Introduction to the Story of Trial

Introduction to the Story of Trial | Appreciation | Reflection

1963 black and white movie 120 minutes

Produced by Alexander Salkin Film Company/Mercury Film Company.

Director: orson welles (based on Franz Kafka's novel) Photography: Edmund Richard Main actors: anthony perkins (as Joseph K), orson welles (as a barrister), jeanne moreau (as Bustner), Romy Schneider (as Lenny), Elsa Martineli (as Hilda) and Achim Tamilov (as Grubach).

abstract

Joseph K, a company employee, had a strange dream before getting up. He dreamed of a story reflected in the pinhole slide projector: a tramp went to the towering gate of the law castle and begged the guard at the door to let him in, but the guard refused. Although the poor man repeatedly argued that, as far as he knew, the door of the law was open to everyone, he was still rejected. The poor man waited outside the door year after year until his death came, but he still couldn't get into the legal door "specially opened for you". The sound of slamming the door finally woke Joseph up and found that it was police officer A who arrested him.

Police officer A declared K guilty, and the legal proceedings to try him have officially begun, but he did not say what crime K committed. The police officer hinted that K had a secret relationship with Miss Bustner in the next room, saying that he liked to dress in the corridor after taking a shower and hid an "egg-shaped thing" under the carpet. K tried to argue that he didn't have any "subversive books and * * *", and called his phonograph *** ogranh in a panic. The assistant of the police officer tried to persuade K to pay bribes and took his shirt. The police officer ordered him to be interrogated at any time, but allowed him to continue his work.

A new "nightmare" began. K couldn't resist the temptation of Miss Bustner and kissed her, but when she heard that he was arrested, she roared K out of the room for fear of implicating her politically.

K complained to the landlady that although he didn't know what crime he had committed, he felt a strong sense of guilt.

K went to work in the company, and his niece Elmy came to see him. The assistant manager of the company looked at him suspiciously. Although K argued that Elmy was "only 16 years old", the assistant manager warned him, "You have a bright future. Don't screw things up yourself. "

K wanted to celebrate Miss Bustner's birthday and bought a birthday cake specially. On his way home, he met Miss Pitel with a prosthetic leg. She trudged along with Miss Bustner's heavy suitcase. K learned from her that Miss Bustner had been evicted by the landlord. K admitted to Miss Pitel that he kissed her and was responsible for her dismissal. Miss Pitel dismissed him and dragged the box away from him step by step.

K was taken away by a police officer when he was watching a play in the theater, and he was asked to go to the interrogation Committee for interrogation. He found the court according to the address given by the police officer. The executive judge asked him if he was a painter, and K took the opportunity to give a speech to the audience in the hall. "The question just asked by the executive judge has clearly explained the nature of this so-called' trial' imposed on me ... What happened to me is insignificant, but I think it represents what happened to many people." K declared him innocent. "Behind my arrest, there is a huge organization whose members include state officials, officials, police and others-and maybe even executioners." K's speech won warm cheers and applause. Suddenly, he found that the audience were all "officials of a certain level", and they just applauded to induce him to say something wrong. K left the court angrily.

K returned to the company and found someone whipping in the basement. He was surprised to see that two policemen who took his shirt were being punished. The prisoner told him that it was because he complained to the authorities and accused them of taking bribes. K tried to stop the execution, saying that he thought that "it is not them who should be punished, but those who are above them, those who have power and influence and the whole institution." The executioner in leather not only ignored it, but smoked more fiercely. K fled the basement in pain, sobbing for his "sin".

K's uncle Max learned of K's arrest from Elmy. He came to K and offered to help him find a lawyer to defend him. They came to the lawyer's office. In a room full of papers, Lenny, the assistant and mistress of the barrister, seduced K. Lenny told K that the barrister and the judge were in collusion, and said that "your mistake is mainly that you are too stubborn and like to make trouble", so you should be "as smooth and docile as possible" in the future.

