Welles himself has commented somewhat defensively on the differences in tone between his film and Kafka’s novel, focusing especially on the unusual settings, which were criticized by Anglo-American reviewers for their giant, baroque quality. Because of his producer’s financial difficulties, he was unable to use specially designed sets in Yugoslavia; consequently he improvised in the empty Paris railway station, doing the best he could in typically desperate circumstances. His original premise, however, was even more abstract than the picture he actually made. “In the production as I originally envisaged it,” he said, “the sets were to gradually disappear. The number of realistic elements was to gradually diminish, and to be seen to diminish by the spectators, until only open space remained, as if everything had been dissolved away.” One can detect traces of this concept in the completed film, which begins in K.’s narrow apartment and then takes us through a series of rooms without walls. K.’s office, for example, is a raised platform at one end of a hangar-size building, overlooking hundreds of secretaries who sit typing at identical desks (a favorite image of the expressionists, appearing first in the days of Lang and Murnau, then in Vidor’s The Crowd, and ultimately in Wilder’s The Apartment). The Advocate’s quarters are represented by a maze of huge, partly enclosed, candlelit rooms in the upper reaches of the Court; the roof is a skylight, the “bedroom” a raised platform echoing the one in K.’s office, and the “kitchen” a refrigerator and sink placed at the extreme end of a cavernous loft. At the climax of the film, the boundaries between one setting and another become even more tenuous. The artist Titorelli lives in a slatted cage with a back door that leads directly into the court; as K. flees out the front exit, a church seems to materialize in an empty plaza, and a curtained wall behind the pulpit leads him into an empty theater. Finally, the pair of executioners seize K. and march across open fields, where dynamite shatters the rocky landscape. The modern government structures and the massive public buildings reminiscent of an earlier age have given way entirely to a wasteland, the story closing with what is perhaps the most depressing image in all Welles’s cinema: a dark cloud of smoke hanging in the sky, with hardly a breeze to indicate life.
As the foregoing description may indicate, Welles’s ideas for staging The Trial were at least coherent, even if the results are sometimes overly abstracted. In fact, despite the lack of authenticity in the settings, the film is as technically interesting as anything Welles has done. He has forsaken the out-of-kilter editing style of his previous three pictures, using a movie syntax as lucid and correct as Kafka’s own prose. In The Trial it is the mise-en-scène that has become irrational, K.’s peregrinations taking him through a world nearly as shocking and bewildering as the fun house at the end of The Lady from Shanghai. The camera repeatedly tracks with him as he moves from one weirdly different locale to another, Albinoni’s Adagio forming a sad, yearning musical leitmotif that enhances the continual gliding rhythm of the shots. Space seems logical and all of a piece, but K. has only to open a door or cross a hallway to find himself in a new environment. From the moment he leaves Mrs. Grubach’s rooming house, the world is transformed into a deceptive, protean, increasingly menacing place. When he tries to penetrate the courts, he moves through gigantic open areas that are filled with passive crowds; when he tries to escape, he finds himself always inside the court’s boundaries, running down tunnel-like corridors that lead him to new confrontations with the Law.
The unhappy influence of the contemporary avant-garde does not obscure these formal beauties, nor The Trial’s dramatically effective qualities as sexual nightmare. Indeed at this level it becomes a more intriguing work—certainly very different from the self-indulgent adaptation that Welles’s reviewers once made it seem. The opening scenes, for example, are carefully designed to establish a relatively normal setting from which the rest of the film will depart, even while they define K.’s psychology and foreshadow the structure of the remaining events.
