*** Perhaps some spoilage in this comment. You may prefer to see the film beforehand. ***
In 1968 I first saw "The Trial" at the Richelieu Theater in San Francisco. An improvised cinema in the basement of a minor league hotel, the Richelieu proved a good venue for a movie shot in jury-rigged locations. Literally underground, the makeshift theater had 16mm equipment doing rear projection on the backside of the screen we watched.
I absorbed "The Trial" at a Sunday matinée and wandered out feeling two-dimensional. As I drifted down Van Ness Avenue a car could have struck me and I would have noticed, but not cared. That disorientation lasted two hours. Later that year I encountered the same effect after my first viewing of "2001: A Space Odyssey", though the spell only lasted a few minutes.
I knew something of Welles at that point. I had heard him on the radio as Harry Lime, charismatic conman and thief. I remembered him as the mesmeric Cagliostro in "Black Magic" (1947). I knew "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942) from television, and I had seen "Citizen Kane" (1941) and "Touch of Evil" (1957 studio release version) on big screens. I had even watched a 16mm print of the unrestored "Tragedy of Othello" (1952), as visually complex a work as any that exists. Yet I had never experienced any cinema such as "The Trial".
Welles used film stock with a very sensitive emulsion, then flooded the sets with light to get flat whites, dead blacks, and infinite shades of grey in between. This technique yields quite powerful results on a large screen in a darkened theater. In the 1960's, a decade noted for experiment and hallucinogens, I found nothing else remotely as daring, nor as radically disorienting.
Though color achieved dominance after the 1950's, geniuses still produced powerful black and white aesthetic statements. Fellini in "8-½" (1963) created a hyper-real dreamscape of crystal-edged images. Brownlow's "It Happened Here" (1966), Cassavetes' "Faces" (1968), and Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers" (1966) each brilliantly counterfeited reality with documentary/home movie-style footage. Wise's "The Haunting" (1963) and Polanski's "Repulsion" (1965) conjured interior locales built of light and shadow alive with menace and madness. Haskell Wexler's b&w photography in Nichols' "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966) starkly enhanced the primal drama being enacted.
Welles himself collaborated supremely with Shakespeare in "Chimes at Midnight" (1966, AKA "Falstaff"), his last black and white feature, an autumnal ode to Merrie Olde England. Not even that greatest of all films matches the reality-corkscrewing visual landscape he achieves in "The Trial". (Though I erroneously thought that Josef K's office parodied modern workplaces until I toiled in a Federal agency perversely like it in design, in noise level, and in operation.)
"The Trial" has provided me with 40 years of revelation, pleasure, instruction, and prophesy. It explains more of modern life than a library of FOR DUMMIES books. The film demonstrates that we live in existential peril from each other, just as surely as "Dr. Strangelove" (1963) implores us to realize that fools run our world. Not art, not religion, not politics, not family ties, not the brotherhood of a common cause, nor the unities of spiritual and physical love can alleviate this indwelling danger.
And yet Orson Welles on a talk show in the 70's stated that he was a pessimist. An optimist, he held, believes things are going well. A cynic believes that things are going badly, but that nothing's worth saving. A pessimist believes that things are going badly, but yet there are things still worth working to save. I would say that in "The Trial" we may find a human dignity and a sense of independent self still worth clinging to, despite what comes.
Luis Bunuel's "Nazarin" (1959) subjects a Christ-like priest to the torments, indignities, and exploitations of an indifferent world. Welles' K can't be called anybody's saint. He's arrogant, thoughtless, flawed as guilty of the seven deadly sins as that Charles Foster Kane whose K dominates Xanadu's gate. For all of that, he's human and has inherent worth, no matter how twitchily or self-centeredly he behaves. Anthony Perkins lends Kafka's abstract figure a vulnerable charm that has worn well for me over the 40 years I've watched him.
The haunting main musical score comes from I Musici's recording of Tomaso Albinoni's "Adagio". Wikipedia informs me that Remo Giazotto composed this in 1958 from 18th Century fragments of an Albinoni trio sonata sent to him by the Dresden State Library. I have read elsewhere that these shards survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden (see "Slaughterhouse Five", the 1972 movie from the novel by Kurt Vonnegut, another survivor of that fire raid). THE TRIAL also escaped flames. Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor, did not obey his friend's command to burn his manuscripts. Both the book and the musical composition hung on in incomplete form to become reimagined and fused together, augmenting each other.
"The Trial" film seems to me more complex than Franz Kafka's unfinished novel, an admittedly great work written sparely and at arm's length from the reader. Beyond resolving scenes left unconcluded by the author, Welles submerges his viewer in a more layered, more meaningful experience than Kafka's text can provide. Art direction, dialogue, camera movement, music create a multi-textured whole that seems to me a greater artistic creation than the deservedly notable book.
While still in his 20's, Orson Welles personally revolutionized radio drama, the New York stage, and world cinema. He would have had the same effect on television if the seed he broadcast in his revelatory "Fountain of Youth" (1958) had taken root in creative minds. I consider Welles' films from the 1960's to surpass "Citizen Kane" (1941), a landmark in the evolution of motion pictures. Beatrice Welles once told me her father would bless me for thinking that.
