Le procès

Plot synopsis:
On his thirtieth birthday, the chief cashier of a bank, Josef K., is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents from an unspecified agency for an unspecified crime. The agents' boss later arrives and holds a mini-tribunal in the room of K.'s neighbor, Fräulein Bürstner. K. is not taken away, however, but left "free" and told to await instructions from the Committee of Affairs. He goes to work, and that night apologizes to Fräulein Bürstner for the intrusion into her room. At the end of the conversation he suddenly kisses her.
K. receives a phone call summoning him to court, and the coming Sunday is arranged as the date. No time is set, but the address is given to him. The address turns out to be a huge tenement building. K. has to explore to find the court, which turns out to be in the attic. The room is airless, shabby and crowded, and although he has no idea what he is charged with, or what authorizes the process, K. makes a long speech denigrating the whole process, including the agents who arrested him; during this speech an attendant's wife and a man engage in sexual activities. K. then returns home.
K. later goes to visit the court again, although he has not been summoned, and finds that it is not in session. He instead talks with the attendant's wife, who attempts to seduce him into taking her away, and who gives him more information about the process and offers to help him. K. later goes with the attendant to a higher level of the attic where the shabby and airless offices of the court are housed.
K. returns home to find Fräulein Montag, a lodger from another room, moving in with Fräulein Bürstner. He suspects that this is to prevent him from pursuing his affair with the latter woman. Yet another lodger, Captain Lanz, appears to be in league with Montag.
Later, in a store room at his own bank, K. discovers the two agents who arrested him being whipped by a flogger for asking K. for bribes and as a result of complaints K. made at court. K. tries to argue with the flogger, saying that the men need not be whipped, but the flogger cannot be swayed. The next day he returns to the store room and is shocked to find everything as he had found it the day before, including the whipper and the two agents.
K. is visited by his uncle, who was K.'s guardian. The uncle seems distressed by K.'s predicament. At first sympathetic, he becomes concerned that K. is underestimating the seriousness of the case. The uncle introduces K. to a lawyer, who is attended by Leni, a nurse, whom K.'s uncle suspects is the advocate's mistress. During the discussion it becomes clear how different this process is from regular legal proceedings: guilt is assumed, the bureaucracy running it is vast with many levels, and everything is secret, from the charge, to the rules of the court, to the authority behind the courts – even the identity of the judges at the higher levels. The attorney tells him that he can prepare a brief for K., but since the charge is unknown and the rules are unknown, it is difficult work. It also never may be read, but is still very important. The lawyer says that his most important task is to deal with powerful court officials behind the scenes. As they talk, the lawyer reveals that the Chief Clerk of the Court has been sitting hidden in the darkness of a corner. The Chief Clerk emerges to join the conversation, but K. is called away by Leni, who takes him to the next room, where she offers to help him and seduces him. They have a sexual encounter. Afterwards K. meets his uncle outside, who is angry, claiming that K.'s lack of respect has hurt K.'s case.
K. visits the lawyer several times. The lawyer tells him incessantly how dire his situation is and tells many stories of other hopeless clients and of his behind-the-scenes efforts on behalf of these clients, and brags about his many connections. The brief is never complete. K.'s work at the bank deteriorates as he is consumed with worry about his case.
K. is surprised by one of his bank clients, who tells K. that he is aware that K. is dealing with a trial. The client learned of K.'s case from Titorelli, a painter, who has dealings with the court and told the client about K.'s case. The client advises K. to go to Titorelli for advice. Titorelli lives in the attic of a tenement in a suburb on the opposite side of town from the court that K. visited. Three teenage girls taunt K. on the steps and tease him sexually. Titorelli turns out to be an official painter of portraits for the court (an inherited position), and has a deep understanding of the process. K. learns that, to Titorelli's knowledge, not a single defendant has ever been acquitted. He sets out K.'s options and offers to help K. with either. The options are: obtain a provisional verdict of innocence from the lower court, which can be overturned at any time by higher levels of the court, which would lead to re-initiation of the process; or curry favor with the lower judges to keep the process moving at a glacial pace. Titorelli has K. leave through a small back door, as the girls are blocking the door through which K. entered. To K.'s shock, the door opens into another warren of the court's offices – again shabby and airless.
