The Trial Orson Wells (1962; Fr) Anthony Perkins; Jeanne Moreau; Romy Schneider
viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 24 Sept 2024: ticket: £7
un-american activity
Orson Wells’ film of Kafka’s novel ‘The Trial’ suggests that his talents as a filmmaker were lopsided. As a director he was a master of mis-en-scene, of understanding how to design chose and activate settings with maximum effect, how to work both camera and actors to deliver the action he wanted. For instance in ‘The Trial’ Anthony Perkins as K delivers a sustained performance of shocked ambivilence. But Wells was not an outstanding writer-director in the style of Godard Fassbinder Pasolini. Unlike these film makers he was not driven by lines of ideological conviction or a particular grasp of life itself that informed and filled out their scripts. Wells had self belief. He seems to have been driven to make films by his belief that he was an artist bounteously gifted in film making. But he was never a great script writer, not remotely on a par with Hollywood studio director, Billy Wilder. He did not write the script for the outstanding ‘Citizen Kane’. ‘Kane’ was written by Herman Mankievicz; Wells’ vision as director gave it life intensity and meaning.
‘The Trial’ comes across as a confused work with Wells struggling to produce a scenario that expressed a filmic reading of Kafka’s novel. Wells’ sets in particular the vast spaces of K’s office and the Court, the distortions of scale, the hemmed in sets all combine to create dramatic atmospheric settings; but in themselves the settings are not sufficient for Wells’ film to establish for itself stylistic mode of expressive realisation. And when filming the work of a writer like Kafka surely such a project can only be undertaken as act of interpretation, not an act of translation. The key element of any film interpretation is that script and scenario establish and sustain a design for the material, a stylistic statement upon which an interpretive schema can be overlaid. Atmospherics are not enough.
‘The Trial’s’ opening scene takes place in K’s bedroom, which is a rented room in a modern apartment block. K is roused by the intrusion into his space of a number of detectives who have come to tell him he’s ‘under arrest’. The scene is conceived shot and scripted in the manner of a 1950’s US TV procedural cop drama such as ‘Dragnet’. Off-set by K’s intelligent protestations, the aggressive non-sequiturs and oblique accusatory tone of the intruding cops fashion an opening of understated menace, augmented by the revealed presence in the adjacent room of some of K’s work colleagues. Creating a mood of disassociated perturbation the scene has an unsettling effect, not the least of which is that the USA might be the perfect foil for probing Kafka’s novel.
And surely Wells as the director of ‘War of the Worlds’, given its notorious first radio transmission, the director of the ‘Voodoo Macbeth’ with its all black caste and the maker of ‘Citizen Kane’, had some elemental feel for the dissonances and derangements that ran under the surface of the matrices of 1950’s American society. ‘The Trial’ as a movie could never have significance or resonance if all it attempted was a sort of literalist rendering of the material.
But after the first scene the ‘American cop’ style drops out of Wells’ design. It’s replaced by a rococo mid-European stylistic gloss. This style is true to Kafka’s own background and the setting of his novel, but as a film design it always has the feel of being something of a pastiche. The large set piece spaces work wonderfully well to create that feel of a visual overwhelming against which K can assume a heroic pose. But many of the other settings: the passageways the advocates chambers the inner intimate recesses such as Tintorelli’s studio are for the most part somewhat formulaic. But not just formulaic, it also feels that they are not properly interrogated as images, as Wells employs them for immediate effect after which they are consigned to being backdrops to dialogue. It feels as if Wells has replicated in his film the surface elements of the book, he’s held back from making the novel his own. As such the longer the film continues the more de-energised it becomes as it is not driven by any unifying vision any compulsive hallucinogenic probing the stranger deeper off-centre recesses that are endemic in Kafka’s work.
The strange deterritorialisation of the the first scene is not maintained and much of the rest of the film comprises a series of repetitions, scenes that come filled with outpourings of dialogue that often have a quasi-philosophical/didactic tone and in the context of watching a movie are hard absorb. Images are subsumed to words to the extent it’s as if Wells has forgotten he is a film maker a being who is charged with the task of giving birth to ideas not representing them.
adrin neatrour
