K. Stays in the Picture: Filming the Novels of Franz Kafka

Home , Amerika (novel), The Castle (novel), The Trial

A thesis submitted to the

Graduate School

of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

in the Department of German Studies

of the College of Arts and Sciences

Matthew R. Bauman

B.A. The Ohio State University

May 2012

Committee Chair: Harold Herzog, Ph.D.

Abstract

From the man who wakes up one morning transformed into a bug, to the man arrested in his bedroom by a shadowy, extra-legal police force despite, seemingly, having done nothing wrong, the author Franz Kafka has put his protagonists into some of the most identifiable and bizarre predicaments of twentieth century literature. It is no surprise then that many notable directors have undertaken the challenge of translating the tales of these protagonists onto film.

Themselves possessed of inspired and unique minds themselves, it should also come as no surprise that these filmmakers each take a distinctly individual approach to the source material, often with an agenda markedly different from Kafka’s own, and, by extension, produce final products that differ greatly both from each other and from the source material.

The goal of this thesis is to provide case studies of three such adaptations of Franz

Kafka’s work: Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962), adapted from the novel Der Prozeß; Danièle

Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Klassenverhältnisse (1984), adapted from the incomplete novel

Der Verschollene; and Michael Haneke’s Das Schloß (1997), adapted from the novel of the same name. These case studies will explore the problems inherent in adapting literature to film in general, and more specifically, present an analysis of those elements of the original texts which the filmmakers in question retain in their respective adaptations as well as those they eschew and the rationales behind these decisions.

Acknowledgements

I would like to extend my gratitude to everyone who helped me in the completion of this project. Thanks, first of all, to my committee: Dr. Todd Herzog, who generously agreed to act as chair despite being on leave and Dr. Tanja Nusser, who took an interest in my work well in excess of what is required of a second reader. Their advice, insight and encouragement, as well as a turnaround time that exceeded all expectations, were instrumental in the timely and successful completion of this thesis. Thanks also to Sasha Parks and Vanessa Plumly for their invaluable help with proofreading and copyediting, as well as to the rest of my fellow graduate students in the German Studies Department for their proverbial tea and sympathy. Additional appreciation is due all of my family and friends for their encouragement and helpful reminders to eat, sleep and take breaks throughout this process. Thank you all very much.

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Table of Contents

List of Images...... v

“Das Insekt kann nicht gezeichnet werden”: Committing Kafka’s Work to Film...... 1

Citizen K.? The Influence of Orson Welles and Franz Kafka on the Film The Trial...... 8

“Ich rühre mich von hier nicht fort”: Haneke Adapts Film to Kafka...... 23

“Wir sind keine Künstler! Wir sind Filmemacher!”: Westlich von der Freiheitsstatue with Straub/Huillet...... 34

“Die Zeit des gewöhnlichen, glücklich ablaufenden Lebens reicht… bei weitem nicht hin”: Final Thoughts on Kafka’s Work in Film...... 46

Works Cited...... 51

List of Images

Image 1 — Joseph K. and Uncle Max discuss the computer...... 12

Image 2 — High angle shot in the courtroom...... 16

Image 3 — Alexeieff’s “pin screen” technique...... 18

Image 4 — Searching through the Chief Councilor’s papers...... 29

Image 5 — Frieda drives the patrons out of the bar...... 29

Image 6 — Illustration of the village with the Castle obscured...... 32

Image 7 — Therese tells Karl about the death of her mother...... 41

Image 8 — Opening shot of the Statue of Liberty...... 42

Image 9 — Karl watches the campaign parade with Brunelda, Robinson and Delamarche...... 44

“Das Insekt kann nicht gezeichnet werden”: Committing Kafka to Film

Franz Kafka went to the movies — a lot. This we know from Hanns Zischler’s thorough and aptly titled exploration of Kafka’s film going habits, Kafka geht ins Kino. In this 1994 volume, Zischler diligently scours Kafka’s writings for mentions of the films he saw, playing out

Kafka’s private and literary biography against the backdrop of Prague cinema in the early twentieth century. In 2009, Peter-André Alt went a step further with Kafka und der Film: Über kinomatographisches Erzählen, wherein he deliniates the effects that cinema, the styles of storytelling that cinema employs and the “Kaiser-Panorama” stereoscope viewer — an early competitor with motion pictures, had on Kafka’s own writing. Though he is the first to explore these effects in great detail, Alt is not the first person to notice elements of the cinematic in

Kafka’s writing style. As in most things Kafka, Max Brod was the first to point it out, but the thread was even picked up by Theodor Adorno, who wrote in a letter to Walter Benjamin:

“Kafka’s novels are not prompt books for the experimental theater… Rather they are the last disappearing textual links to silent film” (Adorno, 95).

But what does it mean to say that Kafka’s writing is “cinematographic”? According to

Alt:

Kafkas filmisches Schreiben manifestiert sich nicht primär auf der Ebene der

Motive und Topoi, sondern vornehmlich im Bereich der narrativen Struktur

selbst. Was Generationen von Kafka-Forschern bevorzugt als das Befremdende,

Groteske oder alptraumhaft Surreale seiner Arbeiten beschreiben, entsteht häufig

durch die programmatische Adaptation filmischer und stereoskopischer Bilder im

Erzählvorgang. Die ‘maßlose Unterhaltung,’ die das Kino vermittelte, und das

‘Vergnügen,’ das vom Kaiserpanorama ausging, erzeugten wesentliche Impulse

für Kafkas poetische Imagination (193).

This is to say, that to describe Kafka’s writing as “cinematographic” does not mean that Kafka was a scriptwriter; he was not engaged in a one-to-one transference of cinematic elements into writing. Rather, “die beruhigten Bilder des Panorama oder die dynamisierten Bilder des Kinos” were his source of inspiration (Alt 192), and he sought to recreate these elements in his writing.

At the conclusion of Kafka und der Film, Alt summarizes the eight indications of this inspiration in Kafka’s writing. Among these:

[Verknüpft] Kafka [verknüpft] Bilder in seinen Texten so, daß eine

Sequenzstruktur simuliert wird, die filmähnlich wirkt... Kafka organisiert

Wahrnehmungseindrücke aus seinem Alltagsleben wie Filmbilder, in dem er sie

als dynamische Abfolgung in Texte einbindet... Der Film vermacht dem

literarischen Texte neue Techniken der Spannungsteigerung, indem er die

Möglichkeit der Konzentration auf affektive Zustände einer Figur bietet, die ohne

‘Gegenschnitt’ auf ihren Auslöser vorgeführt werden können. (191-192)

So some of the techniques, which have been cited as making Kafka’s prose so alienating to readers — things like abrupt cuts and focusing on only one aspect of the action in a scene — are, in fact, directly inspired by cinema where they are an integral part of the “language of film.”

Despite having incorporated so many filmic elements into his writing, Kafka was notoriously conflicted about cinema and illustration in general.1 This conflict engendered a strong antipathy in him about the illustration of his work. In his famously panicked letter to Kurt

Wolff, his publisher, about the forthcoming publication of The Metamorphosis, he writes: “Es ist mir nämlich... eingefallen, er könnte etwa das Insekt selbst zeichnen wollen. Das nicht, bitte das

nicht! ... Das Insekt kann nicht gezeichnet werden. Es kann aber nicht einmal von der Ferne aus gezeigt werden” (Briefe, 136). In the foreword to the Schocken edition of Franz Kafka: The

Complete Stories, John Updike agrees, admonishing that:

Any theatrical or cinematic version of the story must founder on this point of

external representation: a concrete image of the insect would be too distracting

and shut off sympathy… Such scenes could not be done except with words. In

this age that lives and dies by the visual, The Metamorphosis stands as a narrative

absolutely literary, able to exist only where language and the mind’s hazy wealth

of imagery intersect. (xvi)

It is clear, however, that not everyone is so reserved about augmenting Kafka’s texts with images. While researching their 2002 article “Kafka Adapted to Film,” Martin Brady and Helen

Hughes counted no less than 40 cinematic and stage adaptations of the works of Kafka (240).

The impulse to bring the images in Kafka’s words to life is strong, but what are the end results of such an adaptation? What happens to these works when a director transfers them from page to screen?

This thesis endeavors to answer these questions by examining three provocative instances of adaptation: Orson Welles’s 1962 eponymous adaptation of The Trial; Jean-Marie Straub and

Danièle Huillet’s 1984 filming of Der Verschollene, Klassenverhältnisse and Michael Haneke’s

1996 made-for-TV production of Das Schloß. These particular films were chosen because they are feature-length adaptations — each of a different one of Kafka’s three novels — both written and directed by well-known filmmakers who possess distinct, recognized and recognizable styles. These criteria serve to elide certain problems in adaptation studies, while highlighting others for closer investigation. For example, since the directors wrote the screenplays

themselves, it is possible to eliminate the intermediary step of a screenwriter, thus avoiding the question of whether the film is an adaptation of a screenplay or of the novel itself. However, since these directors and the author they adapt are such large presences, with such recognizable imprints on their work, issues of “fidelity”2 to the source material arise and such questions as “is this a ‘Kafka’ film or an ‘Orson Welles’ film?” become more apparent. As a result, the films become more illustrative examples.

In order to look carefully at these films and to answer the aforementioned questions successfully, two concepts must be examined: the idea of an “adaptation” and the concept that is

Kafka’s legacy, “The Kafkaesque.” First, since Kafka has been so much discussed above already, the definition of the Kafkaesque: The word itself, according to Binder’s Kafka-

Handbuch, was coined in 1938 by Cecil Day Lewis (671), signifying, as Osman Durrani puts it,

“a byword for everything felt to be ‘alien’ and ‘incomprehensible’” (220). Beyond this, John

Updike provides a more complete “lay” unpacking of the term:

It is Franz Kafka’s extrapolations from his experience of paternal authority and

naysaying, above all in his novels The Trial and The Castle, that define the

word… The adjective describes not the author, but an atmosphere within a portion

of his work… Out of his experience of paternal tyranny and decadent

bureaucracy, he projected nightmares that proved prophetic. (xviii)3

In this passage, Updike is concerned with the prophetic aspects of Kafka’s “private and eccentric” work, whose aforementioned “decadent bureaucracies” presage “the atrocious regimes of Hitler and Stalin, with their mad assignments of guilt and farcical trials and institutionalized paranoia” (xviii). This, however, is only one aspect of the “Kafkaesque.” In addition to Alt’s aforementioned discussion of Kafka’s unique “cinematographic” writing style, Brady and

Hughes provide their own definition, with a nod to the challenges inherent in capturing it on film:

On the one hand, there is the strongly visual use of language — metaphor,

analogy, a meticulous naturalism in the description of architectural space and

landscape for example — and on the other, the restricted viewpoint of the

protagonists. Together, these make for the disconcerting worldview generally

labeled ‘Kafkaesque’ — they also present the cameraman with a veritable

conundrum” (228).

