Facets of Kafka
Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s carefully composed, concentrated version of Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared follows the misadventures of an inexperienced young immigrant in a harsh and unequal America. With an introduction by Martin Brady.
Class Relations is the only film in this series based on a work by Kafka, the unfinished novel
The Man Who Disappeared (1911 - 1914), also known by the title
America , which was chosen by Kafka's friend Max Brod and under which the fragment was published posthumously in 1927. It tells the story of the young, inexperienced Karl Roßmann, who, after getting a maid pregnant, is sent to the USA by his parents. Here he has to fend for himself, experiences injustice and humiliation, learns about social hierarchies, wealth and poverty. Kafka, who had never been to the USA himself, was inspired by Arthur Holitscher's successful travelogues, which were published in 1912 under the title
Amerika Heute und Morgen [America Today and Tomorrow].
Huillet and Straub shot in strict black-and-white images and avoided a historical setting, using only individual historical elements to establish a connection between Kafka's era and the time the film was made (first half of the 1980s) and to attempt a comparison of the “class relations” of both periods, which they regarded as precarious. “Kafka, for us, is the only major poet of industrial civilization, I mean, a civilization where people depend on their work to survive. That's why there is this permanent fear of losing your job, there are traces left by the fact of having been afraid, and there is constantly misery that appears and is threatening”. (J.-M. Straub,
Cahiers du Cinema, October 1984)
As with all their films, Huillet and Straub's intensive examination of the original text played a central role here. This can be seen, among other things, in their efforts to convey the text “... via specific bodies, physical actors”, i.e. to develop their own speech rhythm and intonation with the actors in long rehearsals with countless repetitions, avoiding all naturalism. Huillet and Straub did not see this as an artistic interpretation on their part, but rather as the transposition of Kafka's text into the medium of film with its specific material characteristics. “This is simply about space and time. Space is the work of the filmmaker, (...). Then it's about time. Time must be created from space. Time is also text, and how it is spoken.” (J.-M. Straub, Press Conference Berlin International Film Festival, February 1984, translated for this web entry.)
Class Relations (
Klassenverhältnisse), Directed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, West Germany, 1984, 35mm on DCP, b&w, 130 min. In German with English subtitles.
Please note that we do not show any advertising and that the programme starts on time.
Martin Brady is Emeritus Reader in German and Film Studies at King’s College London. He has published on Brechtian cinema, documentary and experimental film, music, literature, the visual arts, Jewish exile architects, disability, foraging, and ordinariness. He also works as a translator and interpreter.
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