K. decides to take control of matters himself and visits his lawyer with the intention of dismissing him. At the lawyer's office he meets a downtrodden individual, Block, a client who offers K. some insight from a client's perspective. Block's case has continued for five years and he has gone from being a successful businessman to being almost bankrupt and is virtually enslaved by his dependence on the lawyer and Leni, with whom he appears to be sexually involved. The lawyer mocks Block in front of K. for his dog-like subservience. This experience further poisons K.'s opinion of his lawyer. (This chapter was left unfinished by the author.)
K. is asked by the bank to show an Italian client around local places of cultural interest, but the Italian client, short of time, asks K. to take him only to the cathedral, setting a time to meet there. When the client does not show up, K. explores the cathedral, which is empty except for an old woman and a church official. K. notices a priest who seems to be preparing to give a sermon from a small second pulpit, and K. begins to leave, lest it begin and K. be compelled to stay for its entirety. Instead of giving a sermon, the priest calls out K.'s name. K. approaches the pulpit and the priest berates him for his attitude toward the trial and for seeking help, especially from women. K. asks him to come down and the two men walk inside the cathedral. The priest works for the court as a chaplain and tells K. a fable (which was published earlier as "Before the Law") that is meant to explain his situation. K. and the priest discuss the parable. The priest tells K. that the parable is an ancient text of the court, and many generations of court officials have interpreted it differently.
On the eve of K.'s thirty-first birthday, two men arrive at his apartment. He has been waiting for them, and he offers little resistance – indeed the two men take direction from K. as they walk through town. K. leads them to a quarry where the two men place K's head on a discarded block. One of the men produces a double-edged butcher knife, and as the two men pass it back and forth between them, the narrator tells us that "K. knew then precisely, that it would have been his duty to take the knife... and thrust it into himself." He does not take the knife. One of the men holds his shoulder and pulls him up and the other man stabs him in the heart and twists the knife twice. K.'s last words are: "Like a dog!".

Tags: psychedelic, satire, claustrophobic

Review:
We get to see endless rows of people working on typewriters, the inside of a crate while hundreds of eyes peer through the cracks, a labyrinth of tall bookshelves stacked with old law books, and tons of other dark surrealism that is amazing to look at.As far as plot goes, Anthony Perkins is trapped in a corrupt judicial system, accused of an unspecified crime.
Akim Tamiroff is (as ever) extraordinary, while Anthony Perkins captures the mixture of nervousness and arrogance central to Welles' K.THE TRIAL is also a textbook lesson in how to film a classic text.
Surely the only reasons to film a classic are to a)make it adaptable to film form; b)make it relevant to our age; or c)make it relevant to the director's sensibility.Welles, on one level, is certainly faithful to Kafka's vision.
Like many of Orson Welles films, The Trial has been imitated by other filmmakers.
Cut off from the big money, he was to spend the subsequent forty years globetrotting aimlessly, picking up work as best he could.Autobiographical elements of Kafka's own life, contained in "The Trial", are given prominence in the film.
Once this one entered my mind, though, the contest was over.The lifetime masterpiece of a master of filmmaking, "The Trial" is Orson Welles's finest film, even surpassing "Touch of Evil."  Somber, brooding, sometimes even claustrophobic, "The Trial" is a surrealistic safari through the worlds of law, employment and interpersonal relationships.The melancholy strains of the artistically deployed Adagio by Albinoni underscore the mood of the film, shot mostly at twilight or indoors by night in a tangle of nightmarish sets that extend to infinity.
Even scenes shot in broad daylight seem cold and devoid of nourishment in this cosmos of interminable, infinitesimal complexity which utterly lacks a heart.Anthony Perkins (Joseph K.) is mass of contradictions, at once sympathetic, boyish, paranoid, angry, declamatory and most of all surpassingly frustrated by the futility of attempting to deal with a society that both demands mechanistic perfection of him and at the same time exhibits a persistent apathy toward his continued existence as well as a bureaucratic attempt to destroy it.He seems inadvertently to hurt everyone with whom he comes in contact, ostensibly the cause of people getting thrown out of their dwellings, schools, jobs, marriages and other situations, all due to his benign actions which in any sane world would be completely unconnected with the tragedies they somehow appear to create.
THE TRIAL is Orson Welles's version of a typical European film with all the surrealistic trappings one might expect from a work by a Fellini.
