The Trial (1962)

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Movie
German title The process
Original title Le procès
Country of production France , Italy , Germany
original language English
Publishing year 1962
length 118 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Orson Welles
script Orson Welles
production Alexander Salkind
Michail Salkind
music Jean Ledrut
Remo Giazotto
camera Edmond Richard
cut Yvonne Martin
Frederick Muller
Orson Welles
(not mentioned in the credits)
occupation

The Trial is a literary film adaptation by Orson Welles from 1962. It is a film adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel The Trial .

action

The film begins with an animated sequence in which Welles introduces the narrator in Kafka's doorkeeper parable Before the Law . In the next scene you can see Josef K. waking up one morning through a man in his room. He is declared arrested, but is still allowed to move freely and pursue his profession. The responsible inspector neither shows his ID nor gives Josef information about the reason for his arrest. After the men have disappeared, Josef K. apologizes to his landlady, Mrs. Grubach, and the neighboring tenant, Miss Bürstner, for whom he has a romantic interest, for the disturbances. That same evening Fraulein Bürstner moves out of her room and goes to her friend Fraulein Pittl, much to Josef's distress.

Josef goes to a theater performance, but is brought by the inspector to a court room, where a first hearing about his case takes place in front of many people. Josef K. gives a speech against his arrest, but still does not find out what the court is accusing him of and what the intent behind the proceedings of the mysterious court is. Josef's uncle Max comes to visit from the country and therefore puts him in touch with the lawyer Hastler, who has been friends with him since school and who also maintains relations with the court. Josef quickly begins an affair with Leni, the obscure servant of the seriously ill Hastler, although she also seems to be the lawyer's mistress. The client Block, who has been represented by Hastler for years, also occasionally lives in Hastler's large house. Block sometimes has to wait days to be admitted to Hastler and humiliates himself in various ways. This and the fact that Hastler's influences and undertakings are apparently ineffectual in the case move Josef to want to withdraw his representation from the lawyer despite warnings.

When trying to gain more control over his own process, he neglects his actual job and gets deeper and deeper into the felt of the judiciary. In the course of his investigations, Josef meets various people, such as a court usher and his beautiful wife Hilda as well as the court painter Titorelli. Eventually he meets a priest in a cathedral who implies that the judgment in the trial is apparently imminent and that it looks bad for him. Hastler also appears in the cathedral and tells him the doorkeeper's parable.

One evening Josef is taken to a pit by two executioners, where they undress him and indicate that he should commit suicide with a knife. Josef refuses, however, whereupon the executioners move away from him and then throw a stick of dynamite into the pit. Josef laughs at his executioners and takes the piece of dynamite in his hands, apparently ready to throw it. A big explosion takes place.

background

  • The film was shot in the Gare d'Orsay in Paris , Rome and in Croatia's capital Zagreb .
  • The film premiered in the Federal Republic of Germany on April 2, 1963, and was shown for the first time on German television on April 20, 1966 on HR III .
  • In 1981 an unfinished, almost one and a half hour documentary filming 'The Trial' was created . It essentially consists of a panel discussion with Orson Welles about the making of the film. The documentation is available as a public domain on YouTube.

Reviews

“Film version by Orson Welles, who condenses the original into a gloomy, expressionist cinema nightmare . The staging is captivating with its optical brilliance and virtuoso alienated scenes, but with its baroque wealth of effects hardly does justice to the strict, controlled narrative style of the novel. The ' author ' Welles is always present "

- Lexicon of international film 

“It was clear from the start that filming Kafka's book was a daring, if not impossible, undertaking. […] The magazine cinema 63 said: ' Kafka has gained nothing from this transformation and its readers are rightly disappointed. However, the cinema has grown with a great film. So who wants to complain? '"

- Jens Golombek : The great film lexicon. All top films from A – Z 

"Not Respecting the Scriptures Enough or How to Clear a Disturbance"

- Rainer von Kügelgen : Kafka's parable "Before the Law" in Orson Welles' film "The Trial" ".

Awards

1964: Association Française de la Critique de Cinéma - Prix ​​Méliès (Best Film)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ IMDb : Filming locations for Procès, Le (1962) , accessed on August 13, 2008
  2. ↑ a b The process in the lexicon of international filmTemplate: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used
  3. ↑ Filming 'The Trial' on YouTube
  4. ↑ Jens Golombek in: Dirk Manthey, Jörg Altendorf, Willy Loderhose (Hrsg.): Das große Film-Lexikon. All top films from A-Z . Second edition, revised and expanded new edition. Verlagsgruppe Milchstraße, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-89324-126-4 , p. 2220 .
  5. ↑ In: Osnabrücker contributions to language theory 61, 2000, pp. 67–92. ISBN 3-924110-61-1