-Devdutt Trivedi
Orson Welles’ adaptation of Franz Kafka’s masterpiece was a big budget production with big stars including the likes of Jeanne Moreau and Anthony Perkins. Although the film has been rejected over the years by the public and critics alike, barring a few exceptions, the film stands out as the most formalist adaptation of Kafka. Welles approach to cinema uniquely recreates Kafka’s novel to Welles world of shadows and deep space fragments so that in Welles’ own words,’ films are not an illustration or an interpretation of a work, but quite as worthwhile as the original.’
The most significant difference between the book and the film is the ending. In Kafka’s novel K is murdered whereas in Welles’ film K laughs in front of the murderers transforming the ‘whimper with a bang.’ Welles wanted to adapt Kafka to a ‘pre-Auschwitz’ setting that was reacting to the historical process set up by the Holocaust. Welles believed that Kafka would not have the two executioners stabbing K with a knife if Kafka were to write after Auschwitz. The jagged lensing ‘to show how spatially distant and chronologically separate regions were in touch with each other’ establishes the undercurrent of a historical process that points ‘to a limitless time which made (the separate regions continuous.’ Deleuze’s reading of Welles’ The Trial is the most significant where the sensory-motor breakage in the ‘brain’ of ‘the screen’ can no longer decipher ‘(i)n which sheet of the past … the hero to look for the offence he is guilty of’ so that ‘he can no longer recall anything about it, but the whole is hallucinatory.’ The Wellesian affect is replaced by a space where ‘nothing is decidable an more; the coexisting sheets juxtapose their segments.’ The adults resemble children, the grown women transforms into a young girl, and cinema is one language becoming another. In all of Welles work, the dubbing is slightly delayed to give the effect of a dream as well as another world being denoted which maybe (or may not be in the Robbe-Grillet-like sense) in another language.
Welles himself believed that ‘the great gift of the film form, to the director, is that we are not forced to think of the audience’ and that it was infact ‘impossible to think of the audience’:
If I write a play, I must inevitably be thinking in terms of Broadway or the West End. In other words, I must visualize the audience that will come in; its social class, its prejudices and so on. But with a film, we never think of the public at all, we simply make the film the same way you sit down and write a book, and hope that they will like it.
Welles continues by linking his approach to film and its audience with his Kafka adaptation:
I have no idea what the public will make of THE TRIAL. Imagine the freedom of that! I just make THE TRIAL and then we'll see what they think of it. THE TRIAL is made for no public, for every public, not for this year, for as long as the film may happen to be shown. That is the gift of gifts.
Welles insisted at the time of its release as well as after its critical and public reception that it was the ‘best film’ he had ever made. The film was shot in Paris, at the empty Gare D’Orsay railway station where Welles ‘discovered the world of Kafka.’ Welles described Kafka’s story as being ‘about people waiting, waiting, waiting for their papers to be
filled.’ In this way Welles transforms the text into a mechanism for fulfilling Cocteau’s approach of the cinematograph as being superior to cinema as the latter is ‘incapable of waiting.’ Other parts of the film were shot in Yugoslavia and the last sequence was shot in Kafka’s homeland Czechoslovakia, in Zagreb.
Welles made The Trial in 1961 after the success of Resnais’ two masterworks Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year At Marienbad (1961). Welles claimed: ‘I don't like them, but I'm so glad that they were made.’ Although Welles and Resnais have a similar approach to the past,present and future which form a volume of Deleuze’s second study of cinema: Cinema 2:The Time-Image, Welles avoids any direct influence of Resnais’ work especially in his cross cutting which is remarkable Welles-like in its ability to use chunks of duration comprising of a shot so that, as in Bazin’s remarkable reading of Citizen Kane, montage only serves the function of joining different chunks of duration/shots. Welles dubbed for 11 voices in the film included some dialogues by Anthony Perkins. Perkins claimed that he could never figure out which lines of his were dubbed by Welles.
The film was rejected at its opening and Welles would be relegated to making shorter projects for television which were often left incomplete, until he completed his masterful F for Fake in 1973. The film was defended in 1978 by Noël Carroll in Film Quarterly, Volume 3 as a faithful Kafka adaptation.
References
Interview with Orson Welles, Huw Wheldon, British Broadcasting Corporation, 1962
Cinema 1; Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze, Les Edition De Minuits, 1985
Discovering Orson Welles, Jonathan Rosenbaum, University of Carolina Press, 2007
It's All True: Orson Welles's Pan-American Odyssey, Catherine L. Benamou,University of California Press, 2007