Back to Back 48 - K. On Trial at The Castle

Comparing adaptations of the master whose death centenary we mark this year

The Trial (1962) - director, writer Orson Welles
The Castle (1997) - director, writer Michael Haneke

Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have.
All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already.
Franz Kafka "On Parables"

Seems like only yesterday we had little Franzie walking among us, and now it's a hundred years since he left. How time flies! Halfway twixt K’s deathday and now, enfant terrible Orson Welles decided to adapt perhaps his most famous work, the unfinished and uncertainly-ordered 'novel' The Trial. This resulted in a work of cinematic art that is at once wondrous and endlessly inventive, and deeply flawed, not merely in the way the ending is turned into a clumsy nuclear-era allegory with cartoonish lack of grace.

[The Trial is a] work of great cinematic intelligence and some Kafkaesque terror, which nevertheless seems divided against itself.
James Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles (2015)

Toward the end of his life Welles, tired of all the adulation for Citizen Kane (1941) and the neglect of his European-made indie work, insisted that his adaptation of Kafka's incomplete novel was the best work he'd done in the cinema. I don't think many would agree with him, particularly because of the mismatch in philosophies between Welles' fundamentally optimistic-rational way of thinking and Kafka's altogether darker and more absurdist vision, but the visual framing and mise-en-scène, the updating of an expressionist aesthetic to a contemporary setting, is among the finest cinematic work he ever filmed.

So what's wrong with it, then? It's the overall dramatic effect, the lack of conviction in the narrative drive of Kafka's story, which led Welles to tinker unnecessarily with the ending and give it a clumsy, fake-defiant tone that is undeserved following everything that has gone before.

So let's begin with that ending and work backwards. Welles was convinced of two things about the source novel. First, that the absurdist despair of Kafka's world was a wrong way of looking at our world. His own philosophy was humanistic and liberal, fundamentally optimistic. Critic James Naremore comments on this essential disjunction of worldviews:

On the one hand is the kind of art that submits to abstraction, to angst, to the notion that life is absurd; and on the other hand is the kind of art that, however much it may be influenced by the modernist tradition, retains an essential humanism. It is this latter view that Welles is trying to assert, despite the fact that it nearly breaks his film apart.

Why then would he choose to tackle an absurdist work that explicitly leads to a dark, arguably nihilistic, conclusion? He had already done so with a stage production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros just a year before. The answers would seem to be aeshetic: he loved the possibilities for a perplexing and playful form of dark comedy, how it would give him a chance to use his film noir skills on something more refined than sweaty Texas sheriffs. It was also popular at the time, this aesthetic of the absurd, and Welles needed a return to popularity in his European exile.

The second thing that Welles was convinced about the novel is that Kafka's original ending was outdated by historical events:

Kafka wouldn’t have put that [ending] after the death of six million Jews. It all seems very much pre-Auschwitz to me. I don’t mean that my ending was a particularly good one, but it was the only possible solution.

No, his ending is not a particularly good one. It's absurd in the wrong way, a man laughing in defiant rage and triumph even though he is about to be blown up by a bundle of cartoon dynamite. Joseph K. made the executioners run away as he died and so in some sense he... won?

To me it seems that one way out of Welles’ impasse would have been to scale up the horror, in the same way that the Holocaust scaled up atrocity to unimaginable heights. If Joseph K had been conducted to a wasteland where numberless accused men (and women, but that in a moment) were awaiting their execution, an infinite panorama of victims and killers stretching off the screen, that might have been a way to address Welles' concerns. Again, not necessarily a good ending. But enough to show it's not the only possible one.

This brings us (again working backwards) to an element of the story that stands out screaming to us today but even then might have struck viewers as odd. It's that the accused and accusers, the victims of the obscure law who must accept guilt, and the implementers of that law, are all men. Women stand on the sidelines, finding the glamour of the accused and the mechanisms of power alluring and sexually thrilling. It's interesting that Welles, who proclaimed the need for an update of the execution ending in the light of Nazi atrocity, saw no need to change this fundamentally male vision of guilt and shame. Even Kafka, given enough time, might have recognized that women might have more to do with this story than just to get their panties wet thinking about the dark attraction of a dead man walking.

The psychology of it clearly indicates that men are concerned with prestige, honour, justice and similar abstractions while women are physical fleshy beings, both attractive and repellent to Joseph K. Welles takes the dynamics of that and pushes them to the utmost in the scene's third-from-last climax when K visits the painter Titorello. The sexuality of this scene is intense, queasy and confused.

