Filming "The Trial"

[ToddBaesen]

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Orson Welles talking about FILMING THE TRIAL in 1982, shows us Welles as the master speaker he was. One short excerpt:

ORSON WELLES: 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 culture background — of being occupied by the Austria-Hungarian Empire. I see a curious combination in the book of an unthinkable sterile future, combined with an unthinkable dusty accumulation of those traditions which bureaucrats set up in order to perpetuate their monstrous lies. If I sound like our President (Ronald Reagan), I profoundly apologize.

Now comes news of this bizarre case regarding THE TRIAL.

Franz Kafka's THE TRIAL lawsuit:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091002/sta ... a_israel_2

[Alan Brody]

Thanks again, Store Hadji. Another thing that struck me was when Welles reveals that the narration at the beginning of the film is the voice of the advocate, who Welles says is a satanic figure, a tempter. I wonder if Welles considered him akin to Iago. It also gives Welles's narration at the end of the film (as himself) a creepier edge. K. seeks to conform to a society in which he was born, not realizing that it is actually his prison. Some more rough notes after listening:

It is not a man against society story, it is not about his conflict with society. It is about his failure to flourish and flower in society. K. is basically a conformist, and yet society is killing him even though he's not fighting it. He fights each issue as it comes along, but you don't see a man in an aggressive position against society. Society rather, is in conflict with him. "I wanted K to make a final gesture of defiance even if it was fruitless - existentialist if you want to put a label on it - and I couldn't bear to have him have his throat slit like a pig. He throws the grenade back, which is a way of saying "No". Putting him in a hole with a bomb and having him try to throw the bomb out was the simplest way to express that.

The fairy story (the parable of the law) at the beginning is the attempt to destroy him, to destroy his faith and character. The story is part of the plot against him. We are all told fairy stories- in TV commercials, in presidential addresses, in editorials. This Brothers Grimm fairy tale is repeated later when the advocate tried again to corrupt Joseph K. The advocate is his chief corruptor, the devil. The Trial is not a novel in which a character leaves a real or benign world and enters a world of nightmare. Joseph K's life is contained within a lie. He was born into it, conceived in the womb of horror. He can't escape it any more then a baby born in Bangladesh can escape dying of starvation. Welles fools us into believing that it is his own voice narrating at the beginning when he is actually playing the voice of the devil in order to create a sense of doom. It is the devil's dream of Joseph K. we are watching.

[Roger Ryan]

Alan, I'm not sure what you mean when you say Welles reads the "law" parable as the Advocate at the film's beginning and, then again, as himself at the film's end. Surely, it is the reverse, right? In what is a very clever bit of scriptwriting, Welles informs the audience of the parable at the beginning so when K claims near the film's end to have already heard the story, the audience shares this knowledge. I'm not certain the character of the Advocate would specifically tell the audience that "the story of THE TRIAL is a dream...a nightmare"; only Welles himself as narrator could make that declaration. And he does so for the same reason you notate in your post: to let the audience know that the story of THE TRIAL is not one of a man who slips from reality into a nightmare, but of a man who is born, lives and dies in that nightmare; never understanding anything apart from it, but haunted by the idea that things aren't quite right. This, of course, can mirror our own perceptions of the society around us. If you want to say that Welles is adapting "the voice of the Devil" in his opening narration to set the mood, that's fine. But he's being straightforward with the audience by using the parable in context to illustrate the dream logic of THE TRIAL itself. Welles as the Advocate would not be so accommodating.

[Alan Brody]

Unless the advocate is directing that 'dream logic' at the audience, trying to put the audience in K's position right away. Welles says that's why he starts the film out with animation, to better equate it with a fairy tale, in this case, a spirit-crushing one. I'm not really sure what I mean either, I'm just relating my impression of what Welles says in the Trial discussion, which is that it is not Joseph K's dream that we're watching. "It's my dream. I'm dreaming of him" he says at one point. Does he mean Orson Welles's dream? Or The Advocates' dream? Or the devil's dream, since Welles says the advocate is the devil? At the end, while reading the credits he clearly says "I wrote and directed it. My name is Orson Welles", but this is accompanied by a shot of the open door in the "law parable'. Whose point of view does that represent? Very confusing.