Where Updike is applying the term to plot and atmosphere, Alt, Brady and Hughes are employing the term as descriptive of narrative structure and perspective. For the latter three, what is essential to Kafka’s style are not the strange occurrences that form the “main action” of his stories, but the descriptions of them and the settings in which they take place.4

Yet another aspect of the Kafkaesque is Kafka’s prose itself — his actual word choice and syntax. Many have also commented on Kafka’s “lucid” prose, but Günther Nicolin does so, yet again with an eye toward the visual: “It is easy to illustrate Kafka’s clear text in the traditional way, i.e. to draw each image of that wonderfully clear prose… but nothing is gained by this, rather, attention is wrenched away from Kafka’s diction” (Nicolin, 5). There are numerous other variations on the term “Kafkaesque” which could be explored,5 but these three are sufficient to demonstrate the amount of nuance present in the term. The Kafkaesque, therefore, can encompass a number of aspects of Kafka’s prose, beyond those associated with the term in everyday parlance. Given so many different possible interpretations of the Kafkaesque, it is not important here to settle on one specifically. What is more important is the definition of the term that the adaptors themselves choose when creating their adaptations. As suggested by the

discussion above, they have a great deal of latitude in deciding which aspects of the

“Kafkaesque” to emphasize (or downplay), and those elements of a Kafka text which the adaptors retain, often say as much about the adaptor as they do about the source material.

The other term necessary to discuss is “adaptation.” By Thomas Leitch’s count in 2003, there existed “twelve fallacies in contemporary adaptation theory” (104). Chief among these are the contentions that: “novels are better than films”; “source texts are more original than adaptations” and “fidelity is the most appropriate criterion to use in analyzing adaptations.” His count came three years before Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation, which addresses many of his concerns as well as several others. Hutcheon also provides a useful definition of the term adaptation itself: “an adaptation can be described as the following: An acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works; a creative and interpretive act of appropriation/ salvaging; an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work” (8). That is to say, an adaptation can and does stand on its own, without support from its precursor text — an adaptation can still be experienced as (and again, often is) a legitimate work of art, despite ignorance of the precursor material.

The purpose of this thesis then, is neither to grade each adaptation based on its “fidelity” to its source material, nor to position Kafka above his adaptors. Rather, it is a case study in adaptation and the interpretation of texts by filmmakers. Kafka’s works lend themselves well to adaptation because of their unique characteristics, i.e., their Kafkaesque elements. By creating a film based on a work by Kafka, the filmmakers create a document defining what they see as the most salient components of the Kafkaesque — those they highlight in their respective films. The filmmakers presented here were already well established in their careers by the time they decided to make their respective Kafka adaptations. They were confident enough in their abilities and

defined enough as filmmakers to take liberties both with cinematic conventions and their source materials, in order to fashion adaptations, which not only stand on their own as works of art (as

Hutcheon says they must), but stand out as works of art, while also presenting viewers familiar with the source material with an innovative and challenging interpretation thereof. Orson Welles produces a re-historicization of Der Proceß, transporting it behind the Iron Curtain in the early

1960s. Michael Haneke employs Kafka’s cinematic prose and the limits of the “small screen” in a made-for-TV version of Das Schloß, which attempts to be as faithful as possible to Kafka’s prose and narrative structures. And the team of Straub/Huillet claims to transpose Der

Verschollene directly from the page to the screen, while still emphasizing the political subtexts and commentaries on class they see as inherent in the novel. From this foundation, the in-depth analysis of these films can proceed in hopes of finding out what happens when filmmakers “take

Kafka to the movies.”

1 For more on this conflict, see Zischler, 26-27. Anecdotal evidence of Kafka’s relationship with images can be found in Gustav Janouch’s unverifiable but nevertheless widely cited reminiscences, Conversations with Kafka. 2 Though a problematic term (cf. Hutcheon, 6-7, 31), it may, with stringent limitations on its definition, still function as a shorthand 3 In this, Updike is opposed by Harold Bloom who calls Kafka “a unique writer, but only secondarily a novelist” (Bloom, ix). 4 Or the lack of description, in the case of the limited perspectives of, for example, Josef K. who has neither insight into the charges against him nor understanding enough of the machinations of the Court to elicit a meaningful answer. 5 One of these additional interpretations of the Kafkaesque — the political — will be seen when Jean-Marie Straub and Daniéle Huillet’s adaptation of Der Verschollene, Klassenverhältnisse, is discussed in a later segment.

Citizen K.? The Influence of Orson Welles and Franz Kafka on the Film The Trial

In an interview published in the April 1965 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma, Orson Welles, dismissing the notion that he has “repeated himself” in his most recent directorial endeavor, remarks, “Say what you like, but The Trial is the best film I have ever made” (Don Quixoteland,

35). He does not support this assertion further, except to say, “I have never been so happy as when I was making that film.” Welles, of course, was no stranger to adaptation by the time he made The Trial, having already written and directed the conversions of a number of textual works into films, including Othello, Macbeth and If I Die Before I Wake (the source material for

The Lady from Shanghai) — to say nothing of his notorious 1938 radio adaptation of H.G.

Welles’s The War of the Worlds.

A common thread that runs through all of these adaptations is that Welles had no qualms about departing from his source material, often significantly. For example, full stage performances of Macbeth and Othello last around three hours, but Welles’s adaptations run a mere one hundred seven and ninety-one minutes respectively. Both of these run times are well below the conventional tolerances of the movie-going public, leaving one to wonder what motivated Welles to cut more than third of one play and over half of the other. In a 1962 interview with Huw Wheldon on the BBC television program Monitor, Welles lays out the philosophy underlying his willingness to interpret the source material of his adaptations so freely:

WHELDON: Do you have any compunction about changing a masterpiece?

WELLES: Not at all, because film is quite a different medium. Film should not be

a fully illustrated, all talking, all moving version of a printed work, but should be

itself, a thing of itself. In that way it uses a novel in the same way that a

playwright might use a novel-- as a jumping off point from which he will create a

completely new work. So no, I have no compunction about changing a book. If

you take a serious view of filmmaking, you have to consider that films are not an

illustration or an interpretation of a work, but quite as worthwhile as the original.

WHELDON: So [The Trial] is not a film of the book, it’s a film based on the

book?

WELLES: Not even based on. It’s a film inspired by the book, in which my

collaborator and partner is Kafka. That may sound like a pompous thing to say,

but I’m afraid that it does remain a Welles film… (Wheldon Interview)

This theory of adaptation corresponds well to Hutcheon’s assertions, some forty years later, about the stand-alone legitimacy of adaptations. The key to Welles’s adaptation, however, is his view of Kafka as a “collaborator and partner” rather than a sanctified source of unalterable gospel. Granting himself this license, Welles makes numerous substantial changes to his source material in translating it from print to film, to the point that Leslie Megahey notes in her 1982 interview with Welles that “[The Trial] was seen by many critics as a kind of contest between

Welles and Kafka, with Kafka coming off second best” (200). In the same interview, Welles reiterates his belief that filmmakers should not be slavishly devoted to the works they adapt, saying, “I don’t believe in an essential reverence for the original material. It’s simply part of the collaboration” (201).

Given Welles’s adamant declaration of creative independence when it comes to adaptation, the question that arises is this: If Welles is only “inspired” by Kafka, what makes The

Trial a Kafka film? Welles claims he is “not a Kafka analyst” (Quixoteland, 35), though the very act of adapting Kafka to film forces him into interpretive positions on Kafka’s work. So to

answer this question, it is necessary to examine the ways in which Welles deviates from his source material and his motivations for doing so. By the same token, those elements of Kafka’s novel that Welles opts to retain in his film take on a larger importance as well, due to the fact that Welles, unburdened by “reverence” or “fidelity” has free reign to choose what makes the final cut in his film.

The most obvious element of Kafka’s novel that Welles changes is the setting. Welles, attempts to fashion a Kafka for the 1960s. Substituting Kafka’s present day (the early twentieth century) for his own (the early 1960s), Welles gives the characters updated names, occupations and attitudes, has them speak in contemporary slang and prominently features modern jazz in the soundtrack. Beyond these relatively minor “updates,” though, Welles makes several major stylistic departures from his source material which fundamentally alter the themes and tone. The first and most thoroughgoing of these is his depiction of the city. As Brady and Hughes note, the lively, teeming, dirty masses thrown together in hovels and tenements, which characterized

Eastern European cities in the mid-1910s, have been paved over by the orderly, modern lines of the compartmentalized, steel-and-concrete public housing projects, into which their descendants have been ordered by the Communist governments behind the Iron Curtain, (specifically, in this case that of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as that is where Welles did the on- location shooting for the exteriors) (233). The city the film’s K. inhabits is utterly devoid of passers-by, bystanders and pedestrians: in every exterior scene, there is no one in view of the camera who is not directly associated with the main action of the film. Indeed, however, one could hardly blame these urbanites for seldom venturing out of doors; K.’s city is a triumph of the Brutalist Modernist architecture seen as the future in the early 1960s. It is a concrete fortress, guarding its citizens against any encroaching irregular polygons or organic matter. Even in the

residential districts where K.’s housing block is located and the fields outside the city limits where the film ends, what passes for nature amounts to little more than a few blasted shrubs incongruously struggling to take root in the stony, barren ground. For Kafka, the nightmare of the city was the inescapable crush of humanity, with its jumbled, never-ending vagaries emerging from a population of people, not numbers; Welles sees the city, rather, as fundamentally dehumanizing and isolating, an extension of the faceless, cyclopean bureaucracy he posits as the source of K.’s persecution.

Beyond the desolate exteriors Welles constructs, the other setting with which he takes considerable and impossible to overlook license is K.’s place of employ. Filming in the cavernous ex-train station, Gare d’Orsay, Welles set up eight hundred fifty desks at which are seated eight hundred fifty extras clattering away on typewriters. There are no walls in this building, and K.’s “office,” rather than affording him privacy, serves to increase his visibility by placing him on a riser. Here again, we see the stabilizing force of bureaucracy. Eight hundred fifty people simply milling about idly is an agoraphobia-inducing prospect, but order those people in columns and rows and bend their noses to their individual typewriter carriages, and the potency of the masses has been neutered. Even at quitting time, they are less a force to be reckoned with than an obstacle to be overcome, as they amble, herd-like back to their respective concrete dwellings.