Anthony Perkins realizes the paranoia of Joseph K, charged with an unnamed crime by uncooperative detectives and pursued by victims, executioners, and young girls through a nightmarish European city which is darker than the blackest things in horror of film noir.
It is an unhappy building now: it has many objects as important as this film or the book it is based on -- and their intent is as iconoclastic as Welles and Kafka, but it is run as a heavyhanded, relatively totalitarian institution.
Orson Welles' film version of Kafka's "The Trial" is a perfectly fine 'visualization' of the book but it still doesn't work.
He stumbles across a nightmarish landscape of judicial limbo and cynical survivors, demanding justice...When one thinks about it carefully, one can only conclude that Orson Welles, more than anyone, was the ideal candidate to adapt Kafka's story.
Orson Welles, with Kafka's story, does everything for effect, creating and maintaining an atmosphere that he honed after years of film-noirs.
The mis-en-scene is always with a purpose to get the viewer into the tension and on-going confusion (which is with the lead, Mr. Joseph K played by Anthony Perkins), and the end result of Welles' directorial stamp on the work is that of something like a psychological horror film.
As K wonders what he'll do, the story starts to spiral into running from children, going from one place seamlessly into another, until he is blended into this world of the abstract.The acting is what would separate The Trial from being a weird, experimental (though to a degree the technical side of the film is a little experimental) landscape.
The best thing that can be said about The Trial is that for today's audiences, those who won't understand the path the story takes in the first viewing, will surely be intrigued enough by the editing style, the faces, the photography, and the ideas that do come through.
Two sequences alone- the first part of K in the trial room with the audience present, and a visit to a painter surrounded by little girls- can be counted as some of Welles' finest work.There's an underlying existential theme (K's on and off time with his sense of free will, his sense of isolation, and the Advocate's last dialog with K proves this) that works alongside with the surreal nature of the picture.
By the end of the film, which ends on a note that will baffle some, anger others (perhaps by it not following the book), and bring on a catharsis that can barely be explained, it's at least clear the effect Welles' and his lead have put on is a pure, unique cross-breed of Kafka's tale of maddening persecution.
And it does, as with Welles' more famous works like Touch of Evil and Citizen Kane, demands to be seen two, three, ten more times.
The transitions between locations, relationships between characters and Joseph K.'s own interests are poorly interpreted and the final result is not surrealistic - it's just confusing.I was disappointed to find out that Welles decided to replace 1920s Prague (Kafka's town) with 1960s socialistic Zagreb.
Eventually there is a trial where nothing is truly explained.Director Orson Welles is putting some of his skills into bringing this Franz Kafka tale onto the big screen.
None of the movies I've ever seen impressed me that much.Anyone who loves Kafka will love the film for sure.Orson Welles made the nightmarish Kafka's reality to come so close that it gives you creeps.The movie is not basicly about the horror of totalitarismus.The key subject is loneliness,social industice that the main character can't fight, his struggle is futile.He can't beat the bloody system since he's its flesh and blood.He, like many of us,lives in the world of spiritual insecurity.Most brilliant performance by Anthony Perkins who had been the outstanding outsider,underappreciated by the blind Holliwood.The Trial is a piece of art that is worth a couple of hours watching..
This film gets all its power from status and fame: written originally by Kafka, directed and interpreted by Orson Welles, starring every oddball's beloved (and admittedly great actor) Anthony Perkins.
Orson Welles brings Kafka to film like no one else may ever be able to.
Anthony Perkins is excellent in his role, adding the fact that he looks like Kafka in a very weird way.
Orson Welles said that "The Trial" was the most autobiographical of all his films.
Welles' "The Trial" was a box office failure in 1963, as was Kyle MacLachlan's 1993 remake (which, significantly, hit the theaters right around the time of the Branch Davidian massacre--a story Kafka could have written himself).
Few people, however, will think of The Trial, Orson Welles' 1962 adaption of the classic novel by Franz Kafka.
Beginning with Kafka's famous parable, Before the Law, The Trial tells the story of Josef K (Anthony Perkins), who one day wakes up to find he's being accused of a crime he doesn't know what of, and makes every attempt to clear his name, while working out exactly what he did wrong.
