Retrospective: The Trial (1962)

Kafka meticulously translated the horrors of his time into fables with a strong sense of placelessness. The Trial is clearly the product of a German-speaking Jew in Prague wrestling with the occupation of Bohemia by Austria-Hungary and the regime changes brought by World War I. While you can can see bits of Prague in the book — Kafka was deeply engaged with Czech culture — the book feels like it could happen anywhere in Europe. Josef K.'s story is that of a man punished for failing to completely buy into the cultural and political logic of his captors. Initial assurances that he can survive for a while by abjuring and playing along with his persecutors — like the man Bloch, whom K.'s attorney keeps as a client indefinitely — give way as he refuses to play a game whose rules only punish him. Maybe it's better to get stabbed than to cooperate with capital.

Welles retains Kafka's sense of placelessness and precision. The Trial is largely shot in an abandoned train station which looks like essentially nothing else. The cinematography and production design are governed by an almost Escheresque symmetry and blocking worth of Fritz Lang. But we also have K.'s workplace, a Wilder-esque office complex with endless rows of desks, grounding the story in the daily reality of 20th Century Western capitalism. We see prisoners lined up in a manner clearly meant to invoke the Holocaust. Fascism, HUAC, homophobia all rear their heads. K. faces a culture of hegemony and control, a surveillance state which makes everybody an informant. Casting Anthony Perkins, a gay man, as K., who expresses sexual ambivalence toward nearly every woman he meets, simply deepens the sense of genocidal chauvinism governing the state he lives in. K.'s murder at the end of the film reads thus as a hate crime, but one in which K. defiantly refuses to recant. As far as deadly explosions go, it's a pretty inspiring one.