Le procès

By the times Welles moved his cast and crew to Paris to complete "The Trial", the large-scale project conceived and filmed in Yugoslavia was having to be whittled down fairly drastically because, not for the first or last time in Welles' career, the money had run out. The Paris scenes are shot entirely inside the (then) magnificently derelict Gare d'Orsay, and one wonders if the film's simple, no-frills prologue was forced on Welles by dint of poverty. Monochrome drawings are flipped upwards in a process which Welles calls "pin-screen". The director narrates the fable of a man who seeks entry through the Door of Justice, but never reaches his goal. This conundrum of guards and portals harks back to ancient times, and provides a neat distillation of the story to come.

For the entirety of the long scene in K's bedroom, and throughout the major part of the film, Welles positions the camera slightly below waist height. This 'wrong' spatial relationship creates in the viewer a vague sense of unease, a visual disorientation which compounds K's emotional loss of bearings. Welles plays clever tricks with the proportions of the rooms, their lines being slightly out of kilter, and the ceilings very much in view. Typically, Welles is deliberately and flamboyantly breaking a cardinal rule of cinematography - 'keep the ceiling out of shot'. Interiors seem open and spacious if we can't see the ceiling, and Welles is after the converse effect: driving home the point that K inhabits an airless, joyless place and his surroundings are imbued with inchoate hostility.

German expressionism had gripped Welles' imagination back in the 1930's, and virtually all of his films show its abiding influence. The columns of the opera house represent social regimentation, and K offends against social conformity by awkwardly pushing his way out of the theatre, an irregular irritant polluting the symmetry of the seating. When K gets caught in the exodus of workers from the office, he is both literally and metaphorically swimming against the tide. His microscopic ineffectuality against the ponderous stateliness of the courtroom doors drives home the expressionist point - he is a puny Jonah, entering the cavernous bowels of The State.

"To be in chains is sometimes safer than being free," and it could be said that Welles' genius flourished best when shackled by a dearth of resources. Lacking the money for costumes during the shooting of "Othello", Welles turned adversity to artistic advantage, filming the murder scene in a turkish bath, not only obviating the need for clothing but also making a succinct point about Iago's motives being 'stripped bare'. "The Trial" affords another example of Welles' remarkable fecundity. Zitorelli's studio is built of cheap slats and lit from outside, creating a powerful cinematic image of The State's placeman clinging precariously to his wretched privileges - all filmed at practically no expense. The skewed, empty picture frames are silent comments on the distorted and barren perspective of Zitorelli, the human race's Benedict Arnold.

K is a Freudian picaro, journeying in despair through the intestines of a nightmare system of justice, an apparatus ironically designed to ensure that justice is stifled. The shades of Buchenwald are introduced by Welles. Defendants wait with meathooks above their heads and, in other parts of this unfathomable 'system', nameless naked unfortunates stand in quiet misery, their numbers hanging from their necks. Leni and The Wife are grotesque distortions of Dante's Beatrice, malformed guides with no sense of direction and no transcendent vision. Welles himself plays Hassler the advocate, the bully who has no thought of his client's welfare but seeks only to perpetuate the cruel gavotte of litigation. "The confusion's impenetrable," a point reinforced by shooting characters through interminable patterns of beams and girders, whose shifting geometry engulfs the insignificant humans.

In his 1985 biography of Welles, Charles Higham declared "The Trial" a failure, concluding that it was "muffled, dull, unexciting on every level". Perhaps more tellingly, he criticised Welles for adopting a grandiose approach, whereas Kafka's work cries out for spareness and understatement. Higham is excellent, but the film is not, in my humble opinion, a failure. It evokes with emotional power a dreamspace of despair, and in so doing renders a great service to Kafka's oeuvre.

It's always a question whether film form should attempt to reproduce literature. Is the film the author's, the director's, or both? With Orson Welles, the question is easily answered. We have Tony Perkins raging against the darkness--walking the dream landscape of a nightmare--spitting in the eye of the law--a victim yet not a victim. He is an existential juggernaut. Unlike the man who waits at the door, he already knows it's his door (he says he knows the story). He knows the door will close, but what happens on his side will be his choice. This is a strange curve to throw, a character devoid of dramatic irony, like Oedipus knowing the Oedipus story. Then there's the asexuality and monomania, the refusal of dissuasion which allows Perkins to "win." Force doesn't affect him. When he is dragged off, we aren't really sure who is doing the dragging. In the book, we know perfectly well. I wonder how Orson Welles would have handled such an arrest.

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. The film's visual style and atmosphere are impeccable, but its plot seems to be tenuously put together. This is not surprising, as the source material was never completed by Kafka, and was never intended to be published. The book was assembled after his death by his executor out of the unordered (and sometimes unfinished) chapters which Kakfa had written. The adaptation deals with this by playing the tale as very surreal, which is brought out most excellently by the sets. Welles used an abandoned train station to construct his giant spacious sets, which evoke strange responses with their industrial decay, open work places of endless repetition, and claustrophobia. All the settings are strange and off-putting in the best of ways. The cinematography too is incredible, with exaggerated and unrealistic lighting picked up by the canted and unusual angles to create an unsettling effect. The cast also works wonderfully, as Perkins gives one of his best performances as the protagonist Joseph K. The filmic aspects of the work are all wonderfully executed, but the film doesn't quite pull it off. This is due to the problems with adapting a work which was itself unfinished. However, this shortcoming can be overlooked, as this is one of Welles' best works, a daring work of cinema to be enjoyed and appreciated.

Despite the fact that Welles is best remembered for the film ranked first by the AFI among the films of the Twentieth Century, Citizen Kane, Welles considered The Trial his finest work. In my mind, it is the most beautifully photographed film ever made in black and white, and its sense of composition is that of an artist. The settings are dark and mysterious, and a sense that humanity has been shunted to the margins of a dark industrial order is beautifully conveyed.

I'm told that younger people who did not grow up with black and white TV or with black and white movies automatically tune out pieces that are not in color. That is a shame, as there are films that are better made in black and white, and expressions of time and mood that cannot be made as well in color. Welles never really got the chance to make the transition to color that Kubrick made as well as any American director. Perhaps he would have found expressive use of color as well as Kubrick did, but certainly neither this film nor Citizen Kane could be made in color.

The brilliance of its artistry aside, the film will not appeal to everyone because of the deliberate opaqueness of the plot, and because of its lack of optimism. I like Kafka's story, and I like the movie very well, but it is more art than diversionary entertainment, and some might prefer a good action flick or a romantic comedy.

I found a lot to adore in "The Trial," but just as much to furrow my brow over. The cinematography is stunning; full of visual metaphor and gorgeous composition, it's an unyielding show of movie-making expertise. Welles plays up the bleak, "no tomorrow" nature of the exterior scenes, the structured chaos of the workplace and the hedonistic excess exhibited by the various stages of the trial itself, each to great effect. The story, though, feels too flighty and nebulous for my taste. It should come as no surprise, being a translation of a Kafka novel, that the entire picture often feels surreal and confusing. It continuously floats and sputters just beyond the grasp of understanding, like a moth delicately avoiding a set of flailing hands. The premise may have been established nicely during the slightly more straightforward opening scenes, but as the duration grows it becomes too ambitiously ambiguous for its own good.