Blog response #1 – 400 or more words
Post by Tuesday 2/22, 10 PM
Secondary responses (comments on peer posts) must be posted by the end of the week.
Consider one or more of the following elements of Kafa’s novel The Trial.
-Huld, the Lawyer
-Block, the client
-The treatment of women
-Titorelli, the Painter
-The parable of “the law”
-Locations such as K's office, the court clerk offices, etc ...
-The conclusion of the novel – K’s death
Among other things about the film version by Orson Welles, James Naremore suggests that “Kafka’s ironic, impersonal vision of despair has been transformed into a Wellesian morality play” (198).
Consider how one or more of the above elements has specifically been adapted or transformed to fit Welles’ aesthetic and thematic preoccupations. How does his film version employ and/or reconsider Kafkaesque moods and themes? Be specific as possible (discussing the best of what you can recall of the filmic approach and employing direct evidence from the novel).
The parable of the law is one of the key aspects of Orson Welles transitioning the written version of "The Trial" into a film version is captured completely by the parable of "the law": 1) Orson Welles' monologue describing the notion of a man being denied his justice to only discover the door was his and his alone parallels the journey of Joseph K. and his untimely demise. 2) Welles as Huld when describing the parable to Joseph as his lawyer is striking as Huld knows that Joseph has no way out and that his guidance is the only thing keeping his client alive. Both of these notions are tragic, but the idea that Huld literally holds Joseph's life in his hands is terrible, considering that Joseph thrusts open his own door to ultimately perish under this oppressive legal court.
ReplyDeleteAnother aspect that is converted to create a sense of a "Wellesian drama" is that of shifting locations in the film. Just as in the novel, the film version plays with the idea that the world is slowly enveloping Joseph, and he cannot escape the oppressive system he is pinned underneath. This is most striking in the final moments of the Titorelli scene when Joseph opens the painter's back door only to discover a long hallway of court offices which lead back to the initial meeting place of Joseph's sentencing. The idea that one cannot escape their fate is evocative of Charlie Kane in "Citizen Kane" and Hank Quinlan in "Touch of Evil" where these great, powerful men fall due to their hubris as much as their surrounding environments.
Finally, the conclusion of the novel/film are nearly one in the same. The main, striking difference between the two is that Joseph in the novel isn't in control of his fate in the least as the executioners stab him through the heart when he least expects it, but the film's ending is drastically different in that Joseph manages to take his untimely fate into his own hands when clutching the dynamite, instead of throwing it at his oppressors to escape. The filmic Joseph K. knows there is no escape for himself, and simply succumbs to his fate instead of being murdered by the executioners in the finale of the novel. This is Wellesian in the fact that the protagonist cannot escape their fates no matter what attempts they try to make to change their destiny (ies).
I think you contradict yourself in the last paragraph when you claim that filmic K's taking hold of the dynamite manages to both "take his untimely fate into his own hands" and "simply succumb to his fate instead of being murdered by the executioner," though it's possible I'm misreading it. Rather than looking at his clutching of the dynamite as an accepting or rejecting of his death at the hands of the courts and claiming that the accepting of it is Wellesian, I think the important part is how fundamentally little K's death changes about the court system he opposes. While he claims (possibly only rhetorically) that his goal is to help not himself but other accused, like in Kane where Kane's only legacy is an absurdly opulent estate and Quinlan's the laconic eulogy of a brothel madame, K's legacy is merely that his resistance against the court, though decayed, is intact enough that he at least refused to knife himself.
ReplyDeleteOne of the elements that was adapted was the court offices and K's office. In the book, Kafka described these places as "suffocating" or "airless" and to me it seemed like Welles took that concept and made these places have a suffocating feel despite them being large spaces. In the court room where the first interrogation was held, the room was grand in size, yet the way Welles had it crammed with people made it seem so much smaller.
ReplyDeleteAnother element I found interested was the character of Huld. In the book, it seemed as if he could never just say what he was thinking. He had this way of rambling on with words and using complex thoughts and ideas to communicate his thoughts instead of just saying what he was thinking. This character seems incredibly Kafkaesque to me, and Welles seemed to pick up on it. I think that fact that Welles himself played Huld drove home the character even more. He also placed Huld in an attic setting that made the whole scene of K and Uncle Karl going to meet Huld even more abstract. There was a certain mystery to Huld’s character, and Welles own characteristics made it even more believable. Whether it was supposed to be taken this way or not, I found Huld as an uncomfortable man, which to me is kind of how Kafka writes.
It was almost frustrating to read some parts of the book, and Welles had a way of transferring that to the movie, making some scenes frustrating to watch. Although this isn’t necessarily one of the listed elements, Welles took the book and made a film adaptation that not only portrayed his film traits, but also kept the same tone and style of Kafka. The book was hard for me to really take it, so when pair with the movie, it all came together. Welles was able to take the awkward (and sometimes maddening) writing of Kafka, and put it on film with different perplexities of the doors to the court rooms, the way of making rooms look so tight and small, and also making the characters really come to life. In the grand scheme of things, the book was really left for the reader to interpret. Kafka gave little to no answers, including what K was charged with, in the first place. Welles followed suit with making this film that leaves questions for viewers to answer.