Additionally, K.’s office contains the second most glaring “update” of Kafka’s text, the insertion of a computer, an early 60s, state-of-the-art, punch-card behemoth consisting of banks of blinking lights lined up seemingly to infinity against a wall of the office, and attended by a team of lab-coated scientists. In the final cut of the film, it figures only briefly as the focal point of a conversation between K. and his Uncle Max (Karl in the novel) as to whether it might be

possible that this “electronic

gimmick” — Max’s term — could

provide some insight into K.’s

situation. But in the original script,

this scene is part of a larger subplot

cut by Welles from whole cloth,

about the nature and limits of

computing power and its usefulness

to society. In this scene, before K. Image 1. goes to dismiss the Advocate, he meets with the scientist in charge of the computer during the night shift. After a conversation with this “venerable lady of science … the archetype of the priestess serving a powerful, millenary mystery” (Fry, 120) on topics such as whether computers can tell the future or will ever replace courts of law and how K. misunderstands his own inability to give the computer quantifiable information as the fault of the machine, the scientist hands K. a punch card, which, based on the information he was able to provide, ostensibly contains the crime he is “most likely to commit.” The scientist tells him it is suicide.

Though the scene was ultimately left on the cutting room floor,1 the fact that Welles was willing to concoct and insert a subplot involving technology of which Kafka did not have the faintest inkling demonstrates the lengths to which he was willing to go to suit Kafka to his own purpose. Welles posits that society has changed so much in the intervening decades between the novel and screenplay that Kafka cannot be relevant without a significant modernization for contemporary audiences. As he tells Wheldon, “Although I have tried to be faithful to what I

take to be the spirit of Kafka, the novel was written in the early twenties, and this is now 1962, and we’ve made the film in 1962, and I’ve tried to make it my film because I think that it will have more validity if it’s mine” (Wheldon).

If further proof of this intention is required, as mentioned above, the most jarring departure from Kafka’s novel is that Welles’s film ends not, as Kafka’s novel does, with the iconic scene of K. regarding his assassins as they stab him in the heart. Rather, after K. defiantly informs the reluctant men that he will not take the knife and do their job for them, with the men putting the knife away, walking out of the stone pit, and lobbing a dynamite bomb at K, who is all the while shouting at them and laughing hysterically (Fry, 174-175). This much-analyzed departure from the meek, resigned, shame-filled demise of Kafka’s K. serves to reify the philosophical loggerheads at which Welles found himself with Kafka, and which impelled him to make many of the changes from the novel.

The Josef K. of Kafka’s novel reacts to the news of his arrest and nearly all subsequent indignities visited upon him by the “court” with a lack of urgency and fatalistic resignation that many have argued presages the reaction of the European populace to the Fascism that was nascent across Europe at the time Kafka was writing (cf. Updike xviii-xix). For the sake of an entertaining film, Welles felt that this passivity had to change: “I made him more active in the proper sense of the word. I do not think there is any place for passive characters in a drama…

[I]n order to interest me, the character must do something, from a dramatic point of view, you understand” (Quixoteland, 35). True to this notion, Welles also excised or shortened several of

K.’s longer disquisitions with various supporting characters, making the film less “talky.” But this decrease in passivity was also rooted in Welles’s own philosophy; he believed, with the

benefit of hindsight, that the fate of Josef K. had not aged well. When asked why he changed the ending, Welles explained,

That ending didn’t please me. I believe in that case it was a question of a “ballet”

written by a pre-Hitler Jewish intellectual. After the death of six million Jews,

Kafka would not have written that. It seemed to me to be pre-Auschwitz. I don’t

want to say that my ending was good, but it was the only solution. (Quixoteland,

35)

By Welles’s own admission, he is an “Edwardian” in “modern” times demanding that literature offer hope for humanity (Naremore, 199). It is unsurprising, then, that he should reject the conclusions of the works of Kafka, whose own thoughts on hope are famously summarized in his statement quoted by Max Brod in his article, Der Dichter Franz Kafka: “Oh, Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns” (Brod, 58). As a result of this rejection, we find in the frantic final moments of Welles’s film, the brief shot that is, perhaps, the key to understanding the entirety of the rest of the adaptation as a representation of Welles’s entire

Weltanschauung. It comes as K.’s executioners (whom Kafka refers to only as “Herren,” (236) but whom Welles’s script specifies as “policemen in plain clothes” (Fry, 169)) run away as the fuse of the dynamite they have thrown at K. burns down. Nicholas Fry describes it in his transcription of the film as follows, “1056. Quick long shot of K. from above as he bends down to pick something up (a stone? The dynamite?) and starts to throw it” (Fry, 175). It is also at this point that Fry appends one of only two footnotes containing interpretive criticism: “This shot, which lasts less than a second, is highly significant, as in contrast to Kafka’s ending, it leaves a glimmer of hope” (Fry, 175). At this moment K. is shown — or possibly shown — to be most active in his rejection of his “sentence.” For Welles, after the atrocities committed under

National Socialism, allowing K. to die without offering at least some resistance, and indeed, feeling ashamed, as though he is ultimately aware of his guilt on charges he does not even understand, is unconscionable. Welles sees the Holocaust as the end result of this unresisting, accepting mindset applied on a large scale, and cannot promote it in his adaptation.

Having shown that Welles is making an adaptation of Der Proceß wherein he fundamentally disagrees with Kafka’s philosophy and conclusions about society, this leads to the question, then, what is Kafkaesque about Welles’s adaptation? This question can be interpreted in a number of ways: Which elements of Kafka’s “style” have been transposed to the screen?

How does Welles himself interpret the idea of the “Kafkaesque,” and how does he present that idea in his film? He tells Megahey that he sees the Kafkaesque primarily as a matter of atmosphere:

I felt no need to be true to Kafka in every essence. I’d thought it was necessary to capture

what I felt to be the Kafka atmosphere, which is a combination of modern horror creeping

up on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I saw it as a European story, full of old European

bric-a-brac, with IBM machines lurking in the background. And that was the way I

wanted to present the picture. (201)

Given Welles’s commitment to “the Kafka atmosphere” over being “true to Kafka in every essence,” Brady and Hughes describe the film as “the triumph of the Kafkaesque over Kafka”

(233). Though he may have changed the setting and the attributes of some of the characters, as discussed previously, Welles creates on film the sense of eerie other-worldliness present in

Kafka’s writing. Despite Kafka’s limpid prose and his being categorized by many (including

Straub/Huillet) as a Realist, Welles tips his hand as to his interpretation of Kafka’s literary reality at the end of his voiceover narration in the opening scene of the film, after he has narrated the

parable “Before the Law”: “This tale,” he intones, “is told during the story called The Trial. It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream… of a nightmare (Fry, 17).” With that, Welles readies his audience for a narrative beholden to its own logic, which departs significantly from “real-world” cause and effect. This connection to dream states is reinforced by the scene immediately following. As Fry’s description has it: “We are inside K.’s bedroom.

Close-up from above, at first, slightly out of focus, of Joseph K. sleeping peacefully in his bed”

(17). The gradual coming into focus of a scene is a well-established technique in film for visually communicating that the events preceding or following it take place in a character’s dream. The question of whether this is meant to indicate that K. dreamt the preceding presentation of the parable, or if, after a brief introduction, the viewer is now being introduced to K.’s dream is beyond the purview of this study, but in either case, the seed has been planted, and the viewer begins the film already off balance. Thus disorienting the viewer, Welles continues to establish the strangeness of K.’s world. The bizarre plot elements are manifest enough, but they are

reinforced by distinctly

unconventional cinematography. A

near barrage of alternating high and

low angle shots and close-ups are

intercut with long shots, and

lighting which maximizes shadow

play and exaggerated perspective.

For instance, in the scene when K.

gives his incongruous, stentorian Image 2. speech denouncing the Court at his

first hearing, he is shot from various points in the balconies and on the floor. Additionally, there are shots of his audience set up from various perspectives: a high-angle shot of the people on the floor, or a low-angle shot of the people in the balcony, and when he finally leaves the courtroom, a medium shot of K. from the waist up shows that he is dwarfed by the doors, which heretofore seemed conventionally sized.

Further disorienting the viewer is the lack of coherence between the clean, modern exteriors of buildings and their jumbled, labyrinthine interiors. K.’s apartment block, for example, is shown to be a very architecturally up-to-date building when we see it from the outside as he converses with the disabled woman hauling Ms. Burstner’s trunk away. But inside, all of the rooms lead into each other, and K. has to go through the apartment’s kitchen to get to his own. Moreover, it is revealed that in K.’s apartment, several stories up in a clearly residential neighborhood, Mrs. Grubach’s husband ran a dentist’s office. Even K.’s office, the interior most in accord with the Modernist exteriors of the film, is marked by its total lack of walls, or separate rooms, save for a singular broom closet under a stairway. Such paralogical setups are also present in the Advocate’s expansive, ill-lit home and the Court buildings, in which K. nearly becomes hopelessly lost. All of these elements add up to create a film that exhibits the popular definition of “Kafkaesque.” Welles is unconcerned with reinforcing Kafka’s underlying philosophies (indeed he is, as has been demonstrated, openly hostile to some of them), but rather with recreating the atmosphere of absurdity and chaos, which is the popular impression taken from Kafka’s writing.

Beyond the off-kilter atmosphere of Kafka’s fictive world, Welles sees the parable told in the penultimate chapter of The Trial (and published independently, during Kafka’s lifetime as

Vor dem Gesetz) as the key to understanding the larger story in which it is contained. To this end,

Welles gives the parable pride of

place at the beginning of the film

and revisits it again at a point more

in line with its placement in the

novel. The tale, told first by Welles

in a voice over, and again by

Welles in the role of the Advocate

— though Welles is careful to point

out that “I am not the Advocate” Image 3. (Quixoteland, 35) — is accompanied by illustrations using the intricate “pin screen” technique2 developed by Alexandre

Alexeieff. The illustrations are progressively flipped toward the viewer in Rolodex fashion inviting critics to address the meta-cinematic characteristics of this format (cf. Naremore, 196;

Quixoteland, 35), but Welles sees the slides primarily as an effective way of keeping the tale in the back of the audience’s mind: “It concerns a technical problem posed by the story to be told.

If it were told at that precise moment, the public would go to sleep; that is why I tell it at the beginning and only recall it at the end” (Quixoteland, 35). In order to “refer back to it at the end,” however, the public must internalize the parable and remember it until it is brought up again, i.e., over the course of the rest of the movie. In this way, Welles more forcefully proffers the parable as a lens through which to view the rest of the film.