In 1968 I first saw "The Trial" at the Richelieu Theater in San Francisco. An improvised cinema in the basement of a minor league hotel, the Richelieu proved a good venue for a movie shot in jury-rigged locations. Literally underground, the makeshift theater had 16mm equipment doing rear projection on the backside of the screen we watched.
I absorbed "The Trial" at a Sunday matinée and wandered out feeling two-dimensional. As I drifted down Van Ness Avenue a car could have struck me and I would have noticed, but not cared. That disorientation lasted two hours. Later that year I encountered the same effect after my first viewing of "2001: A Space Odyssey", though the spell only lasted a few minutes.
I knew something of Welles at that point. I had heard him on the radio as Harry Lime, charismatic conman and thief. I remembered him as the mesmeric Cagliostro in "Black Magic" (1947). I knew "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942) from television, and I had seen "Citizen Kane" (1941) and "Touch of Evil" (1957 studio release version) on big screens. I had even watched a 16mm print of the unrestored "Tragedy of Othello" (1952), as visually complex a work as any that exists. Yet I had never experienced any cinema such as "The Trial".
Welles used film stock with a very sensitive emulsion, then flooded the sets with light to get flat whites, dead blacks, and infinite shades of grey in between. This technique yields quite powerful results on a large screen in a darkened theater. In the 1960's, a decade noted for experiment and hallucinogens, I found nothing else remotely as daring, nor as radically disorienting.
Though color achieved dominance after the 1950's, geniuses still produced powerful black and white aesthetic statements. Fellini in "8-½" (1963) created a hyper-real dreamscape of crystal-edged images. Brownlow's "It Happened Here" (1966), Cassavetes' "Faces" (1968), and Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers" (1966) each brilliantly counterfeited reality with documentary/home movie-style footage. Wise's "The Haunting" (1963) and Polanski's "Repulsion" (1965) conjured interior locales built of light and shadow alive with menace and madness. Haskell Wexler's b&w photography in Nichols' "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966) starkly enhanced the primal drama being enacted.
Welles himself collaborated supremely with Shakespeare in "Chimes at Midnight" (1966, AKA "Falstaff"), his last black and white feature, an autumnal ode to Merrie Olde England. Not even that greatest of all films matches the reality-corkscrewing visual landscape he achieves in "The Trial". (Though I erroneously thought that Josef K's office parodied modern workplaces until I toiled in a Federal agency perversely like it in design, in noise level, and in operation.)
"The Trial" has provided me with 40 years of revelation, pleasure, instruction, and prophesy. It explains more of modern life than a library of FOR DUMMIES books. The film demonstrates that we live in existential peril from each other, just as surely as "Dr. Strangelove" (1963) implores us to realize that fools run our world. Not art, not religion, not politics, not family ties, not the brotherhood of a common cause, nor the unities of spiritual and physical love can alleviate this indwelling danger.
And yet Orson Welles on a talk show in the 70's stated that he was a pessimist. An optimist, he held, believes things are going well. A cynic believes that things are going badly, but that nothing's worth saving. A pessimist believes that things are going badly, but yet there are things still worth working to save. I would say that in "The Trial" we may find a human dignity and a sense of independent self still worth clinging to, despite what comes.
Luis Bunuel's "Nazarin" (1959) subjects a Christ-like priest to the torments, indignities, and exploitations of an indifferent world. Welles' K can't be called anybody's saint. He's arrogant, thoughtless, flawed as guilty of the seven deadly sins as that Charles Foster Kane whose K dominates Xanadu's gate. For all of that, he's human and has inherent worth, no matter how twitchily or self-centeredly he behaves. Anthony Perkins lends Kafka's abstract figure a vulnerable charm that has worn well for me over the 40 years I've watched him.
The haunting main musical score comes from I Musici's recording of Tomaso Albinoni's "Adagio". Wikipedia informs me that Remo Giazotto composed this in 1958 from 18th Century fragments of an Albinoni trio sonata sent to him by the Dresden State Library. I have read elsewhere that these shards survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden (see "Slaughterhouse Five", the 1972 movie from the novel by Kurt Vonnegut, another survivor of that fire raid). THE TRIAL also escaped flames. Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor, did not obey his friend's command to burn his manuscripts. Both the book and the musical composition hung on in incomplete form to become reimagined and fused together, augmenting each other.
"The Trial" film seems to me more complex than Franz Kafka's unfinished novel, an admittedly great work written sparely and at arm's length from the reader. Beyond resolving scenes left unconcluded by the author, Welles submerges his viewer in a more layered, more meaningful experience than Kafka's text can provide. Art direction, dialogue, camera movement, music create a multi-textured whole that seems to me a greater artistic creation than the deservedly notable book.
While still in his 20's, Orson Welles personally revolutionized radio drama, the New York stage, and world cinema. He would have had the same effect on television if the seed he broadcast in his revelatory "Fountain of Youth" (1958) had taken root in creative minds. I consider Welles' films from the 1960's to surpass "Citizen Kane" (1941), a landmark in the evolution of motion pictures. Beatrice Welles once told me her father would bless me for thinking that.