“The Trial” - Orson Welles (1962)

Franz Kafka’s haunting novel The Trial (1925) is justly famous, but its enigmatic nature left it open to multiple interpretations and presented challenges to any filmmaker wishing to adapt it to the screen. It was left up to an intrepid filmmaker like Orson Welles to take on the challenge with his 1962 film of Kafka’s tale.  Welles had had early commercial success with films like Citizen Kane (1941)  and The Stranger (1946), but he was subsequently more or less banished from Hollywood and was at this point working in Europe under constrained budgets.  For example in connection with this film production, Welles, who usually strove for an expressionistic atmosphere, was not given the finances to construct his own sets and was forced to look for existing premises in which to shoot his dramatic scenes.  He ultimately found locations and settings appropriate for his film in Paris, Milan, Zagreb, and Rome.  For example, he  shot much of the film in the abandoned Parisian train station (now a museum) Gare d’Orsay. Nevertheless and despite these limitations, he came up with a masterwork [1].

Kafka’s story of The Trial was actually written during 1914-15 and, like most of his work, was never fully completed during his lifetime.  His friend Max Brod edited and finished off the manuscript for posthumous publication in 1925.  And Welles then did some of his own reediting by reordering some of the chapters when he wrote his screenplay for the film.

The story of The Trial concerns a young man, Joseph K., who is awakened early one morning and told by the intruding plainclothes police officers that he has been accused of a serious crime.  But K is not informed of what he has been accused, nor is he immediately incarcerated.  He is merely told that he must report to government offices to face the so-far unstated charges. The rest of the story concerns K’s frustrating and ultimately in-vain efforts to find out just what he has been accused of so that he can make efforts to clear himself of the charges.  As such the story has been considered to be an example of absurdist fiction and existentialist narrative, as well as offering a metaphor for man’s obsession with guilt [2,3].

Besides these more personal and individualistic themes, though, many commentators also attribute themes associated with more exterior, social issues to Kafka’s story.  In particular, the depiction of an obscure and oppressive bureaucracy that intrudes into every corner of one’s personal life seems to anticipate for many people the 20th-century horrors of Stalinism, Naziism, and the Holocaust. In fact in this connection, Welles’s, himself, was once under FBI investigation [4].  Even today, there is a pervasive sense of uneasiness concerning how vast and inscrutable organizations may mysteriously use hidden surveillance technologies to invade our privacy and exert control over our lives.

So we may attribute two separate streams of interpretation to The Trial – the existential and the social.  In Welles’s film there is a particular focus on the existential side of things, though at the film’s conclusion there is imagery that invokes horrors on the social side, as well.

Welles said he did not make his film “based on” on Kafka ‘s book, but, rather, “inspired by” Kafka’s work [5].  In particular, Welles altered the character of Joseph K. somewhat, making him more assertive than Kafka’s character, and he also introduced elements of what might be said to be black comedy into his film.  Despite these alterations, though, I would say that Welles’s The Trial very much captures the anxious spirit of Kafka’s work.

Welles achieved these moody effects by means of his characteristic expressionistic mise en scene, which he admitted was inspired by his viewing of the works of early German Expressionistic filmmakers [6].  This involved high-contrast black-and-white photography, as well as many extreme high- and low-angle shots that present the story’s principals from a psychologically disturbing perspective.

The Trial’s narrative meanders through three general phases.

1.  Guilt

In the beginning the focus is on the disturbing and encompassing nature of guilt.  In the opening sequence Joseph K. (played by Anthony Perkins, who had recently starred in another noirish masterpiece Psycho (1960)) is shown (in a carefully crafted tracking shot of 3:40 duration) being awakened in his room at 6am by plainclothesmen.  Even though he doesn’t know what he has been charged with, K acts guiltily.  Later he talks to another boarder in his rooming house, Marika Burstner (Jeanne Moreau), and again their conversation is clouded by concerns of guilt – on this occasion in connection with their tentative romantic relationship.  Then K is shown in his vast, desks-in-a-row office where he is made to feel guilty by insinuations made by his boss when K’s teenage cousin stops by for a visit.  These and other similar scenes all highlight that our lives are infused with guilt.