As Naremore explains, in Kafka’s novel, the parable is a jumping off point for a lengthy discussion of the meaning of this tale, in the process satirizing Talmudic scholarship and literary criticism, as well as highlighting the absurdity of life (197). But, in addition to the fact that

including such a scene would be “talky and uncinematic,” Welles ultimately disagrees with

Kafka’s conclusions of absurdity, and so these are not included (Naremore, 198). Welles’s screenplay did contain a nod toward the novel’s depiction of the parable in part of the narration that was replaced by the “logic of a dream” pronouncement in the introduction. In this explication, the narrator was to approach the audience and inform them:

This is a story inside history. Opinions differ on this point, but the error lies in

believing that the problem can be resolved merely through special knowledge or

perspicacity — that it is a mystery to be solved. A true mystery is unfathomable,

and nothing is hidden inside it. There is nothing to explain. It has been said that

the logic of this story is the logic of a dream. Do you feel lost in a labyrinth? Do

not look for a way out. You will not be able to find it. There is no way out. (Fry,

17)

Such a bleak proclamation at the start of the film, however, would have put Welles squarely in the modernist camp. These words parallel Walter Benjamin’s analogy regarding the “unfolding” of the parable in the novel:

The word “unfolding” has a double meaning. A bud unfolds into a blossom, but

the boat which one teaches children to make by folding paper unfolds into a flat

sheet of paper. This second kind of “unfolding” is really appropriate to the

[typical] parable; it is the reader’s pleasure to smooth it out so that he has the

meaning on the palm of his hand. Kafka’s parables, however, unfold in the first

sense, the way a bud turns into a blossom. (Benjamin, 122)

Benjamin describes the placement and discussion of the parable in the novel “as if the novel were nothing but the unfolding of the parable” (122), and Welles, as evidenced by his

introduction and reintroduction of it in two points during the film, as well as the fact that the film fades out on the final pin screen image from the parable would seem to agree. The point of contention with Welles, then, is not the importance of the parable, but its interpretation. Rather than go along with the absurdity of the world indicated by the parable, Welles instead uses it as the nucleation point for K.’s resistance against his accusers. When the parable is reintroduced in the penultimate scene of the film, K. has stumbled across the slides familiar to us from the introduction, and the advocate steps out of the shadows to tell K. that his “particular delusions are described in the writings that preface the Law” (Fry, 166). He then begins the tale, but K. interrupts him, crying — with a verbal wink to the audience (Naremore, 198) — that “we’ve all heard it!” (Fry, 166). From this point on, K. is defiant and courageous in his rejection of the nebulous accusations against him. He counter-accuses the Court of trying “to persuade us that the whole world’s crazy, formless, meaningless, absurd” (Fry, 168). He leaves the church and is intercepted by the two executioners, and the final scene plays out, including the hopeful shot of

K. attempting (possibly) to throw the bomb back — his final act of defiance. Welles’s voiceover returns over a still of a cloud of smoke. He informs us the film is based on the novel by Kafka and lists the cast, at which point the image dissolves to the front of the slide projector from the penultimate scene. Welles further informs us that he played the Advocate, as well as writing and directing the film, and leaves us with the fact that “My name is Orson Welles” (Fry, 176). The final image before the fade out is the pin screen image of the gate of the Law, falling shut (or perhaps left open a crack?), thus the parable is further reinforced as a framing device for the rest of the film, again, as though the film were an “unfolding” of this little story.

Welles claims these final moments of defiance are not an attempt to exonerate or acquit

K. In a well-attested diary entry, Kafka compared the guilty protagonist of The Trial, with the

innocent one in The One Who Disappeared: “Roßmann und K., der Schuldlose und der

Schuldige, schließlich beide unterschiedslos strafweise umgebracht...” (Tagebücher, 757), and

Welles does not disagree with the verdict.3 In the Cahiers du Cinéma interview, he is adamant on this point:

Q: […] Perkins appears as a kind of Prometheus…

WELLES: He’s also a little bureaucrat. I consider him guilty.

Q: Why do you say he’s guilty?

WELLES: He belongs to something which represents evil and which is a part of

him at the same time. He is not guilty of what he’s accused of, but he’s guilty all

the same: he belongs to a guilty society; he collaborates with it. But I’m not a

Kafka analyst. (Quixoteland, 35)4

Since immediately after this Welles discusses the drastic change to the novel’s ending, it may seem (and Naremore, for example, has argued) that the film is self-contradictory: Josef K. is

“guilty” and yet he fights back at the end. But the two are not mutually exclusive, especially since Welles points out that K. is not, in fact, guilty of what he has ostensibly been charged with, but rather guilty in a different way, guilty of being complicit in a corrupt society. This is a much more general guilt, and one that is seldom prosecuted to its fullest extent. Thus, K. is perhaps justified in refuting the specific charges against him.

Questions of guilt or innocence, sanity or insanity aside, Welles’s adaptation of The Trial concerns itself primarily with recreating the atmospheric attributes of the “Kafkaesque” as defined in common parlance. As he himself says, he is not a “Kafka analyst,” and he does not attempt to preserve or justify Kafka’s ideas about the human condition. Indeed to do so, he felt, would indicate that Hitler was a necessity (Naremore 201). Instead, having made the requisite

changes to avoid compromising his own moral philosophy, Welles seeks to create a Kafkaesque dreamscape for a contemporary audience, hence the updated dialogue and technology. Despite appearances and its critical reception, this is not an “art film”; the use of the parable as a framing device as well as the modernizations make it clear that Welles wanted the film to be accessible to a general audience, even one that had little familiarity with Kafka’s work. In this way, he differentiates himself from the two German adaptations of Kafka’s novels, which keep Kafka very much in mind and rely, in part, on their audience’s knowledge of his works as a guide through the films, as will be explored in the next two chapters.

1 Cut by Welles at the last moment (Wheldon), so that despite the scene’s deletion, Katina Paxinou, the actor who plays the scientist, is still included in the credits 2 Wherein the interplay of light and the shadows of a million raised pins on a white 3x4 foot board is used to create black and white images. 3 Perhaps keeping in mind the dictum of the officer in Kafka’s “In der Strafkolonie”: “Die Schuld ist immer zweifellos” (212). 4 In a different translation of the same interview, which appears in Fry’s description of the film, an additional question appears: Q: Should Joseph K. fight? WELLES: He doesn’t; perhaps he should, but I don’t take sides in my film. K. collaborates all the time. He does it in Kafka’s book too. All I allow him to do is to defy the executioners at the end. (Fry, 9).

“Ich rühre mich von hier nicht fort”: Haneke Adapts Film to Kafka

Michael Haneke’s approach to adaptation differs greatly from Welles’s. Welles saw himself as Kafka’s “collaborator” (cf. Megahey 200-201), but Haneke’s 1996 made-for-TV adaptation of Das Schloß, which retained the title of the novel, is much more indebted to its source material. As Oliver Speck notes:

“Haneke follows the plot of Kafka’s novel closely, even ending with the sudden

appearance of a white title card: ‘At this point, Franz Kafka’s fragment ends.’ …

As in other literary adaptations by Haneke, the dialogue is mostly taken verbatim

from the source. Equally, the text for a voice-over narrator who fills in

background information or replicates what is shown on the screen is taken directly

from Kafka.” (73)

As evidenced by the almost exclusive use of Kafka’s own words in the film, for Haneke the key element of the Kafkaesque is Kafka’s prose. Haneke’s adaptation of Das Schloß is therefore an attempt to translate Kafka’s sober, precise writing style — to which Kafka adheres even when describing the strangest, most baroque events — from the written word into film.1 For example, the scene from Kafka’s novel in which Frieda drives the patrons of the Herrenhof inn out into the night:

‘Nun werde ich sie hinaustreiben müssen.’ Sie nahm eine Peitsche aus der Ecke

und sprang mit einem einzigen hohen nicht ganz sicheren Sprung, so wie etwa ein

Lämmchen springt, auf die Tanzenden zu... ‘Im Namen Klamms,’ rief sie, ‘in den

Stall, alle in den Stall,’ nun sahen sie, daß es ernst war, in einer für K.

unverständlichen Angst begannen sie in den Hintergrund zu drängen, unter dem

Stoß der ersten gieng dort eine Türe auf, Nachtluft wehte hinein, alle

verschwanden mit Frieda, die sie offenbar über den Hof bis in den Stall trieb. (66)

The use of similes such as “so wie etwa ein Lämmchen” and the special mention of “Nachluft” in this odd scene where rowdy bar-goers are driven into a stall like a herd of cattle, as well as the lack of extensive description of the event, beyond simply that Frieda “sie offenbar über den Hof bis in den Stall trieb,” can be taken as representative of Kafka’s approach to similarly out-of-the- ordinary scenes across his œuvre.

In adapting this writing style to film, Haneke had to navigate the switch from a “telling” medium to a “showing” one. To commit everything contained within the 370-some trade paperback pages of Kafka’s novel fully to film would require a herculean effort not only on the part of the film’s cast and crew, but also on the audience’s end as well.2 Haneke’s adaptation, being a made-for-TV film, is beholden to constraints best summarized by Alfred Hitchcock:

“The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder”

(Schneider, 113). And so Das Schloß has a more or less standard runtime of one hundred twenty- three minutes. While it is true that what is contained in those one hundred twenty-three minutes is considerably more than the average person could read in the same span,3 the change in medium also dictates a change in the ability to display or highlight certain aspects of narrative, as

Hutcheon continues:

In the move from telling to showing, a performance adaptation must dramatize:

description, narration and represented thoughts must be transcoded into speech,

actions, sounds and visual images… In the process of dramatization, there is

inevitably a certain amount of re-accentuation and refocusing of themes,

characters and plot. (40)

Haneke nevertheless retains some aspects of the “telling” medium with his use of voice-over to fill in what cannot be made clear through visualization. For example, in the scene where K. meets his assistants, we see a smile cross K.’s face as they salute him, and it is only through the information provided by the voice-over that we learn: “Remembering his army days, those happy times, K. laughed” (0:09:10). In a scene where he is, in fact, quite angry with the assistants for their lateness in arriving (and quite perplexed, as he cannot seem to recall them being the same assistants he set out on his journey with), his facial expression would otherwise seem quite out of place.