As the film progresses, Josef learns of the cruel reality of the law, demonstrating a sharp dichotomy between Josef's idealism and society's violent pragmatism.The world of The Trial feels more like a nightmare than reality; its baroque architecture, abstract logic, surrealist locales and complete suspension of time helps Josef K, and the audience, feel both paranoid and suppressed.
Orson Welles's The Trial is one disturbing, but hauntingly beautiful film.
K (Anthony Perkins) is arrested of a crime he didn't commit and has various collisions with the law in a surreal Kafkaesque land including with The Advocate (played by Welles) in his quirky little apartment, and the painter whose little girls peek through the boards in the walls.As a Welles fan, there are some Welles pics you struggle to find things to like in: for me, Macbeth, Lady from Shanghai and The Stranger fall into this category (though Shanghai's famous Hall of mirrors sequence is instantly memorable).
If asked what You consider the Best Film from Orson Welles, You might answer "Citizen Kane" (1941), or "The Lady from Shanghai" (1947), or "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942), or "Touch of Evil" (1958).
To Say that Kafka or Welles were Ahead of Their Time is an Understatement.This is a Perplexing, Dream-State of a Movie that is prefaced in the Introduction so it should come as No Surprise that the Film is the Least on Logic.
But it is most Effective on its Visualizations of a Nightmare where an "Innocent" Man is "Accused" of Crimes without Warrants just because the "Law" Can Legally do that, so They do.This sends Anthony Perkins, as Josef K, into a Labyrinth of Bizarre Characters and even more Bizarre Surroundings.
Director Orson Welles (who also acts in the movie) was not one to shy away from new ideas and this film takes the viewer through a sequence of settings that we might experience as a nightmare: shadows, strange voices and faces, creaking noises, and dark, empty spaces.
Franz Kafka's novel comes to the screen via Orson Welles, and it's a striking combination.
Welles, nearly broke at this time, was approached to adapt and direct the film by a company with money but no show-biz savvy; Welles was not a fan of Kafka, but he does seem to connect with these abstract characters and elements, and he revels maliciously in Josef K.'s turmoil.
If you didn't like this film, then you're obviously as guilty as you are if you did like it.Orson Welles is hideously brilliant in carrying out the derision of Franz Kafka.
But with Kafka and The Trial, how do you film inside a man's mind in an unnamed existential world?Well Orson Welles certainly gave it a try.
All of this grandeur, absurdity and irony is carefully designed to convey to us, as Thoreau once said, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation."Also, if you notice this sort of thing, we have Orson Welles' signature long camera takes which move gracefully from set to set, speaker to speaker, creating a haunting feeling as if we the observers are invisible ghosts in the drama, experiencing everything in real time.
You have woken into a nightmare.Orson Welles' underseen classic of surrealism stars Anthony Perkins as Josef K., the man who wakes to find himself in such a world.
Welles, despite having just a supporting role, has an indisputably awesome on screen presence, and his entrance, lying in bed, wreathed in cigarette smoke, is terrific to watch.Welles uses a variety of clever film-making techniques to enhance the film's feeling of confusion, disorientation and paranoia, keeping true to the atmosphere of Franz Kafka's original novel.
The Trial is the best cinema adaptation of Franz Kafka.it's also one of Orson Welles most overlooked and underrated films.i personally think it's one of his best.right from the beginning when K (Anthony Perkins) awakes to find two strange policemen?
wandering around his bed chamber at five in the morning were taken on a hyper paranoid journey through the minds of both Franz Kafka and Orson Welles,with fantastically stark cinematography and unusual locations the film is genuinely un-nerving and oddly humorous in parts,especially when K attempts to explain to the two sinister policemen their is no such word as "ovular" or not to touch those "pornograph records",innocently meaning phonogram records.
this was a role Antony Perkins was born to play and the assemble cast of distinguished character actors lend class to the proceedings,with Orson Welles turning in a memorable performance as the advocate.there is also a pioneering scene using pinscreen animation at the beginning of the film as a kind of prologue.....ten out of ten..
It doesn't seem likely things will end well--the court painter tells K, "I've never seen definite acquittal."Most of the plotpoints stay true to Kafka's novel--and the sets are especially Kafkaesque.
This movie proves that Welles COULD do, artistically, anything he wanted."The trial" introduces us deeply into Kafka's world.
To render a book of Kafka's on screen is a challenge...but Welles succeeds because he is so innovative in the way he tells stories.