From the beginning we sense that The Trial will be the psychodrama of a troubled bureaucrat, everything in the story being generated from the subconscious of the central character. The story proper opens with a tight shot of Perkins’s head, upside down like the faces that introduce Othello and the fun-house section of The Lady from Shanghai. His long, rather feline lashes flutter awake. From a low angle, we see one wing of a double door opening, and a dark-hatted man entering a room. We return to Perkins, who sits up in bed. The camera trucks left, swinging around behind his shadowed head, as if the scene were being projected from his mind. The strange man, a police inspector, walks forward from the door, which is situated directly across K.’s room; in the ensuing action, photographed in a single take, other policemen casually enter and leave while K. tries to wake up and change out of his pajamas. He is accused of having a clandestine relationship with his neighbor, of wanting to “dress in the hall,” and of concealing an “ovular shape” under his rug. Nervous and confused, he denies having any “subversive literature or pornography,” then he inadvertently calls his record player a “pornograph.” His specific crime is never mentioned, and the mysterious police make no formal charge, claiming only that “proceedings have been started.” Nevertheless, it is clear that K.’s guilt is mainly sexual; Welles has the chief investigator enter from doors leading to a lady’s apartment, doors that have been placed nearly at the foot of K.’s bed. One notes also that K.’s room is institutionally white and functional, except for an unframed print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers hanging near his dressing table, the mad blossoms suggesting an inner torment.
This bedroom scene makes the connection between state and superego nearly explicit and shows K.’s anxiety growing out of his willing participation in a repressive social hierarchy. “I am a man of regular habits,” he tells the police as he dresses in gray pants and a vest. In a subsequent conversation with his mousy, somewhat maternal landlady (Madeleine Robinson), he becomes petulant, boasting that the police could never have broken into his office, where “people sometimes have to wait for weeks before they can speak to my secretary.” Later, when he talks with his sultry neighbor Miss Burstner (Jeanne Moreau), he confesses that he has always felt guilty when confronted with authority figures, including especially his father and his teachers. “It’s even worse,” he says, “when you haven’t done anything wrong and you still feel guilty.”
The early parts of the film also establish the formal “rules” of the remaining action. The interior of K.’s rooming house is photographed with a number of tracking shots that move through different rooms, creating the effect of a tiny maze that echoes the larger maze to come. Significantly also, the initial long take in K.’s bedroom ends as he moves up to the double doors leading to Miss Burstner’s apartment and swings them open, confronting a bizarre scene. (See fig. 8.2.)
In the remainder of the film K. repeatedly approaches similar entrances and suddenly opens a door to confront an unexpected sight. The four shots reproduced in figures 8.3–8.6 indicate how often the doorway imagery recurs: in shot one K. has marched down the hallway to tell Miss Burstner that the police have been in her room; he knocks, abruptly opens the door, and sees that she is undressing. Frightened, he quickly swings the door shut and returns to his own room, where, in shot two, we see him pacing anxiously back and forth between the double doors connecting his apartment with Miss Burstner’s. Shot three takes place somewhat later in the film, when K. has walked down a huge silent corridor in search of the Law courts; he swings open a pair of double doors similar to the ones in his own apartment and is met by a rush of noise and light from a jammed “courtroom.” Shot four appears very near the end of the film, explicitly linking the various doorways to the most important entrance of them all—the gateway to the Law, which we have seen illustrated in the parable at the opening of the film. Here K. is standing between a slide projector and a screen, his shadow falling at the center of the huge arch to which he has presumably been forbidden entrance. Subsequently he denounces the Advocate and
walks forward toward the projector, but as he does so, his shadow shrinks, as if he were walking into the maze of gates on the screen behind him.
Figure 8.2: K. opens the doors to Miss Burstner’s apartment.
