Now through Nov. 2, A City of Film – A Factory of Dreams will salute the cinematic side of Zagreb, which traces its cinematic roots back to 1896, when the first film screening in Zagreb was held in the building of the “Kolo” Croatian Singers’ Association.
The exhibition features photographs from the set of Welles’ 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and images of the Upper Town during the filming of Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice, which was nominated for five Oscars. Zagreb was also the location for the filming of two episodes of the successful TV mini-series The Winds of War.
Welles recalled shooting The Trial in a 1962 interview with BBC.
Kafka is central European and so to find a middle Europe, some place that had inherited something of the Austro-Hungarian empire to which Kafka reacted, I went to Zagreb. I couldn’t go to (Kafka’s native) Czechoslovakia because his books aren’t even printed there. His writing is still banished there… I never stopped thinking that we were in Czechoslovakia. As in all of Kafka, it’s supposed to be Czechoslovakia. The last shot was in Zagreb, which has old streets that look very much like Prague. But you see, capturing that flavor of a modern European city, yet with it’s roots in the Austro-Hungarian empire wasn’t the only reason why we shot in Yugoslavia. The other reason was that we had a big industrial fair to shoot in. We used enormous buildings, much bigger than any film studio. There was one scene in the film where we needed to fit 1,500 desks into a single building space and there was no film studio in France or Britain that could hold 1,500 desks. The big industrial fair grounds that we found in Zagreb made that possible. So we had both that rather sleazy modern, which is a part of the style of the film, and these curious decayed roots that ran right down into the dark heart of the 19th century.
The Trial was also shot in Dubrovnik, Rome, Milan and Paris.
Footage from Welles’ never completed documentary Filming The Trial can be viewed at the Wellesnet video page.
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