Ultimately, however, to make a film highlighting Kafka’s prose, Haneke transforms

Kafka’s writing style into a system of cinematography. Beyond the characteristics of Kafka’s writing mentioned above, Haneke, like Straub and Huillet, wishes to emphasize the fragmentary nature of his source material. Immediately after the title card, a second card appears on screen, which reads “nach dem Prosafragment von Franz Kafka.” This is perhaps the easiest aspect of the novel to transfer to film (to end a scene abruptly in a novel, stop writing; to end a scene abruptly in a film, stop filming) Peter Bradshaw discusses it in a review of the film published in

The Guardian:

Notably, Haneke deploys the severe ‘blackout’ effect to end scenes, almost

arbitrarily… a sharp, alienating sort of punctuation. This has its ultimate

expression at the very end: Haneke does not attempt to, as it were, sand down the

broken stump of Kafka's unfinished manuscript. He does not try to round it out

and create a sort of ending or fade-out. (Guardian)

In this way, Haneke preserves the incomplete, episodic nature of Kafka’s “fragment” (which only achieved narrative coherence in the first place thanks to editing by Max Brod after Kafka’s

death). And so, since Kafka’s “fragment” had no definite end — indeed, he never finished what came to be the final sentence — neither does Haneke’s film. In both, the voice of the narrator is cut off mid-sentence: “…mühselig sprach sie, man hatte Mühe sie zu verstehen, aber was sie sagte” (Kafka, Das Schloß, 495).

In addition to this fragmentary narrative structure, Haneke takes Kafka’s written language and translates it into a cinematography providing the film’s mise-en-scène with the same “ironic precision” which Nabokov ascribes to Kafka’s “terms from the language of law and science”

(256). The cinematography Haneke creates as the filmic analogue of Kafka’s prose is remarkable, then, in its seeming unremarkability. It is understated, while being precise and careful. There are no great, sweeping landscape shots (especially unusual for a film in a mountain setting), nor are there any of the unusual lighting effects or camera angles Welles found necessary to create a “Kafkaesque” atmosphere. Speck alludes partially to this style in a brief summary of the film: “the camera dollies alongside walking characters, never allowing for an establishing shot, and always on the one side of the snow covered path” (73). Interior scenes, too, are shot mostly with a single camera, which never rises above eye-level and is seldom farther away than a medium shot. This lends the cinematography the air of something akin to a classic one-camera sitcom. Like viewers of The Honeymooners who only ever saw the

Kramdens’ kitchen from one angle, viewers of The Castle are presented with only a limited number of vantage points from which to orient themselves in the village.4 In Brigitte Peucker’s close reading of the film, she expounds further on this point:

…Haneke makes brilliant use of the disadvantages of the televisual medium — its

flatness or lack of deep space and its reliance on the medium shot and medium

close-up. Televisual style is exaggerated and used to greatest effect in a series of

snow-filled outdoor scenes in which K. in medium shot repeatedly walks back

and forth across a row of doors and windows… Moreover, by throwing continuity

to the winds, these sequences disorient the spectator in the same way that K. is

disoriented… Because we never completely see the buildings to which the doors

and windows belong, the flatness of their surface is accentuated, producing the

effect of stage sets… Indoor spaces are likewise spatially ambiguous: the rooms

in which the action takes place have no discernible contours and, in adherence to

Kafka’s text, the relationship of spaces to one another remains unclear… Kafka’s

text is fetishized, fragmented and permanently suspended in the incomplete

sentence.” (153-154)

Using the limited scope of television, as well as some of his formal trademarks, which coincide with the nature of Kafka’s “fragment” to his advantage,5 Haneke resolves the “cameraman’s conundrum” of strong visual language versus the protagonists’ restricted perspectives in Kafka’s writing posited by Brady and Hughes.6

Having adapted Kafka’s writing style to cinematography, Haneke then employs it in the same manner Kafka employs his prose: everything from the prosaic to the bizarre is filmed in the same, even-handed, medium shot style. During a scene, which begins quite innocuously, where

K. visits the ailing Chief Councilor at his home and has a rather unremarkable conversation with him about his predicament, the latter at one point instructs his wife to search through an enormous armoire for a file relating to K.’s appointment. Kafka describes the scene thusly:

Die Frau öffnete gleich den Schrank, K. und der Vorsteher sahen zu. Der Schrank

war mit Papieren vollgestopft. Beim Öffnen rollten zwei große Aktenbündel

heraus, welche rund gebunden waren so wie man Brennholz zu binden pflegt; die

Frau sprang erschrocken zur Seite. “Unten dürfte es sein, unten”, sagte der

Vorsteher, vom Bett aus dirigierend. Folgsam warf die Frau, mit beiden Armen

die Akten zusammenfassend, alles aus dem Schrank, um zu den untern Papieren

zu gelangen. Die Papiere bedeckten schon das halbe Zimmer. (76-77)

Like the scene at the Herrenhof, this bizarre sequence is described mostly in short sentences descriptive only of the action taking place. No mention is made of the supposed bureaucrat’s total lack of an organization system or of his wife’s complete disregard for any semblance of order that may have existed in the armoire or the comedy inherent in the woman flinging these papers all over the room.

In the novel and the film, as she continues to sort through the disorganized mass of papers in this armoire, K.’s assistants join her in the search, eventually turning the armoire on its back and wading through the ankle-deep pile of papers spread out across the floor. Throughout this scene in the film, from the beginning to the point at which the Chief Councilor is wheeled into another room, there is no discernible change in the depiction of the scene. The camera angles remain the same; there is no extra-diegetic music playing to suggest anything out of the ordinary, and even the two conversers do not seem to react to this unusual behavior. Thus,

Haneke, like Kafka, uses the tools of his medium in such a way as to fashion as objective a report as possible even on the strangest goings on.

Despite this success in turning Kafka’s writing style into a cinematographic one, the inherent differences between textual and filmic depictions noted previously by Hutcheon, the transformation is, nevertheless, imperfect. For example, in the scene just quoted from Kafka’s

Schloß, in which the Chief Councilor’s wife is searching through his files, no mention is made of the perspective from which Kafka intends the reader to view the proceedings. When relating this

through writing, it is not necessary

to do so, but when one is

communicating through film,

choosing a perspective is

unavoidable.7 Haneke’s solution in

these situations — in line with Roy

Grundmann’s assertion that Image 4. “Haneke’s literary adaptations… offer viewers opportunities for engaging the subjectivities of their protagonists” (13) — is to provide us with, more or less, K.’s perspective. In the scene in question, a point-of-view shot shows us exactly what K. would see from his vantage point next to the Chief Councilor.

Alternatively, when he depicts

Frieda sending the raucous dancers

at the Herrenhof out to the stall, we

have an over-the-shoulder shot

behind K., as Frieda drives the

crowd to the other end of the room

Image 5. and out the door. Through this tactic of keeping the camera as near to K. as possible, Haneke provides the distance necessary for these depictions of bizarre happenings in the aforementioned sober, precise style. This choice in perspective further reinforces the idea that Haneke has resolved Brady and Hughes’s

“cameraman’s conundrum,” and indeed, has done so with something of a Gordian knot approach.

Rather than see, to refer back to Brady and Hughes, “the strongly visual use of language” and

“the restricted viewpoint of the protagonists” (228) as mutually exclusive, Haneke uses one to reinforce the other. Instead of employing close-ups at Dutch angles of the terror on the faces of the bar patrons as Frieda wields her whip against them or panning shots across the sea of papers in the Chief Councilors home, which would highlight the strangeness of these events, Haneke locks the camera to K.’s perspective, allowing the viewer to remain a witness to — not be a participant in — the baroque happenings in the village.

While it does force Haneke to make choices that Kafka does not have to, the cinematographic translation of Kafka’s writing style also brings with it opportunities to show things which Kafka must tell. Haneke gives K. a few lines noting his stubborn refusal to give up and go home,8 but this determination, as well as K.’s complex feelings about it, are much more effectively demonstrated through the camera work. Brian Price’s chapter of A Companion to

Michael Haneke, “Bureaucracy and Visual Style” begins with eleven tracking shots from Das

Schloß. Price interprets these shots as representative of K.’s determination to forge ahead and make progress with this bureaucratic system, while at the same time demonstrating his indecisiveness on the matter, by following K. trudging steadily forward through the snow, for example, only to abruptly change direction and walk back the other way (306).

Moreover, this cinematography allows Haneke not just to recreate the plot points from

Kafka’s text, but also to effectively address the larger themes present in Kafka’s text, such as power and bureaucracy. In the course of his article, Price quotes Claus Lefort on the nature of bureaucracy: “Bureaucracy confronts us as a phenomenon of which everyone speaks and believes to have experienced in some way, and yet this phenomenon strangely resists conceptualization” (301). The Castle symbolizes this bureaucracy in Kafka’s novel, but Kafka is careful never to give any concrete indication of its existence and indeed seems at times to refute

it altogether: “Vom Schloßberg war nichts zu sehen, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn, auch nicht der schwächste Lichtschein deutete das große Schloß an” (7). Though K. does seem to sight the Castle during an early attempt to reach it, the closer he gets the less sure of its true nature he becomes:

Nun sah er oben das Schloß deutlich umrissen in der klaren Luft und noch

verdeutlicht durch den alle Formen nachbildenden, in dünner Schicht überall

legenden Schnee... oben auf dem Berg ragte alles frei und leicht empor,

wenigstens schien es so von hier aus. Im Ganzen entsprach das Schloß, wie es

sich hier von der Ferne zeigte, K.’s Erwartungen...Aber im Näherkommen

enttäuschte ihn das Schloß, es war doch nur ein recht elendes Städtchen, aus

Dorfhäusern zusammengetragen. (16-17)

Thus, K. cannot even be sure that what he perceives to be the Castle – his goal after having arrived in the village — is the Castle. Working in a textual medium, Kafka has the luxury of leaving the actual existence of the Castle ambiguous.

Where working in a visual medium might force Haneke’s hand on the existence of a

Castle — since he would presumably be expected to represent it in some form, given the title of the film — the limited scope of his cinematography allows just as well for the retention of

Kafka’s ambiguity as it does for the spatial ambiguity Peucker describes. When K. telephones the Castle under the pretense of being one of his own assistants, at first the voice on the other end refuses to believe him, since this would subvert their position as the sole authority capable of

“assigning” him assistants. This leads to a comedic exchange ending with K. asking, “Who am I then?” The man on the other end gives in, and K. asks, “When can my master come to the

Castle?” The answer is a swift and authoritative “never” (0:13:30), reiterating the answer

received by the assistants when they originally telephoned to ask if K. could come to the Castle the next day: “K. heard the ‘No’ of the answer even at his table. But it went on as follows: ‘not tomorrow nor at any other time’” (0:12:07). Since the camera is tied to K.’s perspective, no counter shot of the person on the other end of the line is offered, leaving the viewer just as confused as K.

Beyond tying the viewer’s perspective to K., however, Haneke, like Kafka, limits the viewer’s perspective even more than he limits K.’s. The only hints to the viewer about the layout of the village come in the form of an illustration of it on the door seen when K. first arrives. But

even in this illustration, a partially

torn chart obscures the Castle.