K went to the court to be tried again. Hilda, the wife of the court janitor, told him that the trial would not begin until tomorrow. Hilda told K that she could use the evil thoughts of the executive judge to help K, and showed K obscene illustrations in legal books: "These books are really dirty." Hilda began to seduce K, but then the executive judge sent Burt, a law student ("future judge"), to take Hilda away by force. K chased it out and found that the court office turned out to be a place. Hilda's husband came up to ask K to help Hilda avoid being insulted, and the rows of "defendants" sitting there waiting for trial also looked at him with pleading eyes, because they had all heard his remarks attacking the law. K is desperate. He said to the doorman, "the purpose of my coming here is to see for myself whether the interior of this prestigious legal institution is as disgusting as I thought." Now I'm tired of watching it. I just want to get out of here. "

K is determined to fight alone. He went to the lawyer again and fired him. The barrister told him that "it is safer to wear shackles than to be free". He looked puzzled at another "defendant"-Brock, who willingly endured the personal insult of the barrister and still crawled at the barrister's feet to beg for help. When he accused the lawyer, Brock came up and hit him. The barrister proudly told K that one of Lenny's eccentricities was to chase every man accused of being guilty and then tell him her love story with each of them to make him happy. K feels sick and wants to make a dash for the door. Lenny stopped him and suggested that he go to Titorelli, an official painter who painted portraits of judges and had a great influence on them.

In Titorelli's studio, K was told that he had only two choices, either parole or postponing the trial. If it is parole, it will only temporarily unload this burden from his shoulders, and the shadow of the accusation will always hang over his head. As soon as the person who was sentenced to parole came home from the court, he would find the police there waiting to arrest him, so everything started all over again. Every parole means being arrested again. As for postponing the trial, the court cannot delay it forever. They will take various measures for interrogation and monitoring, so they will conduct further interrogation and collect evidence ... The painter said, "I have never heard of any defendant being acquitted in my life."

K went to the priest for help, and the priest told him that his crime had probably been proved. The lawyer suddenly appeared and showed him pinhole slides. K said he had read the story, but he didn't want to be a martyr.

The nightmare finally ended: two plainclothes policemen caught him, pushed him into a stone pit and waved him around with a sharp knife. K struggled desperately. The police finally took out a pile of explosives, lit the fuse, and then jumped out of the stone pit to escape. K threw the explosive out, and people heard six explosions in a row, and a thick black smoke filled the screen. Become a pinhole slide: the door of the law castle is slowly closing.

Distinguish and appreciate

1958, orson welles decided to leave the United States forever and exiled himself to Europe. Since then, Wells' works have tilted the understanding of evil and good through his own experience. From Citizen Kane to Miss Shanghai, he has some equal views on ugliness and goodness in life. He believes that there are wicked people in life, but they are not vicious in nature, and we can still find the goodness and beauty in human nature from them. Whether it's Kane, George Minaver (The Abeinsons), Elsa or Arthur bannister (Miss Shanghai), there is still a sympathetic side. However, since Akatin, pessimism has intensified. Wells said: "Please note that there are two kinds of people in the world: givers and takers. The former is generous and the latter is free. " Akatin is the "scorpion" in life. His nature is to stab people around him, so he must be loyal to his nature. This fatalistic approach was once again proved in his trial, which was filmed shortly after Akatin. Wells commented on Joseph K, the protagonist who was persecuted for no reason. "I think he is guilty because he is a person." Wells has completely fallen into the consciousness of original sin.

Wells' self-exile is a Kafka-style process of punishment and finding mistakes. This may be the reason why he agrees with the protagonist in Kafka's world. Joseph K's experience seems ridiculous, but in Kafka's world, it is the actual situation of human existence, and it is confirmed by Wells' own experience. Wells seriously considered adapting the experiment from 1960. It took him six weeks to write the script, but due to the lack of funds, he actually put into filming nearly two years later.

Wells may be the ideal person to put Kafka's painful novels on the screen. The strong contrast between light and shade, pungent humor and labyrinthine obscurity in his previous works are easily reminiscent of Kafka's novel world. But unexpectedly, after the film was released, it attracted fierce criticism from British and American film critics. A fair evaluation of the film The Trial is only possible after people have a deeper understanding of Wells' intentions and contact with the ideological process of Wells' films.

At that time, the almost unanimous condemnation of the film by British and American film critics did not lie in the fact that the film did not respect the plot development process and the sequence of events of the original work. There can be no question of loyalty in this respect. The original novel was edited and published by Max Broder after Kafka's death. Kafka's manuscript has no chapter order. Probably because Kafka thinks that K's experience is a chaotic nightmare, and there is no only reasonable time sequence. According to a comparative study by a French critic, Wells changed the chapter order of Brod to 1, 4, 2, 5, 6, 3, 8, 7, 9, 10.