Wild girls threaten through the slats like the bars of a cage while K is propositioned on several levels by the painter clad in his pajama top and grubby long-johns (which in the black-and-white image look a lot like his naked bottom-half. Welles himself dubs Titorello's voice so we get a campy version of the lawyer Hastler's voice coming on to K once more. Before this, Hastler demanded submission to his dominant status - here Titorello wheedles and entices with his suggestive patter. No wonder K comes over all sweaty and faint.

Finally - that's to say, first of all - there's the magical framing and filming of the whole thing. This is where the film really does stand out as Welles' best work, taking all the lessons learned in composition and mise-en-scène from his earlier films and making them thrilling and powerful. It's the way the doors open to radically different spaces each time - a huge open office space, then a door opens, now suddenly we're in a tiny closet watching men being tortured; a grubby little kitchen, now the door opens to a vast smoky hall crowded with men. Or the way the characters propel themselves towards you through starkly lit corridors or stumble over alienated urban wastlands.

Right at the beginning Welles sets up the door as a motif by foregrounding the parable of the door. It is presented there as if a key to the meaning of the piece that is to come, but in lines for the narrator deleted before shooting, there was originally a warning against this type of understanding of the mysterious parable: "the error lies in believing that the problem can be resolved merely through special knowledge or perspicacity—that it is a mystery to be solved. A true mystery is unfathomable and nothing is hidden inside it. There is nothing to explain."

This warning was taken out of the shooting script, as it clashed quite obviously with the narrative direction and particularly the ending that Welles would finally choose, but the door remained as a powerful physical symbol throughout (Naremore again):

The various doors are among the chief symbols of K.’s dreamworld and are one of the principal methods of achieving transitions from one stage of the action to the next. Always they open onto bewilderingly different places... The “next room” in The Trial always suggests a repressed psychic horror—either a forbidden sexual desire, as in the case of Miss Burstner’s apartment, or a hidden guilt, or a fear of retribution. Every entranceway portends some kind of shock; when K. crosses one of these he commits a psychic transgression as well as a literal one, and his anxiety inevitably increases.

These dynamic moments when K dares to open, push or finally to break through a doorway into a radically different space and a radically different phase of his anxieties are the absolute pinnacle of this wonderful film. If only Welles had seen fit to bend himself to Kafka's way of thinking, to surrender his formidable ego to that artist and his prophetic nihilism, he might have created a work that was truly the equal or even superior to Citizen Kane or Touch of Evil.

---

Opinions differ on this point, but the error lies in believing that the problem can be resolved merely through special knowledge or perspicacity — that it is a mystery to be solved. A true mystery is unfathomable and nothing is hidden inside it. There is nothing to explain. It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream. Do you feel lost in a labyrinth? Do not look for a way out. You will not be able to find it. There is no way out.
[Welles’ final script for The Trial opening; in production all lines were deleted except for "It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream"]

— INTERMISSION —

...But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.
A man once said: If you only followed the parables, you yourselves would become parables, and with that rid yourself of all your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
Franz Kafka "On Parables"

Today Michael Haneke is known for his spare fables of stark violence within a realistic setting but with no rational explanation possible for what's actually happening, a logic of dream or nightmare, perhaps most obvious in The White Ribbon (2008) but visible in all of his 21st century work. Where on earth did he learn to think about story like that? Well there's Buñuel, of course, and Kubrick, and Lynch... but there's also Kafka. In the same year that Haneke made the original German-language version of Funny Games, he also made for Austrian TV, an adaptation of Kafka's surreal/expressionist 'novel' The Castle. Many actors, including the leads, appear in both.

Haneke’s Castle, this Austrian TV-movie adaptation of Kafka's unfinished final novel-length work, is just as dry-funny-evil-slapstick, just as enigmatic, and just as frustrating as its source story. Michael Haneke correctly gauges the mood of Kafka's work to be the dry bleak humour of an absurdist comedy, but also a kind of romance, a romance that has to try to bloom amid a deeply hostile and mysterious system that will act without explanation or apparent logic.

