust devoid of human feeling, like Harry Lime, and keeps society going by telling lies in commercials. Like Lime he is an authority on the lower depths where an affluent society’s excess is flushed away. He knows the true end of consumption is excretion…”In the twentieth century, the main product of human endeavour is waste…in two centuries there will be a great mountain of garbage. It’s up to you and me to see that we’re standing on top of it rather then under it”. That line recurs in a subversive commercial filmed by his acolyte, over images of corpses being shoveled into a trench at a concentration camp. “Ours, the scientists keep telling us,” Welles said as he looked up at Chartres cathedral in F For Fake, “is a universe which is disposable”. He contrasts this monument to God’s glory and the dignity of man, with the contemporary worldview that resulted from the loss of faith in both. This conglomerated world of ours, and the economic system of mass production, indiscriminate consumption and waste, had caused man to be superceded by machines and a technological society that compressed individuals like Joseph K into interchangeable, anonymous units.