By RAY KELLY
Following a theatrical re-release in the United States earlier this year, The Trial is coming home on 4K UHD and Blu-ray discs from The Criterion Collection on September 19.
Footage from director Orson Welles’ planned documentary Filming “The Trial” is also included in the set. In addition,Criterion is offering archival interviews with Welles, Jeanne Moreau, and director of photography Edmond Richard, an essay by Jonathan Lethem, and audio commentary by film historian Joseph McBride;
McBride spoke with Wellesnet about the upcoming home video release and his thoughts on The Trial.
“It was a welcome challenge to do the audio commentary for Criterion on The Trial, a highly complex and somewhat controversial Welles film based on a great novel. I’ve long had some issues with some of the ways Welles approached The Trial, as well as admiration for much of what he did with it, but the opportunity to dig into further research and read the Kafka novel for the third time helped me to see the film in new ways.”
He added, “The restoration produced in 2022 by Studiocanal and the Cinémathèque française is impressive and brings out the highly adventurous, avant-garde visual qualities of The Trial. The soundtrack is also enhanced. Seeing and hearing the film in the best possible light and comparing it with other filmic approaches to Kafka and his work makes me appreciate what Welles did all the more.”
“As he said, his Trial is not so much a film based on Kafka’s novel but ‘a film inspired by the book, in which my collaborator and partner is Kafka.’ That helped unlock some of the mysteries of his approach to the cinematic version. And Welles’s surprising declaration to Peter Bogdanovich that this is ‘the most autobiographical >movie that I’ve ever made, the only one that’s really close to me’ challenged me to explore what he meant by that and how his feelings of guilt relate to those in the novel and the existential dilemma of Joseph K. I put a lot of thought into the commentary and much research and information and believe that and the restoration will help illuminate the film for viewers in some fresh ways.”
McBride said he was “thrilled that Welles’s documentary Filming ‘The Trial’ will be included in the Criterion edition; I was part of the audience that night in November 1981 at the University of Southern California when he and Gary Graver filmed it, and I talked with Welles before the event about his plans to make more essay films about his work, which unfortunately didn’t come to fruition because of the commercial failure of F for Fake and Filming Othello. But at least we have Filming ‘The Trial,’ which found him in good form frankly answering a lot of well-articulated questions from the audience of cinephiles and students.”
Criterion’s 4K UHD and Blu-ray combo set has a suggested retail price of $49.95, while the single Blu-ray disc is priced at $39.95. Both are available for less than the suggested retail price by ordering directly from Criterion or other retailers.
The synopsis offered by Criterion: “A feverishly inspired take on Franz Kafka’s novel, Orson Welles’s The Trial casts Anthony Perkins as the bewildered office drone Josef K., whose arrest for an unspecified crime plunges him into a menacing bureaucratic labyrinth of guilt, corruption, and paranoia. Exiled from Hollywood and creatively unchained, Welles poured his ire at the studio system, McCarthyism, and all forms of totalitarian oppression into this cinematic statement—one of his boldest and most personal, and the film that he himself considered his greatest. Dizzying camera angles, expressionistic lighting, increasingly surreal locations—Welles unleashed the full force of his visual brilliance to convey the nightmarish disorientation of a world gone mad.”
Anthony Perkins as Josef K., a bureaucrat who is accused of a never-specified crime. In addition to directing, Welles wrote the screenplay and co-starred in the movie. Producer Alexander Salkind secured backing of French, German and Italian investors. Welles began the production in Yugoslavia with scenes also shot in Rome, Milan and, most notably, the Gare d’Orsay, an abandoned Parisian railway station.
Upon its release in December 1962, Welles boasted “The Trial is the best film I have ever made.”
The film has been described as polarizing with critics divided over it upon its release. However, it now holds an 84 percent critical rating and 87 percent audience approval rating at the aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes.
The 4K restoration of The Trial was released last year in Europe by StudioCanal.
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