A dark web of absurd questioning and mysterious allegations
Dir. Orson Welles
France, Italy, West Germany, 1962
DCP, 119 min.
Orson Welles's
The Trial reworks the spatial knots of Kafka's novel by making use of oversized sets in vertiginous tilts and crammed, low-ceilinged caverns in nauseatingly unsettling shots. Anthony Perkins fresh from
Psycho is
a Josef K. recognizable from the novel—self-serving, crudely polite, and wonderfully hard to like. Welles's web-handed Leni is more feline than amphibian, but her power is made clear, if not to Josef K., definitely to the viewer.
The series 'Decoding Kafka: A Cinematic Interpretation' is programmed by Irena Čajková and presented by Doc Films in partnership with the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, the Goethe-Institut Chicago, and the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in Chicago.
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