The film was attacked for two main reasons. First, movies are too obscure and boring. Kafka's novels are easy to read, but movies are more difficult to understand than novels. Secondly, Wells rewrote Kafka's "anti-hero"-helpless in the face of man's absurd existence-into a "sinner" who still has the courage to resist. K's speech in court is regarded as a kind of "non-probability" fiction, which is incompatible with Kafka's world at the beginning of the film. K escaped the bad luck of being stabbed to death by the executioner in the novel (this should be a logical ending). In that less than a second shot, he grabbed something (is it a stone or that pile of explosives? ) throw it out, no matter how obscure it is, after all, it leaves a glimmer of hope.

Obscurity is one of the inherent characteristics of western modernist works. If the film "Trial" tells the traditional story of an innocent person being persecuted innocently, it will inevitably attract more serious criticism. In the film, the whole world is full of unrealistic colors. In the huge office with hundreds of typewriters, the labyrinthine bank building, the lawyer's foggy and candlelight-flickering bedroom, Lenny's room full of documents, the mysterious court hall, and Titorelli's tattered studio full of girls peeping ... everything seems "extremely unreal". This is a deliberate affront to Kafka's style. As the British film critic Eistein pointed out, "Kafka's novels show a fairly real world, but there are also people living in dreams, and in Wells' films, real people live in a nightmare world. "

Adapters can make major changes to the original version if there are compelling reasons. Nine times out of ten feature films around the world are adaptations. As an unwritten general rule, people will never and cannot re-evaluate the value of the original work according to the success or failure of film adaptation. On the contrary, the adapted film can have its own new quality and value. In fact, the film The Trial is such an example.

In essence, the film The Trial turned Kafka's ironic rather than personal desperate world into a Welsh moral drama. When K announced to the barrister that "I never wanted to be a martyr" and "I am a member of society", and he told the priest in a challenging tone that he would be responsible for everything he did and that "I am not your child", Wells not only criticized Kafka, but also criticized some irrational tendencies instilled in the public by modernist art (such as absurd drama) in the early 1960s. Wells promoted Kafka's nightmare to conscious analysis. It is inevitable that he will change the final outcome of K.

Judging from all Wells' films, he is more of a calm world bystander. He is more interested in the psychological state of the oppressor than the pain of the oppressed. He calls himself "Edwardian" (that is, staid) rather than "modern" intellectual. He insisted on the literary belief of19th century, that is, literature should point out some bright prospects for people. In the film The Trial, it is this essential humanitarian tradition that resists the modernist values that urges him to remold Kafka's "anti-hero", although this modification almost destroys the logic of the work.

Wells' revision of Kafka also has its historical background. In an interview with a reporter from the French film magazine "Movie Handbook" after the release of the film "Trial", he explained why the ending of the novel had become unacceptable at 1962. He said, "I think (the trial) was a ballet written by a Jewish intellectual before Hitler came to power. After 6 million Jews died, Kafka would never write like this. In my opinion, all this was before Auschwitz existed. I don't think my ending is very good, but this is the only possible ending. " He also said that "Joseph K" in the original work can not be separated from something that represents evil. He didn't commit the crime he was accused of, but he is still guilty: he belongs to a guilty society and he cooperates with it. Therefore, if K continues to be a passive collaborator, "it means that Hitler is indispensable". Wells may have exaggerated the problem a little, but his criticism of irrational tendencies such as "life is absurd" and "people will be sent to an unknown destination by the conveyor belt of life" is undoubtedly sincere and valuable.

Since Joseph K has changed from a "dreamer" to a "real person" (Wells changed the story about the practice told by the priest to what K saw in the dream at the beginning of the film, and then let the police wake him up), the unrealization of the story environment has become a necessity, because it is a fable after all, adapted from Kafka's novel. Wells said that due to financial difficulties, he could not go to Yugoslavia to use a set specially designed for movies, so he had to shoot in an abandoned railway station in Paris. In fact, his original design was more abstract than reality: "My original idea was to make the scenery gradually disappear. The elements of realism should gradually fade away, fade away in front of the audience, and finally there is only a wilderness, as if everything is gone. " We can still vaguely see this idea from the finished film: as Joseph K's psychological tension intensifies, the places where various events took place strangely get closer and closer to each other, and the walls disappear. At the end of the corridor, pushing the door will lead to another location. The concrete and real environment are unrealistically linked until a wilderness appears at the end of the film, and everything goes up in smoke in the explosion.

If you watch this movie for entertainment, you will find it obscure and boring, and it is hard to finish. If you have serious expectations for art appreciation, you will have a strong interest in this film. It is natural to apply different appreciation standards to films of different quality.