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Writer and Director: Orson Welles (based on the novel by Franz Kafka) Photography: Edmund Richards Starring: Anthony Perkins (plays Joseph K. Anthony Perkins (plays Joseph K) Orson Welles (plays barrister) Jeanne Moreau (plays Bustner) Romy Schneider (plays Leni) Elsa Martinet Leigh (played as Hilda) Akim-Tamilov (played as Grubach)
Plot summary
Company employee Joseph-K did a strange thing before waking up He dreamed of a story projected on a pinhole slide projector: a tramp walked up to the majestic gates of a legal castle and begged the guards at the gate to let him in, but they refused, despite the poor man's repeated pleas. As far as he knew, the doors of the law were open to everyone, but he was still shut out. Year after year, the poor man waited outside the door, and until the moment of his death, he still could not enter "only." The door of the law "opened for you". The last sound of the door closing woke Joseph up, and he realized that the arresting officer A was coming.
Officer A announced that K was guilty, and the legal process for his trial had begun , but did not say a word about what K had done. The police officer hinted that K had a secret relationship with his neighbor Miss Bustner. He liked to get dressed in the corridor after taking a bath, and he also hid it under the carpet. An "egg-shaped thing." In a panic, he described his gramophone as a pornographic painting (***ogranh). The officer's assistant tried to persuade K to pay a bribe, and the officer took his shirt away and ordered him to accept it at any time. trial, but allowed him to continue working
A new "nightmare" began. K could not resist the temptation and kissed Ms. Bustner, but when she heard that he had been arrested, she roared. yelled and kicked K out of the room because she was afraid of getting involved in "politics"
K complained to the landlady that he did not know what crime he had committed, but that he had committed it. Strong sense of guilt.
K went to work and his niece Elmi came to him. The deputy manager of the company looked at her suspiciously, although K argued that Elmi was "only 16 years old". , but the deputy manager still warned him: "You have a bright future. Don't mess things up yourself."
K wanted to celebrate Miss Bustner's birthday, so he went to buy a birthday cake. On the way home, he met Miss Pitel, who had a prosthetic leg. She was dragging Miss Bustner's heavy suitcase. K learned from her that Miss Bustner had been kicked out of the house by the landlord. K asked Pitel. The young lady admitted that he kissed her and was responsible for her being kicked out of the house. Miss Pitre ignored him and dragged the suitcase away from him.
K was at the theater. At that time, he was taken away by Officer A to attend an interrogation committee. He found the court at the address given by the police officer. The executive judge asked him if he was a painter, and K took the opportunity to address the audience in the hall. "The questioning by the execution judge made me understand the nature of this so-called 'trial' that was imposed on me... What happened to me was trivial, but I think it is representative of what happened to many people." K declared He is innocent. "Behind my arrest, there is a huge organization operating, including state officials, officials, police and others - maybe even executioners." K's speech received loud cheers and applause. He suddenly realized that the audience "turned out to be officials of a certain level" and that they were applauding to induce him to say the wrong thing.
K returned to the office and found that whipping was taking place in the basement. He was surprised to see that the two policemen who had taken his shirt were being tortured. The condemned man told him that this was because he complained to the authorities, accusing them of taking bribes. K tried to stop the execution, saying that he believed "it was not them who should be punished, but those above them, those in positions of authority and the entire institution."
The executioner in leather clothes not only ignored him, but whipped him harder. K fled the basement in pain, whimpering for his "sins."
K’s uncle Max learned the news of K’s arrest from Elmi. He hurriedly found K and expressed his willingness to hire a barrister to defend him. The two came to the barrister's office. In a room filled with documents, Leni, the barrister's assistant and mistress, seduces K. Leni told K that barristers and judges are the same, "your fault is that you are too stubborn and like to make a mess of things", and you should "try to be more docile" in the future.
K went to court again for trial, and the janitor's wife Hilda told her that the court would not start until tomorrow. Hilda told K that she could help K by using the execution judge's evil thoughts about her, and showed K obscene illustrations in law books, "these books are dirty." Hilda began to seduce K, but at this time the executive judge sent law student Bert ("the future judge") to force Hilda away. K chased out and found that the court office turned out to be a **** place. Hilda's husband came forward and begged K. to save Hilda from humiliation, and the rows of "defendants" who sat awaiting trial looked at him pleadingly, for they had all heard his speeches attacking the law. I'm just here to see for myself if the inner workings of the legal establishment are as abominable as I imagined. Now I'm tired of all this, I don't want to see it anymore, I just want to get out of here."