Is it a Faustian story? In one interview Welles said that K. is guilty because he collaborates with a guilty society. In another interview he said that all his protagonists are variations of Faust, because "we live in a world that was built by Faust. Our modern world is Faustian". I assume he's talking about machines, which is why the missing computer scene still has relevance even though it's no longer a part of the film. And of course, the mushroom cloud at the end is the product of a machine, a bomb. And one could argue that the vast beauracracy of the Hapsburg empire was a giant political machine that Kafka was born into, and being Jewish, oppressed by. It's the nightmare of someone who is not guilty because of anything he's done; but because of what he is (some say The Trial was Kafka's response to The Dreyfuss Affair of 1905). But Welles, not being Jewish, was never oppressed like that, and in his post-holocaust account K. is guilty because of what he does, and thus apparently becomes some kind of metaphor for all people trying to climb the ladder of a corrupt society (I guess that's what he means by trying to 'obtain the law').

[Roger Ryan]

I agree that Welles' statement regarding the film being "his dream" is a little obtuse. I really think he was trying to clarify that the film was definitely not supposed to be K's dream, but K's reality and a "fable" we watch from the outside (the film being the thing that Welles the writer/director "dreamed up"). In addressing his Q&A audience, he wants to make sure they understand that, even though there is a dreamlike quality to the story, K the character does not enter the dream from a waking state (ala WIZARD OF OZ) but is a part of the dream world. Welles linking the Faust legend to this story is a unique idea; he maintains that K is not an "everyman" trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare which is the standby interpretation of Kaftka's THE TRIAL, but a man who is guilty of selling his soul to be a part of a machine that will destroy him.

[Alan Brody]

That's well put, Roger.
Here's an interesting excerpt from an interview on The Trial that Welles did shortly after the film was released which seems to tie in with the dream nature of the story:
"We were due to leave Paris for Yugoslavia in two weeks when we were told that we wouldn't be able to put up a single set there because the producer had already made another film in Yugoslavia and hadn't paid his debts. That's why we had to use that abandoned station. I had planned to make a completely different film. Everything was improvised at the last moment, because the whole physical concept of my film was quite different. It was based on the absence of sets. And the gigantic nature of the sets, which people have objected to, is partly due to the fact that the only setting I could find was that old abandoned station (the Gare D'Orsay). An empty railway station is vast. In the production as I originally envisaged it, the sets were to gradually disappear. The number of realistic elements was to gradually diminish, and to be seen to diminish by the spactators, until only open space remained, as if everything had been dissolved away"

From This is Orson Welles:

PB: ...I think it is like some terrible dream
OW: But it isn't a reproduction of a dream - that's a very important point to make.
PB: It gives you the feeling of a dream.
OW: Yes, related to the experience of dreaming...the magical part of dreaming is what I was looking for, trying to achieve. Because dreams do have something to do with magic, and I believe in magic as the main source of poetry*. We create entire worlds in our dreams - full of people we've never seen, places we've never been to - that seem to echo and reverberate with worlds and memories that we've never experienced. And yet, there they are, real, within the context of that sleeping experience - when we're in touch with whatever we're in touch with, which people have only begun to guess at. And so it would have been disastrous to have symbolism, in the ordinary sense of the word in it, because a symbol is my statement to you and the audience, and I'm not there. I mustn't tell you anything. I must make you think that there are things happening in the next room that you don't know about; that's the thing of a dream. That they are richly happening. Totally ambiguous, you know. Signalling to us magically, but never in the sense of the egghead symbol, only in the symbolism of magic. That symbolism is very valid, and I prefer not to talk about it...it's an invocation of something.

[Hartley]

Hey everyone! Just thought I'd share a link here to a download for a video copy of Filming 'The Trial'. I already downloaded it and it works (except for when they ran out of film every so often, and at the beginning there's just blackness for the first few minutes). If you don't have an account (like I don't), then just hit the free user download button and wait around 20-30 seconds and you're good to go!

http://www.filestube.com/06e18a2a84f977ec03ea/go.html

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks Hartley, nice catch.

[Le Chiffre]

About 90 minutes of unedited footage from FILMING THE TRIAL on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbUe-bM6bXg

[mido505]

My God, this is fantastic. Mike, thank you for pointing this out, and thanks to nuclear5641, whoever he or she is, for posting that footage; I literally was just thinking about FILMING THE TRIAL the other day, and how I would love to see this footage. My guess is that this won't last long, so watch it while you can...

[Le Chiffre]

You're right, Mido. This footage has popped up online at least a couple of times before, and been taken down quickly. It probably can't be much fun to be a copyright owner these days.

[mido505]

FILMING THE TRIAL is listed as public domain at YouTube. Let's hope that is the case. I would think that Oja has the copyright, but perhaps she, or her lawyers, forgot to renew it.

Around 2007-2008, a whole bunch of Welles rarities showed up on YouTube, including much of Magic Show. I remember joking that it looked like someone had uploaded the contents of Gary Graver's garage. Unfortunately, it all came down very quickly.

Let's hope this stays, and that there is more.