The various doors are among the chief symbols of K.’s dreamworld and are one of the principal methods of achieving transitions from one stage of the action to the next. Always they open onto bewilderingly different places. In the opening scene Miss Burstner’s quarters are at the opposite extreme from K.’s own—tiny and dark, covered with flowered drapes and cluttered with memorabilia from her mother’s vaudeville routine (“Burstner’s Birds,” she calls it, in one of Welles’s more puckish attempts at humor). Later, the tribunal to which K. is summoned makes a striking contrast to the lonely corridor outside; actually it is a European-style political rally—an exaggeration of the one Kafka describes, echoing Citizen Kane—with hundreds of men packed in the rafters and the air thick with smoke. Still later, K. makes his way through a sea of typists in his office and opens the door to a tiny storage closet, where, in one of the most brilliantly edited and disturbing moments of the film, he finds a man in leather whipping two corrupt policemen. The huge corporate workroom has given way to a claustrophobic torture chamber, an ugly little space lit with a naked bulb and filled with cringing figures. The offending officers cling to the walls, shirtless but with their hats on, submitting to a beating while K. pulls back in horror to avoid being lashed himself. Welles cuts rapidly between the Gestapo-like torturer raising his strap and the pathetic, middle-age flesh of the victims; the lamp sways wildly with every blow, creating a strobe-light effect, a shattering violence that is further increased by the tempo of the cutting. Meanwhile Anthony Perkins conveys K.’s terror with the bodily skill of a good dancer; he forces himself out of the room the way he came, fighting to get free of a man who pleads for help, then paces nervously back and forth in the hallway outside. Once out, he bites his fist and hunches his wide, bony shoulders, twisting into a humiliated near-crouch, then quickly forces himself upright as a secretary enters to announce that he has a visitor in his office.
Figures 8.3–8.6: Recurring use of doorway imagery in The Trial.
The “next room” in The Trial always suggests a repressed psychic horror—either a forbidden sexual desire, as in the case of Miss Burstner’s apartment, or a hidden guilt, or a fear of retribution. Every entranceway portends some kind of shock; when K. crosses one of these he commits a psychic transgression as well as a literal one, and his anxiety inevitably increases. In the concluding scenes, however, his entrances and exits become more purposeful, reflecting his transformation into an angry, more active character. Near the climax, after he has witnessed the debasement of the Advocate’s client Bloch (Akim Tamiroff), he leaves the room by defiantly breaking down a locked door. At the conclusion of the film the inhibiting walls and boundaries have become more fragile, at last yielding to an open space.
Perkins’s movements through doors and ultimately into a field indicate the progress of his character; he does not actually get anywhere, but he does change. The film has begun with K. having all the respect for officialdom that his accusers could desire. He arranges his life methodically, he cowers before his boss, and he acts like a martinet to underlings in his office. He somewhat unsuccessfully fights back sexual longings, all the while boasting of his efficiency on the job. “Don’t be surprised if you hear any day now that I’ve become Deputy Manager of my department,” he tells his cousin. “Why, all I’ve got to do is apply those same abilities to this case of mine.” His every conscientious effort to defend himself against the court makes him more and more a cog in the system of institutional horrors; even his complaints about the violation of his “civil rights” result in his becoming a guilty, frightened witness at the torture of low-level policemen. Gradually, however, he begins to show flashes of anger. Standing before an old man who waits patiently outside the courts of Law, he becomes testy and aggressive: “I’m under arrest [also]. You don’t see me putting up affidavits. What makes you think this kind of thing is necessary?” He even commands respect from the court’s guard, a weakling who regards him as a kind of hero. At the end of the film K. continues to insist, “I’ve got to catch up on my work at the office,” but he has become progressively more defiant, finally dismissing his attorney and sneering at the authority of the court.
If K. never becomes a sympathetic character, he is at least given a chance to assert himself. And as K. becomes bolder, his accusers visibly weaken. At first the police are bullies and Advocate Hastler is a demonic presence; indeed Welles has devised a typically theatrical entrance for himself: rising from a bed like a baroque exaggeration of all the invalid father figures in Kafka, he removes a hot towel from his face, steam floating in little clouds around his head. As usual, however, Welles tries to convey a softness and vulnerability behind the powerful façade. He makes Hastler into a childish, sometimes rather funny villain—for example, when he confides to K.’s uncle Max (Max Haufler) that there is a hole in the floor of his room at the court: “Not quite big enough to fall through, but if you stumble into it you find yourself with your leg hanging down into the corridor below—the very place where all your clients have to wait.” He pats his mistress on the bottom with all the ostentatious but somehow charming vulgarity of a Hank Quinlan, and he mischievously hides under the covers of his bed in order to play sadistic tricks on visitors; he puts on a show of authority, making his client Bloch humiliate himself while K. watches, but the display only makes K. more determined to rebel. The same ineffectiveness is seen in all the other legal officials; in the final episode, for example, the executioners do not even have the strength to put a knife into K. and are last seen running in fear from their own dynamite. At best, Welles suggests, the court’s power over its cases is dependent upon the cooperation of the accused.