The synopsis of the story gives no idea of how strange and exotic the experience is of reading or - here - watching it, can be. It's the story of K. (Ulrich Mühe), who drifts in to a country inn one night and when challenged, says he was contracted by the lord of the castle as the official surveyor. This is accepted and he's given a job for the Castle but never gets to go there, instead becoming involved in an intricate series of intrigues and feuds with various villagers and Castle officials. Along the way he meets Frieda (Susanne Lothar), a barmaid and lover of a 'senior' official called Klamm - who may not actually exist - who is also K.'s boss or controller. As they settle down to life as a couple, the situation goes mysteriously awry, and they (and K.'s two annoying clownish assistants) have to live in increasing squalor and degradation.

No reason is apparent for anything that happens here. It's absurdist, and in Kafka's telling, quite strongly expressionist, with moments of uncanny weirdness that burst through the simple prose like a wild subconscious disruption. Haneke tends to flatten out that wild disturbance, so for example he chooses not to show the eerie artificial-seeming tableau of the all-powerful Klamm through a peephole that K. sees. One feels that if David Lynch had done it, we would have briefly snatched a glimpse of Klamm as a puppet or a balloon man, something like the monstrous beings of Inland Empire (2007). He also fails to mention the bizarre doubling of an offscreen pair of characters, Sordini/Sortini, and how their monstrous and/or normal actions become confused for each other so it's never clear who did what.

It's shot in colour but it is mostly so grey and colourless that it might as well be one of Bela Tárr's bleak wastelands where things are always more menacing and sinister than they at first appear, and in fact they appear pretty menacing to start with. Just a grade less tint and the whole thing would be as monochrome as most of the dialogue is flat.

At one point the scene is underlit, a voice is droning monotonously, and the main character, drowsy, keeps nodding off. It is a delight to drift off with him and momentarily enter a dream world where you feel that you're just on the verge of understanding what's going on - but then you snap awake and you realize you understand nothing. The frequent cuts to black which are held for some time as scene transitions reinforce this sense of nodding off.

The principal dynamic of Kafka's work is frustration, a series of actions that barely begin before they are thwarted by a mysterious malign actor or just by the unfavourable circumstances that always prevail. Haneke captures this with conversations that are interrupted by phones or people bursting in unexpectedly, by would-be decisive moves that go nowhere, and by an unceasing number of annoying little things like letters which you try to read in the dark, in the howling wind, with a pair of clinging idiots who have to repeat every syllable, in the light of a failing electric torch. It's all quite infuriating, and Haneke is clearly enjoying how much the frustration mounts.

One of his main devices is the strange doubling of characters and situations, so there's very rarely one of anything, but rather a person or a thing and its sinsiter shadow. In the world of The Castle there are two taverns, one clearly more potent and more charged with malign intent than the other - a doubling that may have inspired David Lynch's Black and White Lodges in Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017).

I mention Lynch so insistently because the American worked for some time on a film, or maybe TV, version of Kafka's much better-known novella The Metamorphosis. Though this earlier and better-known story isn't Kafka's best work, its obviousness part of what makes it so popular in High School lit classes, any adaptation of the weird and wonderful output of the Czech author by Lynch would be (would have been) very exciting, though in a sense most of Lynch's work is a stealth adaptation of Kafka.

Most saliently, a Lynch version of this story of The Castle would allow a free-ranging imagination like his to come up with his own resolution to K.'s deepening attrition, the closing-off of possibilities and the progression towards a stasis of inaction. Because that's the sad truth of this tale - it's unfinished. Kafka died of tuberculosis aged 40 without completing this story. There is no canonical ending, and any adaptation has to either remain fragmentary and truncated, or invent its own climax, resolution or closure. Samuel Beckett would be a go-to inspiration for any possible ending, I believe, as he understood frustrated stasis more than any other writer and how to depict it dramatically.

Haneke chooses to end it as a fragment, the narration breaking off in mid-sentence, just as the written text does. And right from the beginning we are warned about this, as in the opening titles the source is described as a "Prose-Fragment" not a novel. Almost certainly a more adventurous (or reckless) creator like Lynch would have ventured his own attempt at an ending.

Just because death cheated us of an ending to the story - though there are critics who regard the narrative as 'unfinishable', whatever that actually means - doesn't mean an adaptation need necessarily lack a resolution of some kind. Though I can certainly understand Haneke's decision to preserve the story as it's come to us, I would have welcomed a bold venture like Welles' flawed ending to his version of The Trial to this abrupt and shocking annulment of narrative.