Indeed our social institutions, particularly our religions, are dominated by notions of guilt.  Humans are called upon to take responsibility for their actions that have negative outcomes, and the principal mechanism to place a behavior-modifying burden on people for these unwanted actions is guilt.  In addition, humans are presumably the only animals that know that death is inevitable for everyone.  But we don’t know why we are faced with this punishment.  So our institutions tend to proclaim that we all must be intrinsically guilty for this situation – we are all guilty at birth.  But why?  This is the question the underlies Joseph K.’s situation in The Trial, and its understanding points to the idea that guilt is a man-made construction [3].

2.  The Law and Its Execution

The second phase of the film shifts the main focus from personal guilt to an immersion into a vast and unknowably labyrinthine legal system – the instrument for adjudicating and punishing guilt.  While attending an opera, K is interrupted and escorted to an obscure courtroom building where a hearing on his case is being conducted in a crowded auditorium.  K ascends to the stand and makes an impassioned speech dismissing the still-unstated charges against him and then walks out of the room.  So K is shown not to be a passive victim but an assertive responder, if only he could figure out where he stands in the legal system.

Later K’s uncle Max takes him to his lawyer friend, the advocate Albert Hastler (Orson Welles).  But K is distracted by Hastler’s beautiful assistant, Leni (Romy Schneider), who tries to seduce K and who also urges K to confess to his guilt.

Subsequently K returns to the courtroom where he had made his speech and is surprised to find it empty.  The only person around is the beautiful wife of the courtroom guard, Hilda (Elsa Martinelli), who also offers herself to him without qualification.

When K later does talk to the advocate Hastler, he soon sees that the advocate is a cynical manipulator and is of no use in connection with K’s legal difficulties.  So K eventually dismisses Hastler, but before he leaves the office, Leni urges him to visit the official court portraitist, Titorelli, who supposedly knows all the ins and outs of the legal system and the people at the top.

On the way to visit Titorelli, K is hounded by a frenetic pack of giggling and laughing young girls who seem to be aggressively after him.  Titorelli’s room turns out be a small, slatted enclosure, through the slats of which the loudly cackling pack of young girls can be seen and heard.  All of this creates a claustrophobic and paranoid atmosphere for the conversation between Titorelli that ensues. 

With his insider knowledge Titorelli explains to K that there are three possible types of acquittal:

• definite acquittal – this is a theoretical designation that nobody knows how to achieve.
• ostensible acquittal – rearrests for the same charges are inevitable, and one will be involved in an endless cycle of court cases.
• indefinite deferment – one’s court case will get tied up in a literally endless sequence of proceedings  

K departs from Titorelli’s premises under a cloud and hurries down a surrealistic slatted corridor  with the shrieking girls in pursuit.

3.  Closing In
Commanding voices now direct K through further mazes until he reaches the basement of a cathedral, where a priest emphasizes to him the hopelessness of his situation.  Then Hastler mysteriously shows up, and he tells him about the cryptic and fatalistic “Before the Law” parable that is a metaphor for the eternal mystery of every man’s ultimately doomed fate [7].

Finally, K is grabbed by two rough-looking police guards, who usher K to the outskirts of town and down into a large hole in the ground, where they apparently intend to execute him with a large butcher’s knife.  With K lying submissively on the ground between them, they lean over their victim and hesitantly pass the knife back and forth between them, apparently waiting for K to do the job himself.  In Kafka’s story, K is knifed “like a dog” at this point, but in the film K just laughs derisively at the two men, who then scramble up out of the hole.  Once out on top, they toss a pack of dynamite down into the hole where K is.  K grabs the bomb and throws it, but we immediately see a massive explosion that apparently destroys everything in the vicinity.  The final images are those of the mushroom cloud from the explosion.