Figure 8.7: Hastler rises from the bed.
But K.’s progress through the labyrinth leads him to only a partial release from frustration, only a pyrrhic victory. Moreover, even though he becomes an angry member of a “human community,” he is less fortunate where women are concerned. His qualified moral triumph is obtained against what appears to be a purely masculine institution, a bureaucracy that is concerned with the abstractions of the “Law.” It is worth noting, however, that females always hover at the edges of this institution, and they represent an unresolved conflict. Repeatedly they offer K. favors or comfort, their charms luring him away from obsessive preoccupation with his “case.” In K.’s own offices and in the archives of the court, one occasionally notes prim ladies with their hair fastened in buns and their dresses buttoned to the neck, but just outside, K. encounters a whole gallery of more fascinating, threatening types. First there is Mrs. Grubach, the maternal landlady; then Miss Burstner, the prostitute; then Irmie (Naydra Shore), K.’s cousin from the country; then Hilda (Elsa Martinelli), the hausfrau who washes and sews outside the courtrooms; then Leni (Romy Schneider), who acts as nurse and sexual companion for the Advocate. As a group, they seem to prove the Advocate’s notion that a defendant in a trial is always more “attractive” than ordinary law-abiding citizens.
“It can’t be a sense of guilt,” the Advocate muses, trying to explain why his own mistress likes to seduce his clients. “We can’t all be guilty, hmm?” Yet the officials of the court are as driven by secret desires as K. himself; thus the Law books have dirty illustrations in them, the official proceedings are interrupted by perverse sexual byplay, and the examining magistrate lusts after the guard’s wife. Everywhere the rigid structure of the Law seems threatened by Eros, the women often becoming sinister manipulators of the higher authorities. It is typical of Welles, in fact, that the males who are connected with the law and the public world of social responsibility are weak, disorganized, and even impotent. Throughout his career one finds the same theme recurring—weakling fathers like the elder Kane or Minafer being set off against strong, dominating women, and the legal structure
(as in Touch of Evil) being undermined by sexual passion. It might be said that the typical psychological difficulty of Welles’s protagonists lies precisely in the futile attempt to assert masculine control, to pass out of infancy and sexual chaos, to identify with a “father” who is ultimately not strong enough.
As a sign of the threat women embody in The Trial, Welles usually poses them at the other side of a doorway or a subtle visual barrier. Notice, for example, the compositions in the four shots reproduced in figures 8.8–8.11. In the first, K.’s cousin Irmie stands outside the glass partition of his office while K. talks with the deputy manager; K. wrings his hands, trying to ignore her. Meanwhile his boss gives a wry look and makes an insinuating remark: “We’ll have to keep an eye on you, old man.” In the second shot, Hilda pulls up her dress to show K. her new stockings. “Do you wanna see?” she says, but the shadow of a crossbar in the foreground suggests that K. is psychologically forbidden to look. In the third, Leni holds out a key that opens the door to the Advocate’s house, but at the same time she stands behind the bars of a partition. Finally, we see one of the urchin girls outside Titorelli’s room, peering through a slat in the wall. Images like these, which contain both an invitation to contact and a prohibition against it, help to illustrate K.’s divided consciousness. They also turn the women—who are not so much characters as enigmatic objects of desire—into potentially dangerous creatures. By provoking K.’s desire to transgress, the females stimulate guilt, anxiety, and hostility. He attracts them, but he is also irritated and fearful, uncertain whether they are influential parasites—like the fleas in a guard’s coat—or an actual menace to his “case.”
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 29