Moreover, when K. is trudging

through the snow trying to get to

the Castle (“if he forced himself in

this state to go on to the Castle

Image 6. entrance… he would have done more than enough”), the camera only tracks him walking right-to-left across the screen.9 We only know he is searching for the Castle because of the voice-over: “The road didn’t lead to the

Castle, it only made towards it, then turned aside as if deliberately, and though it didn’t lead away from the Castle, it got no nearer to it either.” Haneke’s cinematographic choices highlight his source material’s commentary on the ephemeral nature of power and the lack of access to that power which labyrinthine bureaucracies ensure.

Haneke’s adaptation of Das Schloß evinces his understanding of the Kafkaesque as rooted primarily in Kafka’s prose style. His translations of Kafka’s written, “telling” descriptions

into visual, “showing” film are guided by a fidelity to the source material, which manifests itself most obviously in the almost exclusive use of Kafka’s own writing for the dialogue and voice- over in the film, but also in a cinematography that carries the exact, fastidious nature of that writing over into the realm of images. This method of adaptation allows the presentation of the bizarre events that make up the plot of Das Schloß to retain the detached sobriety present in

Kafka’s novel, thus resolving the “conundrum” of reconciling Kafka’s strong visual language with limited perspective on film. Haneke’s success in maintaining this unity renders the

Kafkaesque — as Brady and Hughes define it — on screen, and so Haneke’s representation of

Kafka’s writing style allows other elements of Kafka’s works, such as an “atmospheric”

Kafkaesque and the over-arching themes present in the novel to develop in the film as well.

1 What Brady and Hughes call, in the brief mention the film merits in their article, “a direct stylistic equivalent for Kafka’s prose” (237). 2 Cf. Fassbinder’s 15½-hour, epic television serial, Berlin Alexanderplatz, an adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s 400-plus page novel of the same name, or conversely, the myriad blog posts written by fans of the latest bestseller when they discover that the makers of its blockbuster adaptation “left out the best part!” 3 Linda Hutcheon cites David Lodge in support of this point: “Novels contain much information that can be rapidly translated into action or gesture on stage or screen or dispensed with altogether” (40). 4 The analogy to early sitcoms may be even more appropriate, as Speck places the setting of the film in “what appears to be a snow covered, stormy German village in the early 1950s” (73). 5 E.g., the abrupt, fragmented cuts familiar from The Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments (Peucker 154) or Code Unknown (Bradshaw). 6 See page 5. 7 The translation metaphor is very apt here, as the situation can be likened to an English speaker opting not to specify the gender of the neighbor she visited last evening, whereas a German speaker must always indicate whether she visited her Nachbar or her Nachbarin. 8 In the conversation with the Chief Councilor: “I’ll enumerate some of the things that keep me here: the sacrifices I’ve made to leave home; the long and difficult journey; my complete lack of funds; the impossibility of finding suitable work at home now and my fiancée who lives here.” 9 The primary “direction of travel” in the film is right-to-left, counter to, for example, Lawrence of Arabia’s classic left-to-right “journey,” indicating that K. is, in fact, making the opposite of progress.

“Wir sind keine Künstler! Wir sind Filmemacher!” Westlich von der Freiheitsstatue with Straub/Huillet

That Der Verschollene was chosen by the husband and wife directing team of Jean-Marie

Straub and Danièle Huillet (often referred to by the aggregate moniker “Straub/Huillet”) to be the subject of one of their films is of little surprise. The two made a career out of intellectually rigorous adaptations of the works of others, and as committed Marxists — perhaps most clearly evident in their films’ dedications to such polarizing left-wing entities as RAF member Holger

Meins and “the Viet Cong” — socially progressive themes critical of capitalism often appear in their work. Thus, Kafka’s novel where the protagonist spends much of his time shifting between social statuses — and generally trending downward — would seem to be just what the duo were looking for. Even the title of their adaptation reflects their leftist sensibilities. They rejected not only the title under which the book was originally published, Amerika, as a commercial choice by Max Brod (for whom they have few kind words to spare, and whom they regarded as having defaced much of the purity of Kafka’s prose (Byg, “For Danièle”)), but also Kafka’s own title for the work, Der Verschollene, (which, according to Straub, “passt unserem Film nicht,” though he does not elaborate on this (Blank)), finally settling on the provocative Klassenverhältnisse.

As their title suggests, the film is less an adaptation of Kafka’s novel than an illustration of the socio-political lessons that Straub/Huillet see in the book — even the style of the film is reminiscent of a Brechtian morality play. In his essay accompanying the Filmmuseum DVD transfer of the film, “Informationsverlust und Informationsgewinn,” Klaus Kanzog posits the film as a sort of companion to Kafka’s text:

Gemessen an den Konventionen der sogenannten “Literaturverfilmungen”

interessiert am Film Klassenverhältnisse nicht das, was er aus Kafkas Roman

gemacht hat (und was alles unberücksichtigt blieb), sondern in welchem Maße er

komplementär zum Roman gesehen werden muß. Dabei ist Der Verschollene

nicht “das Buch zum Film,” vielmehr ist der Film auf besondere Weise geeignet,

den Leser auf die Lektüre des Romans vorzubereiten. (Kanzog) 1

The idea that the film is “preparing” the reader for the novel is in line with Brady and Hughes’s assertion that the film — like all successful adaptations — “[frees] in the rendition that which is imprisoned in the original” (237). That is to say, translators (and, by extension, adaptors) are capable of excavating additional meaning from their source material. In the case of

Klassenverhältnisse, Straub/Huillet reveal the Marxist critique of industrial capitalism latent in

Kafka’s text.

To uncover this additional meaning, Straub and Huillet feel they must strip their source material to its most fundamental elements (cf. Brady & Hughes, 234), anything beyond this and the text is at risk of slipping away “like shit on a sheet of plastic” (Farocki, 246). Straubs describes the process by which this skeleton is ascertained in a conversation with Wolfgang

Schütte: “Man muß zuerst wissen, was einen interessiert oder nicht. Das wissen die meisten

Leute in unserer Welt schon gar nicht mehr. Und man muß wissen, was mit den eigenen

Erfahrungen zu tun hat, d.h. was einen trifft oder nicht. Denn man ‘verfilmt’ ja nicht ein Buch, sondern man setzt sich mit einem Buch auseinander” (Schütte, Gespräch, 46).

What interested Straub/Huillet is the element of social critique in Kafka’s writing. In an interview with Manfred Blank about the film entitled Wie will ich lustig lachen, Straub, while cautioning that “der Kafka kein Marxist war” (15:31) — uses the fact that Kafka’s fiancé Milena was a communist (to the point that she was interred in a concentration camp as a communist rather than as a Jew), as well as the leading question: “Wo hat denn der Kafka seine

Lebenserfahrung gesammelt? In einer Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt — was lernt man

da?” (14:25) to justify the Straub/Huillet Marxist reading of the novel. Straub goes on to say that

Kafka is “der einzige — bis jetzt der einzige Dichter… der industriellen Zivilisation” (15:39); moreover, Straub cites a supposed quote from Kafka that capitalism is “der System der

Abhängigkeiten” (14:55)2 to demonstrate that Kafka had at least a latent understanding of the

“true nature” of capitalism.

All of this evidence allows one to fashion a strong argument that Straub/Huillet’s interpretation of Kafka is relatively straightforward, i.e., they are presenting the viewer with a political (specifically, a Marxist) reading of the novel. This assertion runs into difficulty, however, when one discovers that Straub/Huillet themselves do not believe it. They insist — often in the same interviews where they expound on their theory of adaptation — that they are not interpreting or adapting Kafka in any way. Straub utters the slogan of sorts for this point of view when pressed on a point at a press conference during the film’s debut at the 1984 Berlinale:

“Wir sind keine Künstler! Wir sind Filmemacher!” (Pressekonferenz). He explains in the Wie will ich lustig lachen interview that “Film… ist nicht ein Instrument zum illustrieren, zum

Beschreiben… Die Beschreibungen der Schriftsteller, die lässt man am liebsten den

Schriftstellern” (Blank). Straub takes Orson Welles’s The Trial as a counterexample of the “non- interpretive” style he and Huillet subscribe to: “[Welles] hat versucht zu zeigen was der Kafka beschrieben hatte… Wir wollten das Gegenteil machen. Wir wollten überhaupt nicht zeigen was der Kafka beschreibt” (Blank). Straub recognizes that Welles’s film, as Welles himself stated, is not a “faithful” adaptation of Kafka; he sees Welles as taking too much creative license with

Kafka’s text. Also at the Berlinale, Straub emphasized the lack of a desire to make a “traditional”

Kafka film in the style of Welles:

Und es geht um einen Text, drittens und letztens. Nicht um einen Klotz. Und

dieser Text von Kafka ist zum ersten Mal auf einer Leinwand, das ist alles…. Bis

jetzt gibt es keine Filme, die einen Text von Kafka auf die Leinwand bringen. Das

ist alles. Und es ging mir nicht darum, die Atmosphäre von Prag aufzufangen,

sonst hätte ich den Film in Prag gedreht. Das war einfach nicht die Absicht vom

Film. (Pressekonferenz)

Here, Straub betrays the duo’s intent with regard to the structure of Klassenverhältnisse: not to adapt Kafka’s text to the screen, but to render, as closely as possible, Kafka’s text — and only

Kafka’s text — on the screen: “Es ging uns überhaupt nicht darum, einen Text zu interpretieren.

Keineswegs. Wir wollen keine Spur von Interpretation, wir wollen einen Text ganz ... Wir sind keine Künstler! Wir sind Filmemacher! Es geht uns darum, einen Text vorzutragen. Schluß!”

(Pressekonferenz). According to Straub and Huillet both, there is no interpretation in the film; they present themselves as having had a totally passive role in the adaptation process: “Den

Leuten, die ihn nicht gelesen haben oder die ihn schlecht gelesen haben oder sogar die ihn gut gelesen haben ... über bestimmte Körper, Körperdarsteller zu bringen. Das ist alles.”

(Pressekonferenz). Unsatisfied, a reporter asks if even the title, Klassenverhältnisse, is not already an interpretation. Straub strongly rejects this proposition, saying,

Ja, also dieser Titel ist doch kein großes Geheimnis. … In diesem Film geht es

nur darum… einfach Verhaltensweisen zu zeigen, wie einfach immer die

Verhaltensweisen sind, die verbunden sind mit der Klassenangehörigkeit. Jeder ist

in seiner Klassen- und Funktionsangehörigkeit gefangen. Die drängt und reagiert

nur in diese Richtung auf den Jungen, und der Junge selbst kommt auch nicht aus

der Luft. Ich meine, es gibt Klassen und man glaubt dran oder man glaubt nicht

dran. Ich stelle immer mehr fest im Alltag in unseren Ländern, daß es Klassen

gibt. Und es gibt sogar Kasten. Und dann gibt es Klassenverhältnisse.