K was determined to fight alone. He went to the barrister again and wanted to fire him. The barrister told him, " It is safer to be in chains than to be free." He looked at the other "defendant" with confusion, Bullock, willingly enduring the barrister's personal insults and still crawling at the barrister's feet to beg for help. When he went to accuse the barrister, Bullock instead The barrister rushed up and beat him. The barrister also happily told K that one of Leni's quirks was to chase everyone accused of a crime and then tell him her love story with each one, which made K very disgusted. He wanted to rush out, but Leni stopped him and suggested that he go to the painter Titorelli, because this official painter specializes in painting portraits of judges and has a great influence on the judges.
In Titorelli's studio, K was told that he had only two options, either parole or deferred trial. If he was paroled, it would only temporarily relieve the burden on his shoulders, and the shadow of the accusation would always hang over him. As soon as the parolee came home from court, he found the police waiting to arrest him and the whole thing started over again. As for adjournments, the courts couldn't drag it out forever. Measures, interrogation, surveillance, resulting in further interrogation and collection of evidence... "I have never in my life heard of a defendant being categorically acquitted. "
K asked the priest for help, and the priest told him that his crime had probably been proven. The barrister suddenly appeared and showed him the pinhole slide. K said that he had read the story, But he didn't want to be a martyr.
The "nightmare" finally ended: two plainclothes policemen grabbed him, pushed him into a gravel pit, and dangled a sharp knife in front of him. Struggling desperately. Finally, the policeman took out a bundle of explosives, lit the fuse, jumped out of the pit and fled. Six explosions sounded one after another, and the screen turned into a pinhole slide: Law. The castle doors are slowly closing.
Recommendations
In 1958, Orson Welles decided to leave the United States forever and went into self-imposed exile in Europe. Si's works have a biased understanding of evil and goodness due to his own experience. From "Citizen Kane" to "Miss Shanghai", he has a more or less equal view of the ugliness and beauty of human life. point of view. He believes that there are evil people in life, but they are not born despicable, and the good and beauty in human nature can still be found in them, whether it is Kane or George Miniver ("The Ambersons"). Whether it is Elsa or Arthur Bannister ("Miss Shanghai"), they all have a side worthy of sympathy or pity. However, starting from "Mr. Arkadin", pessimism becomes more and more intense.
Wells said: "Please note that there are two kinds of people in the world: givers and takers. The former give generously and the latter take wantonly." Arkadin is the "scorpion" in life, and he stings those around him. nature, so he must be true to his nature. This fatalistic tendency emerges again in "The Trial," filmed shortly after "Mr. Arkadin." Wells said of the protagonist Joseph-K. who was persecuted for no reason: "I think he is guilty because he is a human being." Welles was completely immersed in the consciousness of original sin.
Wells’s self-exile is a Kafkaesque process of punishment and error. This may be why he identifies with the protagonists in Kafka's world. Joseph-K's plight may seem absurd, but in Kafka's world, it is a real condition of human existence, and Wells's personal experience confirms this. Welles began seriously considering adapting The Trial in 1960; he wrote the script in six weeks, but due to a lack of funds, actual filming began nearly two years later.
Welles may have been the ideal person to adapt Kafka's harrowing novel to the screen. The strong contrasts of light and dark, the acerbic humor and the labyrinthine obscurity of his past works are all reminiscent of Kafka's fictional world. What was unexpected was that the film aroused fierce criticism from British and American critics after its release. Only with a deeper understanding of Welles' intentions, combined with the ideological history of Welles' films, is it possible to do justice to The Trial.
The almost unanimous rejection of the film by British and American critics is not due to disrespect for the plot development and sequence of events of the original work. In this regard, being faithful or unfaithful is virtually impossible. The original novel was compiled and published by Max Brod after Kafka's death. Kafka's original manuscript had no chapter order. This is probably because Kafka believed that K's experience was originally a chaotic nightmare without a reasonable chronology. Based on a French critic's comparative study, Wells changed the order of chapters arranged by Burroughs to 1, 4, 2, 5, 6, 3, 8, 7, 9, 10.
The film has been attacked for two main reasons. First, the movie was too obscure and dull. Kafka's novel is easy to "look at the flowers in the smoke", but the movie is more difficult to understand than the novel. Second, Welles rewrote Kafka's "anti-hero" - helpless in the face of the absurd human existence - into a "sinner" who still had the courage to resist. "K"'s impassioned speech in court was considered an "accidental" fiction, incompatible with the Kafkaesque world at the beginning of the film; "K" was stabbed to death by the executioner's knife in less than a second and escaped. The executioner’s knife in the novel (this is the logical conclusion).
