Orson Welles' The Trial

March 22, 2006

Welles' version of The Trial is quite close to Kafka's novel, but had a heightened physicality. This physicality comes through in a terrifying way when Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) stumbles into the closet where the two policemen against whom he lodged a complaint are being savagely beaten in a dark little closet. That scene is in the book, but film accents the physical impact.. Then the sexual overtones are underlined. A great scene in the movie is when Josef K. talks with some executive for his corporation, while through glass windows his young 16 year-old cousin waves at him. The executive implies that something dirty is going on between Josef K. and his cousin.

I vaguely remember from The Trial that the Advocate's female helper has webbed fingers, but in the film she declares herself to have a physical deformity, and holds up her hand to the light. At one point Orson Welles goes too far.. in my opinion: when Josef K. attempts to help a woman dragging a trunk, we actually hear the creak of her metal brace as she limps along.

I would never deny that Kafka is a physical writer.. he gave us Gregor Samsa and his transformation one morning into a vermin.. definitely physical. But ask yourself how that looks? The second you actually picture a roach or some other real insect/vermin you have moved into a variety of realism that is distant from Kafka's work. For me Kafka has always been a master of parables on the page. The translation of these written parables to the visual language of film brings about changes in tone and meaning. Webbed fingers no longer haunt the mind as an odd and impossible to imagine fact, but sit there repulsively in the light.

The Trial is certainly ambitious, and in his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles admits the importance of the film within his body of work:

OW: Well, you know why I defend it—I suppose because it's my own picture, unspoiled in the cutting or in anything else. That's why I hate to hear that it is not as good, because I can't blame anybody for it [laughs].

It also seems different from his other films in being more of an "art film." The Trial was completed in 1962, and of course Welles knew about the kinds of formal experimentation represented by Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960). And that is perhaps exactly the problem with The Trial, although it has numerous Welles touches throughout, it catches its author in unfamiliar territory.

Maybe (and I should note that I am formulating an opinion that will be tested as I proceed with this project) we could call Welles a "Hollywood Classicist"—meaning that he was at home with the goals and aesthetic feel of Hollywood films ca. 1935-1950, although he had trouble operating within the Hollywood studio system that produced those beloved films. When he arrived at the threshold of a new era in film, ushered in by directors such as Fellini, he seems a bit out of place.