(Pressekonferenz)

When posed a similar question in the Lachen interview, Danièle Huillet responds “Der [Titel] ist doch keine Interpretation… nur ein Zeichen, dass man die Ohren und die Augen zuspitzen sollte.

Das ist alles.” (Blank).

The question then becomes how to reconcile the auteurs’ stated intent in making the film and their interpretations of the finished product with the case made by Brady and Hughes that

Straub/Huillet are, in fact, projecting their own ideas onto Kafka. To answer this, we must recall

Hutcheon’s definition of an adaptation. According to this, an adaptation is: “an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable work or works; a creative and interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging and an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work” (8).

Given their thoughts noted above, the crucial point lies in the second element: Straub/Huillet contend that their work is neither creative nor interpretive; they see themselves simply as translators, “die einen Text von Kafka auf die Leinwand bringen” (Pressekonferenz). But, as

Hutcheon posits and Haneke’s Das Schloß shows as a case in point, despite any director’s best efforts, it is impossible, to transfer a textual work to a visual medium (to go from “telling to showing,” as Hutcheon has it) without significant interpretation on the part of the filmmakers.

Thus, Straub’s assertion that filmmakers and artists can be mutually exclusive is inherently non sequitur. If Straub/Huillet do, in fact, adapt and interpret, as all adaptors must do, what then do they emphasize in their adaptation? The same question that was asked of Welles and Haneke must be asked for Straub/Huillet: what do they understand the Kafkaesque to mean? Many scholars see Klassenverhältnisse as a politicization of Der Verschollene, and this is a well-

supported analysis of the film. But more so than a simple, political presentation of Kafka,

Straub/Huillet, like Haneke, posit the fundamental aesthetics of Kafka’s prose as the underlying source of the trenchant commentary on power relationships and hierarchies which emerge in the text.

Haneke uses Kafka’s prose to create a “Kafkaesque” cinematography, which translates

Kafka’s writing style to a visual medium, and is less (though not totally un-) concerned with the subtexts and themes present in the text. But, based on their comments detailed above,

Straub/Huillet see the relationship between their political interpretation and Kafka’s aesthetic presentation as so self-evident and inherent that it should be readily apparent to anyone who engages with the text. As such, they do not consider what they are doing to be “adaptation,” but rather, to return to Huillet’s statement in Lachen, an exhortation to the audience to “keep their eyes and ears open.”

Thus in Klassenverhältnisse, the aesthetics of the film play an important role in transmitting the political message. In light of the title’s “reference,” even the fact that the film was shot in black and white becomes significant: the dualism of the two colors highlights the primary dividing line of the characters in the film, i.e., those who have power and those who do not. Kafka depicts Karl’s journey through Amerika as his acceptance into and rejection from a succession of “fiefdoms,” each presided over by a powerful figure: Karl’s uncle; the headwaiter at the hotel; Brunelda and so on. It is these class — or perhaps better, power — relationships that form the focus of Straub/Huillet’s film. There are plenty of underlings in the places Karl finds himself throughout the film, but as the newest arrival by far, he is always the least powerful. He is always at the mercy of those who have been in the place longer and, therefore, know the rules

(which change unpredictably from place to place) better than he does. Some of those above him

take pity on him or even like him, but he, nevertheless, always manages to incur the wrath of the person in the position of absolute power and must, the opinions of everyone else notwithstanding, leave that particular authority figure’s realm.

The film’s aesthetics delineate the statuses of the characters in other ways as well. One of the most noticeably jarring aspects of the film is its halting, fragmented dialogue. Karl’s conversation with the Stoker at the very beginning of the film, for example, is punctuated by awkward, unnatural dialogue. But these speech patterns only apply to characters who lack authority. Karl’s uncle and the headwaiter at the hotel, being in positions of absolute authority in their respective domains, do not speak with pauses, and, in fact, deliver their line in the most fluid and “natural” fashion of any of the characters in the film. As Brady and Hughes note when they discuss the film’s transference to film of the “celebrated polysemy” in Kafka’s texts: “Those who speak without pausing… are simply those whose position of absolute power extends to, or rests on, language” (236). The ability to speak without jarring pauses, i.e., the privilege of being in total control of one’s communicative faculties and the privilege of having one’s thoughts fully and completely understood, is the exclusive province of the heads of the different societal classes

Karl encounters in Klassenverhältnisse.

Though this technique of Straub/Huillet’s is often described as “emotionless,” due to its flat delivery and broken rhythms, it is, at times, capable of rendering emotional effect. In this way, it harkens back to Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, through its refusal to allow the audience to forget they are watching a dramatization so that they relate their emotional experiences of the play to the “real world.” Scenes such as Karl’s anger at Green for not delivering the letter from his uncle promptly, or his standoff with the headwaiter and the head porter at the hotel elicit a sense of injustice from the audience, and again in Brechtian fashion, exhort them to ponder the

link between the world of the film and their own world. This effect reaches its pinnacle, however, during the scene where Therese tells Karl the story of her mother’s tragic and bizarre death while in a hunger induced daze on a construction site. Though spoken with the

“emotionless” delivery of one of

the disenfranchised, the story is

still meant to evoke a reaction from

the audience. As Straub says at the

Berlin Film Festival press

conference, “Wenn einer nicht

Image 7. bewegt wird von der Erzählung von der Mutter… dann sind wir machtlos. Also, wir sind keine Vergewaltiger” (Presskonferenz).

Andi Engel, Straub/Huillet’s distributor and the man who played the part of the head porter also uses this scene to reject the claim that “mit Gefühlen haben Sie nichts am Hut”: “wenn Sie mir dann sagen, das ist nicht emotional, dann verstehe ich Sie wirklich nicht. Dann fehlt Ihnen etwas, nicht dem Film” (Pressekonferenz).

Another major aesthetic instance to address is the setting of the film. Kafka sets the events of Der Verschollene in a world roughly contemporary to his own, famously basing his

“Amerika” on the journey across North America described in Arthur Holitscher’s 1912 travelogue, Amerika heute und morgen. Hellmuth Karasek describes Kafka’s conception of

“Amerika” in his 1984 review of Klassenverhältnisse: “Das Amerika des Romans ist alles andere als Amerika... Kafkas Amerika war der Traum eines Autors, der nie in Amerika war, der nie

Amerika beschreiben wollte, sondern nur die größtmögliche Fremde” (Karasek). He then contrasts Kafka’s conception of the country with Straub/Huillet’s depiction of it in their film:

Das Amerika des Films ist, mal von der Freiheitsstatue am Anfang abgesehen,

durchweg Hamburg. Die Elbbrücken, eine Klinkersiedlung in Eimsbüttel, der

Hafen. Noch die Bilder an den Wänden, noch die Nummern an den Hotelzimmern

(aufgeklebte Metallfolie), noch die Kneipen sind so deutsch — deutscher geht's

nicht… Straubs3 Film beschreibt ein befremdliches Deutschland, dessen Uhren

irgendwann, kurz nach der Währungsreform wahrscheinlich, stehengeblieben

sind. Es ist ein Traumland, eine Alptraumwelt, der Wirklichkeit ebenso nahe und

entrückt wie Kafkas Roman (Karasek).

In both the text and the film, the physical locations Karl finds himself in seem to be divorced from any coherent space and time. Though the film was made in 1984 — 60 years after Kafka’s death — based on the style of dress and means of transportation, as well as the technology

available, the film looks to be set,

as Karasek notes, in Germany

during the 1950s. In point of fact,

except for the opening scene filmed

on the Staten Island Ferry and the

final scene on an Amtrak train from

St. Louis to Jefferson City, MO

(Huillet, 6), the entirety of the film

was shot in Hamburg where the Image 8. two directors were artists in residence (Brady & Hughes 235). The cognitive dissonance this engenders already recreates the lack of coherent space Kafka establishes in his prose; moreover, abrupt cuts and the lack of any

perspectives longer than a medium shot, gives each scene a contained, isolated feel. Much like the village in Kafka’s novel or in Haneke’s film, which also employs limited perspective and abrupt cuts, it is impossible to create a map of Amerika from either the novel or the film, or to trace Karl’s journey across the country with anything more than a few plotted points.

This confusing geography differentiates Klassenverhältnisse and Das Schloß from the

Trial, which was very intentionally shot in Eastern Europe,4 with the intent of “…capturing that flavor of a modern European city, yet with its roots in the Austro-Hungarian empire” (Wheldon).

Additionally, in keeping with Naremore’s paraphrase of Sarris on Murnau: “A film devoted to no place in particular cannot hope to represent everyplace in general” (Naremore, 203), Welles says,

“It seems to me that the story we’re dealing with is said to take place ‘anywhere.’ But of course, there is no ‘anywhere.’ When people say that this story can happen anywhere, you must know what part of the globe it really began in” (Wheldon).

Beyond the aesthetic level, the lack of spatial coherence in Der Verschollene is established through Kafka’s use of locations such as Clayton, “Oklahama” [sic.] and Butterford to dissociate the setting of the novel from the “real” United States. Even when Kafka does employ an actual, recognizable setting, New York City, details such as the attribution of a sword to the Statue of Liberty instead of a torch indicate that there is no connection to the actual metropolis. In addition to the ambiguous temporality of their setting, Straub/Huillet retain the textual clues from the novel such as city names. Although they do follow Kafka in his attempt to fragment the space of the text, they take this a step further in that they leave out or excise any scenes involving large, unconfined spaces. No mention is made, for example of Karl’s uncle’s enormous warehouse, an enormous complex that, as described by Kafka, would dwarf even

Joseph K.’s bank in Welles’s Trial:

Es war daher ein Geschäft, welches in einem Käufe, Lagerungen, Transporte und

Verkäufe riesenhafte Umfangs umfaßte und ganz genaue unaufhörliche

telephonische und telegraphische Verbindungen mit den Klienten unterhalten

mußte. Der Saal der Telegraphen war nicht kleiner, sondern größer als das

Telegraphenamt der Vaterstadt… Im Saal der Telefone giengen [sic] wohin man

schaute die Türen der Telephonzellen auf und zu und das Läuten war

sinnverwirrend. (Verschollene 66)

Nor does Karl or the viewer see

“alle zwanzig Schritte einem reich

livrierten Diener mit einem

Armleuchter stehen” (Verschollene,

71) in Pollunder’s apparently vast

country house. And, while Karl is

able to see a distant election

campaign’s parade through

Brunelda’s opera glasses, the Image 9. viewer must be satisfied to watch

Karl as he watches it.