That final shot of the mushroom cloud was Welles’s way of reminding us that we live under the cloud of likely nuclear annihilation.  In other words, we face a self-imposed death sentence, the current collective mindfulness of which is much lower today, by the way, than it was back in 1962, even though its danger and likelihood is undiminished from that time.  This is something, like the horrors of the Holocaust, which Kafka also could not have anticipated in his day, but the universality of this deranged death sentence makes it particularly appropriate to connect with Kafka’s tale.

Another interesting subtheme of Kafka’s that appears throughout the film concerns the take on femininity in the story.  Many of the women that K encounters – Marika Burstner, Leni, Hilda, and the pack of young girls – are aggressively seductive and represent lascivious distractions from K’s serious concerns.  In casting Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Elsa Martinelli for these cameo roles, Welles was presenting some of the most alluring feminine European movie stars to portray this notion of feminine distraction and devotion to sensual physicality.  Their presence in the film is likely to give the viewer a different feeling than what one probably gets from reading Kafka’s story.

So we can say that Welles did inject references to significant social themes in his rendition of The Trial.  But nevertheless and as mentioned above, the principal focus and aesthetic virtue of his film concerns his presentation of Kafka’s existentialist theme.  This was accomplished by means of Welles’s well-developed film noir mise en scene, which he had honed in connection with his earlier works along these noirish lines – The Stranger (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and Touch of Evil (1958).  But The Trial represented the culmination of Welles’s film-noir aesthetics.

We can observe that the film noir is actually the ideal mode for Kafka, because it employs emphatic expressionist techniques to convey paranoia, hopelessness, and fear of incarceration – just what Kafka was talking about [6].  As filmmaker and writer Paul Schrader remarked regarding the aesthetics of film noir [8]:

“The actors and setting are often given equal emphasis. . . . When the environment is given an equal or greater weight than the actor, it, of course, creates a fatalistic, hopeless mood.”

Certainly this is the case in The Trial, where Welles’s expressionistic settings and camera arrangements constantly impose a threatening surroundings on the beleaguered Joseph K.  The positive effects of this moody atmosphere more than compensate for some minor deficiencies in the finished product.  The background music, while often evocative, is sometimes too jazzy and distracting. And the dubbed dialogue (Welles is said to have used his own voice to dub eleven of the characters’ spoken lines [9]) is sometimes unclear and too rushed. But overall, Welles’s The Trial is a masterpiece.  In fact even though Welles’s Citizen Kane has often been ranked as the greatest film of all time [10], Welles, himself, regarded The Trial as his best work [5].  And it truly is worthy of being considered a film classic.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “The Trial”, RogerEbert.com, (25 February 2000).  
2. Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Existentialist Aesthetics”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (17 February 2015).   
3. Temenuga Trifonova, “The Trial”, Cinémathèque Annotations on Film, Issue 38, Senses of Cinema, (February 2006).    
4. Cristina Vatulescu, “The Medium on Trial: Orson Welles Takes on Kafka and Cinema”, Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2013).    
5. Huw Wheldon, "Orson Welles on THE TRIAL", Interviewed on the BBC in 1962, Wellesnet, (1962).   
6. Jeffrey Adams, “Orson Welles's ‘The Trial:’ Film Noir and the Kafkaesque”, College Literature, Vol. 29, No. 3, Literature and the Visual Arts (Summer, 2002), pp. 140-157.
7. Franz Kafka, “Before the Law”, (translation by Ian Johnston), Franz Kafka online, (1915).   
8. Paul Schrader, “notes on film noir”, Film Comment, Vol. 8, No. 1 (SPRING 1972), pp. 8-13.     
9. “The Trial (1962 film)”, Wikipedia, (30 August 2018).    
10. “Sight and Sound: Critics’ Top Ten Poll”, Wikipedia, (26 August 2018).