The Trial: Crime of the Century

The situation is intricately ironic. Kafka left The Trial, like his other novels—The Castle and Amerika (known also as The Man Who Disappeared)—unfinished. Welles, notorious for uncompleted projects, brought this one to the finish line. Yet his absolute commitment to Kafka’s disjunctive and oblique novel induces a vertiginous experience for which many critics, let alone audiences, were hardly prepared. The two artists may seem to be polar opposites—Kafka the earnest, self-abnegating martyr, the starvation artist, barely known in his lifetime; Welles the Falstaffian raconteur, bluffing magician, and eater of worlds, his artworks obscured by an aura of rumor and charisma. These outward differences cloaked the deeper resonance that animated the project. They also dictated the awkward first impression that has tended to restrict The Trial from the shortlist of Welles’s masterpieces, completed, wrecked, or otherwise.

If Welles’s artworks were inevitably distorted by their creator’s aura, so, too, were Kafka’s, in the decades following his death in 1924. With the ascent of technocratic bureaucracy, Kafka’s reputation as an advocate for humanity against monolithic forces of conformity and repression made him a secular saint—an emblem of individual feeling in the face of the machine. Following the Holocaust, Kafka seemed a kind of archetypal Jewish victim and seer (never mind, in this viewpoint, that he wasn’t killed by Nazis; he would have been). Like Anne Frank, the author conveniently wasn’t around to complicate this sanctification, or to add further writings that might disappoint his celebrants. Kafka the poster child for artistic sensitivity is easier to embrace than the deeply ambivalent, vain, wry, self-pitying, neurotic, jealous, and elitist Josef K. who is the protagonist of the novel (or the similar K. of The Castle).

A distracting amount of attention was given to Welles’s alterations to the book’s chapter order, and its ending—an order and an ending that were, by definition, provisional, since the manuscript Kafka left behind existed only in fragments, frozen into a false authority by his literary executor Max Brod. Another distraction concerned the film’s concluding imagery: the smoke of the final explosion resembled a mushroom cloud, an unavoidable impression that Welles hadn’t intended and a form of “symbolism” he detested. Yet by the time the atom-bomb echo was drawn to his attention on set, logistical circumstances made it impossible to substitute anything better.

Anyone knowing Kafka, from the story “The Judgment” to the relationship between the land surveyor and the sleepily monstrous Klamm in The Castle, will see the resemblance. There’s father-son energy in this mix, yet the more that relation is displaced into other frameworks, the better it illuminates the ballet between power and enthrallment. Welles lived longer than Kafka and felt more complicit with the father’s position; in his films, he plays the callow, impressionable son just once, in The Lady from Shanghai (1947). In The Trial, the role he took for himself, as the Law’s tyrannical, bedridden representative, enjoys only a scattering of scenes—yet by dubbing so many other characters’ voices, Welles manages to perfectly “embody” the everywhere-but-invisible quality of the advocate’s insinuating influence.

Welles also accentuated Kafka’s subterranean perversity. The sexual puns in the initial scene of arrest in K.’s rooms—the substitution of pornograph for phonograph, the strange dispute over the word ovular—originate with Welles, as does the development of the languorous, teasing encounter with his fellow boardinghouse occupant, Miss Bürstner, played by Jeanne Moreau. She’s just the first of the temptresses Welles hurls at Josef K. Presented with the specter of female desire, the character whiplashes between diffident preening and nerve-racked indifference. As reported by Welles’s late-life confidant Henry Jaglom, Welles and Perkins never needed to directly communicate the homosexual subtext of which both were aware. The insertion of a centerfold into the courtroom’s law books, on the other hand, comes from Kafka: “I got all the dirty eroticism of the rest of the movie out of that one thing,” Welles told Bogdanovich.

This atmosphere of polymorphous-perverse unease may have added to a sense, in 1962, that Welles had mishandled Kafka’s book. But again, Welles was ahead of a wave of twenty-first-century scholarship and retranslation, which freed Kafka’s texts from Max Brod’s revisions, as well as the religious tone played up by his first English translators, to better reveal the blunt, searching strangeness of his texts—and a few suppressed sexual allusions. Here, Welles anticipates writers like Michel Foucault, Slavoj Žižek, and Roberto Calasso, who employ Kafka as a lens on how unsatisfiable appetite binds humans to systems of disciplinary power.

Welles’s interrogation of Kafka’s subtext wouldn’t mean much if the director hadn’t found a cinematic language equal to the novelist’s distinctive effects: those careening yet gnomic set pieces; the tonal vertigo that seems to excavate the underside of ordinary existence; and, above all, the serene, dreamlike juxtapositions and jumps, so incontrovertibly lucid, that give Kafka’s writing its crazy power. Who better than Welles, really, to depict the discontinuous spatiality that caused Jorge Luis Borges to compare Kafka to the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea? Preparing to shoot, Welles drew up designs for elaborate sets he wasn’t allowed to create—some of the sketches survive, possessing an expressionistic power perhaps most closely approximated in the final film by the slatted cage that houses the sinister court painter Titorelli (William Chappell). 
Yet Welles’s employment of found locations, including the vacated Gare d’Orsay train station in Paris, worked better than any sets could have done. The movie shatters multiple European cities into fragments, crushing together antiquity and modernity, and claustrophobia and barren enormity, to form a labyrinth that grips K. as tightly as the teeth of a vise. The Trial, one of the few films where Welles controlled every editorial decision, shows that among his many talents he was one of the greatest editors in cinema.

The musical score, too, crushes eras together. This temporal insight Welles also drew from his study of Kafka: “In my reading of the book . . . I see the monstrous bureaucracy which is the villain of the piece as not only Kafka’s clairvoyant view of the future, but his racial and cultural background of being occupied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” Like George Minafer in The Magnificent Ambersons, another occupant of a decaying castle he can exit but never leave, K. is a bug smashed, as if in the pages of a book, between historical eras.

In hindsight, we can now place The Trial less outside the continuum of Welles’s interests than as the middle film in a loose trilogy, with Mr. Arkadin and The Other Side of the Wind: all three present labyrinthine, fractured, phantasmagorically subjective worlds, and conclude that, despite the plethora of doors and passages one may pass through—quite easily, despite the admonition of the doorkeepers—no exit is possible, since the inside and the outside, the prisoner and the warden, are one and the same. (The Lady from Shanghai is The Hobbit to this Lord of the Rings.) Of the three, only The Trial is whole and intact, and, though the two others originate with Welles and The Trial with a book plucked from a list, it is the least archly baroque, the most fulfilled, in authentically Wellesian terms. When Bogdanovich mutters, “I told you I liked it better the second time I saw it,” Welles, sensing victory at hand, commands, “See it a third time!”