Rather than depicting an atmospheric “Kafkaesque” like Welles, or a textual

“Kafkaesque” as Haneke does, Straub/Huillet show an aesthetic “Kafkaesque” from which a political reading of Kafka is derived. The aesthetics and, hence, the politics which Straub/Huillet focus on center primarily around class and power relationships among the characters, especially

Karl’s continued distancing of himself (willful or not) from the ostensible center of power in

“Amerika” — his uncle and his capitalist colleagues — to a position proximate to the powerful as a liftboy in the hotel, to the low man on the totem pole in the lower-class cohort of Brunelda,

Robinson and Delamarche, to his final relegation to the position of “Negro” as he heads off to the “nature theater” in Oklahoma. This complete lack of power, paradoxically, affords Karl a freedom which none of the other characters in the novel can claim. Unburdened by any meaningful connection or responsibility, Karl enters and departs several microcosmic

“societies,” while every other figure is bound to one of these. These societies are only loosely related to one another and, beyond that, only loosely set in any specific place or time.

Ultimately, and as a final contradiction of their stated “zero interpretation policy”

Straub/Huillet posit this as a net positive for Karl. The fact that the novel remained unfinished allows Straub to interpret a note of hope into the ending of the film, as he himself puts it: “Die

Größe von Kafka ist es, das nicht zu entscheiden und daß er gar nicht daran gedacht hat.

Vielleicht fährt Karl am Ende wohin, wo eine Utopie existiert, was wir erst in dreihundert oder dreitausend Jahren erreicht haben werden; aber es kann auch sein, daß er anderswo hinfährt — ins Nichts, wegweg mit ihm” (Schütte 42). When Karl is riding on the train to Clayton, watching the scenery of the Missouri river rush by, he is, despite all his prior subjugations and humiliations, a free man. He rebels against the society he finds himself in and survives (unlike

Welles’s Josef K.); As Schütte says: “Er übersteht ja auch alles, er ist ja nicht totzukriegen” (57).

1 For many years, Straub was the more vocal, public member of the duo, and so it was assumed that he was also the primary intelligence behind the films themselves; the epithet now in currency, Straub/Huillet reflects the acknowledgement of their equal contribution to their works. 2 This quote, like the ones about photography in the introduction, is attributed to Kafka by Gunther Jauch, though at the time Straub/Huillet made the film, he was still regarded as a reliable source. 3 See endnote 1. 4 Though the film was shot in Yugoslavia, in his interview with Welles, Wheldon asks if he would have preferred to shoot The Trial in Czechoslovakia (Kafka’s works were banned in his native country at the time), to which Welles responds: “I never stopped thinking that we were in Czechoslovakia. As in all of Kafka, it’s supposed to be Czechoslovakia. The last shot was in Zagreb, which has old streets that look very much like Prague.”

“Die Zeit des gewöhnlichen, glücklich ablaufenden Lebens reicht… bei weitem nicht hin”: Final Thoughts on Kafka and Film

The three films explored here represent three divergent methods of adapting Kafka to film, but they are not equally divergent. The constellation that emerges reveals

Klassenverhältnisse and Das Schloß to be more closely “related” to each other than to The Trial.

This is perhaps unsurprising, given the background of the filmmakers: Haneke, an Austrian who often works in France might naturally be more stylistically aligned with Straub and Huillet,

French émigrés who worked in Germany, than the American Welles, simply by virtue of their

European pedigree. But this dichotomy is supported by much more than a superficial, geographic or cultural divide between Europeans and Americans.

Brady and Hughes mention Haneke’s “debt to the materialist aesthetic of Straub/ Huillet”

(237). A debt which, on the structural level, can be recognized in their films’ mutual use of limited camera angles (i.e., nothing longer than a medium shot) to limit the viewer’s perspective, for example. Additionally, both Klassenverhältnisse and Das Schloß are concerned, thematically, with universally recurring issues in industrial society. Haneke’s film addresses the ephemerality of bureaucracy and Straub/Huillet’s engages the socio-politico-economic class system inherent in capitalist society. Additionally, Haneke and Straub/Huillet locate their films in nebulous, vaguely

1950s-era settings.1

Given these characteristics, the two films contrast rather strongly with Welles’s The

Trial. Welles’s mise-en-scène frequently features cyclopean, oversized sets, and he has no reservation about displaying their enormity, using not only wide or long shots, but also camera angles that serve to magnify their cavernous scope. Furthermore, Welles very consciously sets his film in a specific time and place. Knowing as he does, that “of course, there is no

‘anywhere’” (Wheldon), he chooses not to leave the setting as chronologically or geographically

nebulous, but rather in contemporary Eastern Europe (i.e., behind the Iron Curtain). An

American filmmaker shooting in Eastern Europe in 1962 (even in newly non-aligned

Yugoslavia) is almost definitionally a political statement, especially when the source material for the film is banned in neighboring countries (including the author’s own home). But the politicalism of The Trial is substantially different from that of its European counterparts. Where

Haneke and Straub/Huillet deal in general political principles, Welles’s film is a re- historicization, which transfers Joseph K. from the 1920s to the 1960s, and thus is a comment on the concrete political situation at the time the film is set (and was made). Specifically, the film comments on the nature of authority and power — the “modern horror” Welles alludes to in his interview with Megahey — on both sides of The Cold War: both the gulags and show trials in the Soviet bloc, as well as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on

Investigations and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the United States.

Even beyond the structure and themes of their respective films, Welles, Straub/Huillet and Haneke exhibit the same alignment when it comes to their fundamental relationships with their source material. Straub and Huillet were adamant: “Wir wollen keine Spur von

Interpretation; wir wollen einen Text ganz” (Pressekonferenz). Their goal was to transfer

Kafka’s text directly onto the screen. Any political themes that appear in the film are, to their minds, clear and apparent on the surface of the text. Haneke, similarly, was concerned with

Kafka’s prose when making his film, as he attempted to create a “Kafkaesque” cinematography that would render Kafka’s distant, precise writing style in the form of moving pictures. Thus, it can be said that Haneke and Straub/Huillet are concerned, in some way, with fidelity to Kafka and the novels they are adapting. Indeed, as has been noted, Das Schloß makes almost exclusive use of Kafka’s own text for the words spoken in the film. Again, this sense of fidelity or

proximity to the text is not shared by Welles. Like Straub and Huillet, he declares his distaste for interpretation but with a completely different intention:

I like to make films in which I can express myself as auteur rather than as

interpreter. I do not share Kafka’s point of view in The Trial. I believe that he is a

good writer, but Kafka is not the extraordinary genius that people see him as

today. That is why I was not concerned about excessive fidelity and could make a

film by Welles. (Quixoteland, 39)

He is much more concerned with putting his own stamp on the film than ensuring it remain faithful to a source text. He calls Kafka his “collaborator,” and in point of fact, is not even all that taken with Kafka as an author.

In positioning Klassenverhältnisse and Das Schloß as more similar to each other in their depictions of Kafka than The Trial, several of the main aspects of each adaptation have been reiterated and summarized; additionally, many other possible areas of exploration have been touched upon, which, while within the scope of this thesis, cannot be further investigated here due to space constraints. Each of these films has been the subject of worthy scholarship, and the interconnections among them are multiple and varied, providing many additional avenues of research. The films’ respective commentaries on the 1950s, for example, would be an interesting area of analysis. Welles’s allusions to Sen. McCarthy and the HUAC in addition to the

“Wirtschaftswunder” trappings of Straub/Huillet and Haneke’s settings all relate these films to a decade in which neither they nor their source material were produced. Another point to consider: is it possible, following Welles’s line of reasoning that an authentic Kafka text is unnecessary to make a successful Kafka film — not just a Kafkaesque one — one not based on Kafka’s own writings?

Even without exhausting every avenue of comparison among them,2 it has been demonstrated that these three films each apply different methods to the task of adapting Kafka to film and thus, not only with three very different films, but also with three very different attitudes toward their respective source materials. Orson Welles emphasizes the atmospheric elements in

Kafka, forgoing reverence for Kafka’s text, and instead presents “a sequence of spectacular

Kafkaesque visions” (Brady & Hughes, 238). He challenges the primacy of the source material to the adaptation, and the necessity of fidelity to a “successful” adaptation, arguing instead that liberal creative license allows for the continued relevance of the text to contemporary audiences.

Indeed, he is far ahead of his time in this, given Leitch’s complaints in 2003 about the backward state of adaptation theory and Hutcheon’s groundbreaking theoretical framework for adaptation studies in 2006.

Michael Haneke approaches his source material, Das Schloß, much more reverently, seeing the prose itself as the key to the “Kafkaesque.” For Haneke, recreating the Kafkaesque on film entails recreating Kafka’s writing style in the form of cinematography: the way Kafka describes his images in words is the way they should be presented visually as well: objective and detached, even in the most baroque, bizarre circumstances, as well as the open-ended nature of the unfinished “Prosafragment.” Haneke is also less concerned than Welles with placing Kafka in a specific historical context. His film challenges and even embraces the “anywhere is nowhere” statements of Welles.

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, like Haneke, and indeed even more so, approach their source material reverently and espouse a severe, almost ascetic philosophy of adaptation wherein there should be no interpretation on the part of the adaptors whatsoever. This philosophy is undercut, somewhat, by the duo’s collective unwillingness to admit that the political themes,

which they see as self-evident within the text may, in fact, be an act of interpretation on their part already. Again, like Haneke, they retain the open-ended nature of their unfinished source novel, interpreting Karl Roßmann’s journey at the end of the film to be an optimistic one, perhaps leading to new opportunities for him. Falling somewhere between Haneke and Welles,

Straub/Huillet realize that for the political elements of the text to be meaningful, their film must be rooted in a specific location. Thus, they create an “Amerika” out of the “Old World,” which can ground the critiques of industrial society, but also exist as a dimensionless, anonymous space.

These three adaptive processes demonstrate the multiple levels on which adaptations function and the impossibility of containing every facet of a source text within an adaptation, especially when moving from “telling” media to “showing.” Kafka’s works here can stand in for any text adapted to the screen. From general to specific settings and from “faithful” to liberal interpretations, examining the ways in which filmmakers adapt Kafka to the screen can help to clarify the “rules” of adaptation across all fields as well as define more precisely what we mean when we use the term.

1 For Das Schloß, see Speck (73), for Klassenverhältnisse, Karasek. 2 A task for which, as the grandfather of the narrator of “Das nächste Dorf” is wont to say, “die Zeit des gewöhnlichen, glücklich ablaufenden Lebens… bei weitem nicht hin[reicht]” (280).

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