Yet where that film had a half-hearted premise, this one takes its conviction to the ultimate conclusion and highlights, sadly, just how overrated Kubrick was as a director.Orson Welles, surely one of the ten most important people in cinema, stamps his mark all over this work, and old hamster cheeks even makes a cameo as the advocate.
Orson Welles' 1962 film does so laudably, and should be applauded for trying, even if it didn't quite come off (though it did do so, brilliantly).It is not as faithful as the 1993 version, which did follow the book closely while Welles' at times is more Welles than Kafka, but in terms of momentum, emotional power and atmosphere Welles' is significantly better.
I really doubt coz after reading, I felt like I reviewed Kafka and Orson Welles more than the movie "The Trial" itself.
All of this because of one citizen Kane.It's a real tragedy that Welles would be unable to finish most of the things he worked on after this, the two sweet expectations being "Chimest at Midnight (1965) and "F for Fake" (1973), the latter which I think is his best film (whatever that means).
No wonder then that Welles found such a resounding autobiographical level in this, and in retrospect considered it to be his best film.I'm not at all into reading too much into the lives of filmmakers as some kind of key to understanding and enjoying their work, but this case is different.
Filmed in large, almost derelict, buildings at times, the atmosphere of the film adds a fitting backdrop to Anthony Perkins, a man who's accused of a crime is never told him.I was left totally frustrated and angry at the end - and that's exactly what Perkins' character must've been feeling throughout for, no matter how hard he tries to deal with the accusations, he only gets further and further away from a solution.You'll probably either love or hate it - I hate it in the sense that I won't watch it very often, but I love it because Welles has made the film to be so unique that you 'feel' it rather than 'see' it.Finally, you've no need to know the plot except that Welles turned Kafka's saved manuscript into an indictment of the legal system..
The Trial is Orson Welles' attempt to adapt Franz Kafka's tale to the silver screen, and the success of that adaptation is an interesting case.
An unassuming office worker (Anthony Perkins) is arrested and stands trial, but he is never made aware of his charges.Orson Welles is generally considered one of the greats of the film world.
I have seen a handful of Orson Welles' films, and The Trial is definitely the one that stands out most for out and out weirdness.
Based on Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial is a story about law and order focusing on one man; Josef K.
The plot, along with Welles' paranoia-inducing use of the camera makes The Trial feel more like a terrible nightmare than anything else.
I also find Perkins performance as Joseph K to be erratic; sometimes it works and sometimes he is just plain annoying.Nevertheless, those who like the book will want to see the creative ways in which Welles brings the scenes to life.
Based on Franz Kafka's dark novella, "The Trial", Orson Welles effectively directs and stars along side Anthony Perkins.Perkins plays Josef K, an insignificant office worker, who is at the films onset charged with an unspecified crime.
Yet if you like any one of the following:  Welles, Perkins, Kafka, and/or dark films, then viewing this gem is highly recommended..
Perkins does awonderful job, playing something opposite of his role in Psycho.I think that Kafka stories make a wonderful translation to film,and this movie is deffinite proof.
A fan of Orson Welles, especially from his "Citizen Kane" days, I was not sure what to expect prior to viewing "The Trial."  However, I thoroughly enjoyed the film.
The choice of filming in black and white rather than color will become obvious to viewers who may not otherwise be familiar with Kafka's writing or Welles's work.
Anthony Perkins does a wonderful job as the anxious Josef K - in Kafka's book I imagined K to be nothing like Perkins in Welles' film, but I love them both.
Orson Welles plays the advocate, one of the marvelous characters by Kafka, which also include; Bloch, Mrs. Grubach, Leni, The Painter and Ms. Burstner played by Jeanne Moreau, who had just made her breakthrough four years earlier in The Lovers (1958) by Louis Malle.Both the film and the book are one of the weirdest pieces of literature and cinema I've ever read or seen - a little exaggerated by generalizing.
A masterpiece perhaps the greatest film since Citizen Kane by Orson Welles, maybe the greatest book of the 20th century and it might just be the most loyal adaption ever made..
Orson Welles is one of my heroes, but I don't think "The Trial" was one of his better films.
What do you get when you combine two masters at their craft like Franz Kafka and Orson Welles?
Reading Kafka's The Trial was very useful in after watching Welles's adaptation in that I was able to spot out various little changes to the plot.