“The Trial”

Here's some coffee for the gentlemen.

No, Mrs. Grubach.

These people are not friends of mine.

They came with the police

and they should have left with the police.

Please be good enough to show them to the door.

Yes, Mr. K.

This way, gentlemen.

What are you, anyway?

Informers?

(suspenseful music)

Well, what do you have to inform about?

[Narrator] The most visually original

and extravagant film that Orson Welles ever made

is The Trial, from 1962.

And you're still here!

You're attracting attention, Mr. K.

Attracting attention?

[Narrator] It's a surprisingly close adaptation

of Kafka's novel.

Josef K., played by Anthony Perkins,

an office functionary who lives in a boarding house,

is visited early one morning by officials

who inform him that he is under arrest

on unspecified charges,

but they let him go free.

Suddenly, this mid-level clerk's life

is transformed into an agony of the system.

With no specific charges,

Josef K. endures a total cosmic free-floating

sense of guilt to match his utterly impotent

sense of defiance.

He needs to justify himself in a universe

that accuses him of everything and nothing,

in which his very existence is reduced

to a document that's doomed to remain blank.

The last thing I want is to annoy you, but I--

[Narrator] Living in an unnamed city,

K. experiences a hallucinatory version

of modern times, of bureaucratic tangle,

legal complexity, disjunctive visions,

and overall psychological dislocation.

With his arrest, K.'s life is shattered.

The entire movie captures the shards flying outward,

and Welles finds ingenious, giddy visual,

and for that matter actorly, correlates,

for those states of mind.

(dramatic orchestral music) (audience applauding)

Excuse me, sir, excuse me.

Yes ma'am?

I have a note here for you.

[Narrator] Welles's The Trial is a sort of

cinematic surrealism in which the action

follows a dreamlike logic that's both natural

and ridiculous,

and in which the course of events

follows the horrific commonalities of a nightmare.

(slow, pensive music)

Though the movie was made on a remarkably low budget,

Welles's filming, lighting, and editing,

his vertiginous angles and frenetic camera moves,

as well as the theatrical frenzy of the performances,

have a unique, imaginative energy,

as if they were the release of his pent-up furies.

The movie is filled with hyperbolically dramatic

set pieces of shrieking horror

and melodramatic absurdity,

and higher absurdities emerge

from the nerve-jangling juxtaposition

of incongruously adjoining spaces.

(crowd murmuring)

I've got to close the doors after you.

Nobody else must come in.

[Male] You should have been here one hour

and five minutes ago.

(typewriter keys clacking)

[Narrator] Welles films the office with especial delight

and makes sure that its functions are up to date.

One of those electronic gimmicks--

Yes.

Can give you the answer to anything?

Yes.

Well.

Well, what?

You wanna know about your case, doncha?

Ask the machine.

[Narrator] Filming in Paris, Rome, and Zagreb,

Welles revels in the expressive power

of architecture, the macabre Gothic labyrinth

of monumental classics,

as well as the oppressively pure, sharp,

and empty lines of advanced modernism.

This is where I leave you, Irmie.

[Narrator] Above all, there's the riotous pathos

of K.'s advocate, Hastler, played by Welles himself

in an extraordinary outburst of self-accusation

and self-deprecation.

Hastler is an advocate in retreat,

enduring an unwilling, messy, effete sort

of breakdown caught between genteel extravagance

and impoverished ruin.

The advocate's job is, after all,

to represent the accused to the world.

He's a master director now locked in his retreat,

and that's how he depicts himself,

as a master of images whose personal crisis,

his inability to do his work normally,

is a crisis of the world at large.

Welles's The Trial is a cry of cinematic urgency,

a depiction of a nightmarish moment in history

that's all the more horrific

when it's great representing.

Exile from Hollywood is shunted to the margins.

Delusions of persecutions.

Delusions?

Well.

I don't pretend to be a martyr, no.

Not even a victim of society?

I am a member of society.

[Hastler] You think that you can persuade the court

that you're not responsible by reason of lunacy?

I think that's what the court wants me to believe.

Yes, that's the conspiracy, to persuade us all

that the whole world is crazy, formless,

meaningless, absurd.

That's the dirty game.

So I've lost my case, what of it?

You, you're losing, too.

It's all lost.