In less than a second of footage, what did he catch (was it a stone or a bundle of explosives?
Obscurity is one of the inherent characteristics of Western modernist works . If "The Trial" had been a traditional story of the persecution of innocent people, it might have attracted more serious criticism. The whole world in the film is admittedly filled with hundreds of typewriters. , the maze-like bank building, the mist-shrouded barrister's bedroom with flickering candlelight, Leni's room filled with documents, the mysterious hall of the court, and Titorelli's shabby living room with the voyeuristic eyes of a woman... ., everything seems "unreal", which is an intentional offense to Kafka's style. As the British film critic E. Stein pointed out, "Kafka's novels show a quite real world inhabited by dreams." "normal people, whereas in Welles's film, it's real people inhabiting a nightmare world." Acceptable. Nine out of ten TV series in the world are adapted. As an unwritten rule, people never and cannot re-evaluate the original work based on the success or failure of the adaptation. On the contrary, the adapted work can have its own new quality and value. . In fact, the film "The Trial" is an example of this.
"The Trial" basically transforms Kafka's ironic and inhumane world of despair into a Wellesian one. Moral play.
When Kafka declared to the barrister "I never wanted to be a martyr" and "I am a member of society", when he told the priest in a challenging tone "he will be 'responsible' for what he has done", When "I am not your child", Wells was not only criticizing Kafka, but also criticizing certain irrational tendencies that modernist art (such as absurd plays) instilled in the public in the early 1960s. Welles elevates Kafka's nightmare into an analysis of self-awareness in one fell swoop. He inevitably changes Kafka's ending.
Throughout Welles's entire film, he is more like a calm bystander of worldly affairs. He was more concerned about the psychological state of the oppressor than the suffering of the oppressed. He claimed to be an "Edwardian" (that is, old-school) rather than a "modern" intellectual. He clung to the 19th-century belief that literature should show some light. In "The Trial", it was this rebellion of the humanist tradition against modernist values ??that prompted him to reshape Kafka's "anti-hero" image, although this almost destroyed the logic of the work.
Wells's revision of Kafka also has its historical background. In an interview with the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma after the release of The Trial, he explained why the novel's ending became unacceptable in 1962. He said: "I think ("The Trial") is a 'ballet' written by a Jewish intellectual before Hitler came to power. Kafka would never have written such a work after the death of six million Jews. In my opinion , and that was before Auschwitz. I don't think my ending was that good, but it was the only possible ending. In the original, "Josef-K was associated with something that represented evil," he added. Inseparable. He did not commit the crime with which he was accused, but he was still guilty: he belonged to a guilty society and he cooperated with this society. Therefore, if K is allowed to continue as a passive collaborator, "it is tantamount to imply that Hitler is now "Indispensable". Wells may have exaggerated the seriousness of the problem, but his attack on irrational tendencies such as "life is absurd" and "people will be sent to an unknown end by the conveyor belt of life" is undoubtedly Sincere and valuable.
Now, Joseph-K has changed from a "dream man" to a "real person" (Welles changed the story of the door of law told by the priest in the second half of the original film). It became K.K.'s dream, and then the police woke him up), the background of the story was changed to K. had a dream, and then the police woke him up), the unrealization of the story background became inevitable, because it is an adaptation after all A fable from Kafka's novel. Welles said that due to financial difficulties, he did not have the money to travel to Yugoslavia to use a set designed specifically for the film, and had to improvise in an abandoned train station in Paris. More abstract than the actual shot: "My original idea was to have the set fade away. Realism should fade away before the viewer's eyes, until at the end there is nothing left but a wilderness, as if everything has disappeared. Even after the film was completed, we could still vaguely see this idea: as the psychological tension of Joseph-K increased, the various events took place incredibly close to each other, the walls disappeared, and at the end of the corridor, someone pushed aside The door will lead to another place. The specific real-life environments are unrealistically connected until the end of the film appears in a wilderness, and everything is reduced to nothing in the sound of explosions.
If you watch this movie with an entertainment mentality, you will find it obscure, dull, and difficult to watch. If you go to this movie with serious expectations for artistic appreciation, you will be deeply attracted. It's natural to apply different scales of appreciation to a film's different qualities.