Where to start? Leave it to me, when choosing a film from the great director, to choose one that probably least best represents him. Well, I sure wasn’t going to write any more additional, undeserved praise about that over-rated movie about a sled, so this is what you get!. Just kidding. Seriously though, The Trial is an adaptation of a Franz Kafka story so the challenging and somewhat inaccessible nature of his work will always take the driver’s seat in a project like this. Similarly, another favorite director of mine, Michael Haneke, made his attempt at adapting the Kafka book The Castle. Though both directors have distinct and recognizable styles, both of these films would be lost among their distinguished…

Absurd. Surreal. Oppressive. All fine words to describe Orson Welles' The Trial, but I think the term that best describes how I felt while watching is 'hysterical': not in the sense that The Trial is a comedy - to describe it as a black comedy stretches the very definition to the breaking point - but that I found myself laughing to ward off the physical and mental unease it forced upon me (especially during the absolutely insane last 20 minutes). That a film can cause laughter as a defense mechanism is a testament to Welles, Kafka, and Perkins.

The dialogue flies by so fast that you become inured to the fact that the words spoken are so bizarre, the sentences…

Perhaps one of the least known of Orson Welles' near immaculate filmography is The Trial, a Franz Kafka adaptation that only could have come from an imagination as bizarre and inventive as Welles'. Starring a post-Psycho yet still fractured Anthony Perkins, it's a tricky maze of bureaucracy that satirizes a melancholy examination of the absolutely laborious process (hence the original title Le Procès). This is entirely a Welles picture, however- his trademark angled camera shots are omnipresent, furthering the delusional funhouse mirror style proceedings that ensue for the strangely named Josef K.

The Trial's style is something out of a fever dream- or more aptly perhaps, nightmare- that whisks our befuddled protagonist through his legal proceedings for a crime that…

To be in chains is sometimes safer than to be free.


Sometimes, not very often, I notice that my tastes have honed in on something truly specific. Whether it be melodrama and kitchen sink realism, documentaries, dark comedies, I end up slumping and only watching films from these sub-genres because, well, I typically enjoy them all the more.

However, I live for those movies that stand out from a  genre I would typically avoid, such as this strange dystopian type courtroom film, which is the total opposite of what I’d typically be interested in, and yet, here we are, I saw this film and I absolutely adored it.

I adore its bold craziness, it’s insanity, it’s huge scale, it’s silliness,…

Film School Drop Outs
Week 12: Mar. 19-Mar. 25
Auteurs - Orson Welles

Ages ago I read a David Foster Wallace essay, from the days as a literature professor that ultimately lead to his death about Kafka, about how he would teach 'The Trial' and his class would all respond in the same way; talk about totalitarianism and powerlessness and arbitrary justice. And how Wallace turned it all on it's head by asking. 'But What If he's guilty' how it wasn't a nightmare just a cosmic joke.

Welles definitely thinks it's a nightmare, I guess in the cold war thats understandable, there were other countries where you were told that was how it worked. where you could live your life…

To be in chains is sometimes safer than to be free.
-Hastler

I knew nothing about this film going in. I basically thought it was a straight forward film about a man wrongfully accused of a crime, so I was thinking maybe I'd be lucky and it would turn out Hitchcockian. Turned out much more Kafkaesque for what are obvious reasons now.

You have Orson Welles adapting Franz Kafka's 1925 novel and it turns out exactly as brilliant as you would expect. First you have Anthony Perkins in the lead, and he's fantastic, but having him portray Josef K., a man arrested but never told why he faces a trial adds so many layers to the story that I imagine…

I appreciate the fact that at the beginning of the movie you are given a warning that the story of The Trial “follows the logic of a dream”. Establishing that from the beginning saved me from the ordeal of trying to connect scenes together and trying to figure out what they mean in a traditional sequential structure when in the end there simply isn’t one. This way you get to see the movie’s attempts at making a dreamlike experience and get it from the beginning. But all that being said, with a two hour runtime The Trial unfortunately turns from captivating at first to tiresome by the end of the movie. Had I known this film was based on the…

The scale of this is incredible. Welles is able to cram an unbelievably large amount of people into some of the shots, truly stunning. 

With regards to its content, I don't know a ton about Kafka. In general I'm pretty poorly read. But this film—to me—shares a similar frustrating circularness to an episode of Seinfeld (or Curb Your Enthusiasm). Maybe—probably—it's a stretch, but the way I see it is this: a small, seemingly banal incident or minor violation of social norms spirals into something nightmarish. This incident or minor violation in The Trial is unseen—when the film begins we are immediately thrust into the fallout of it. But the fallout is the same: every action the character takes to right…