New restoration of The Trial to premiere at Cannes

[Wellesnet]

As the new 4K restoration of The Trial continues its run at New York's Film Forum, Beatrice Welles shares her memories of the filming in a recent Film Forum podcast:
https://www.wellesnet.com/beatrice-well ... ast-trial/

[Wellesnet]

‘The Trial’ restoration playing select U.S. cities:
https://www.wellesnet.com/trial-nationw ... wcPzg8LZkY

Those screening dates for The Trial include:

February 3 – 10 — Somerville, MA — SOMERVILLE THEATRE

February 5 – 6, 8 – 9 — Salt Lake City, UT — BROADWAY CENTRE CINEMAS

February 10 – 16 — Chicago, IL — MUSIC BOX THEATRE

February 10 – 16 — Sag Harbor, NY — SAG HARBOR CINEMA

February 12 & 16 — Nashville, TN — THE BELCOURT

February 19 — Edmonton, AB — METRO CINEMA

February 22 & 26 — Amherst, MA — AMHERST CINEMA

March 12 & 14 — New York, NY — FILM FORUM

March 17 – 23 — Silver Spring, MD — AFI SILVER THEATRE

March 19 & 25 — New York, NY — MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

March 31 – April 6 — Pittsburgh, PA — ROW HOUSE CINEMA

April 21 – 23 — Minneapolis, MN — TRYLON CINEMA

June 3 – 4 — Detroit, MI — DETROIT FILM THEATRE

[tonyw]

I hope the eventual DVD release will include those scenes with Katina Paxinou shot silent and other items that ended up on the cutting room floor?

[jbrooks]

The March 12 and 14 encore screenings of the restored "The Trial" at Film Forum in New York City are part of its Jeanne Moreau Retrospective. Film Forum is also playing "The Immortal Story" and "Chimes at Midnight" on those days (March 12 and 14).

[Wellesnet]

Chicago Tribune review-
https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertai ... gP8Rd-XN5A

It operates as if dreamed into concrete existence, though in the world of Josef K., played by Anthony Perkins, nothing’s concrete, or holds for long. He is a company man (we never hear what company; in Kafka, he’s a head cashier at a bank) accused of an unspecified crime. He tries to get answers and to fight the power, haplessly. His purported advocate, billed as The Advocate and played by Welles, is not a man of the people, simply a man out for one person, and that person is not his client.

Once accused, Josef K.’s surroundings are defined by obstacles and humiliations and piles of useless forms and detritus of a civilization without a human pulse. The movie has one, because it’s alive, barely controlled but often exquisite, every second. Distributed by Rialto Pictures, the tack-sharp new digital 4k restoration of “The Trial” opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre.

Kafka began writing his nightmare in 1914, before the Great War. He never completed it, though its abruptly ended, posthumously published form made perfect, jagged sense while going on to mess with millions of college-age brains worldwide for decades.

Ray Pride from Chicago New City.
Sharp-Dressed Man: A Review Of Orson Welles’ Restored The Trial:
https://www.newcityfilm.com/2023/03/10/ ... the-trial/

Dead center is Anthony Perkins: handsome and agile, haunted yet antic. Look up “man,” man as Welles has created him: exacting haircut, encased in timeless tailoring, a trim suit, natty five-button vest, slim pants with pleats crisp as glass. In the hours of the film, among his superhero garments, only his perfect white shirt shows stress. The costume offers no distraction from the study of Tony Perkins in motion (and commotion). K. is a time traveler: he does not look out of place in these threads containing this commotion in 1915 (when Kafka’s book was written), 1925 (publication date), 1962 (film release), or even 2001, 2023. (The wicked costume design is by Helen Thibault.)

"Film Noir could be described as suffering with style." - Eddie Muller

***

Richard Brody, The New Yorker-

The histrionic writhings of Orson Welles’s 1962 adaptation of Kafka’s novel—featuring Anthony Perkins, as the persecuted bank clerk Josef K., as well as Romy Schneider, Jeanne Moreau, Elsa Martinelli, Michael Lonsdale, Akim Tamiroff, and Welles himself, in full-throttled fury, as the Advocate—join with a frenzy of Expressionistic images to bring the story’s tormented universe to life. Welles’s visual compositions, with their striated, high-contrast black-and-white photography and their sets (built in Paris’s Orsay station) of a jaw-dropping grandeur, burst through the screen to evoke an oppressively incomprehensible system of edicts and constraints. And who better to reveal the system’s evil genius than Welles, the golden boy turned Hollywood martyr? He plays the sybaritic attorney as, in effect, an imperious yet insecure director whose dialogue seems made for a megaphone, and turns Josef K. into a rebellious actor who defies the machine and needs to learn his lesson. Visual and textual allusions to Welles’s entire oeuvre to date (starting with “K,” for “Kane”) and a concluding apocalyptic showdown in front of a bright and empty screen reinforce the suggestion of torments inflicted by the studio system on the innocent—on both sides of the camera and on society at large.

[tonyw]

I assume this version is the one running "Down Under" in this excellent commentary by adrian danks?

https://cinemareborn.com.au/The-Trial