The Trial (1962)

 Orson Welles’s “The Trial”


Thematic Elements: 

Orson Welles’s ‘The Trial’ (based off of the book by Franz Kafka), is a nightmare in which you wake up to discover that it is a crime to simply be yourself, while bureaucrats try to control you using your guilt and you must beg and provide fees to higher powers just to defend yourself.  The world that is presented is a world of authoritarian control and manipulation by the state to force you into a situation where you have no legal powers. The surrealist elements of the film make the thematic elements of this authoritarian invasion by the state seem just as absurd as a nightmarish as the surrealist elements themselves. The Trial is an inescapable nightmare in which you have no control and nothing makes sense. 

Another fascinating element is the element of persecution.  Welles hinted at protagonist being a homosexual. This further adds more texture to the situation. Henry Jaglom, a close friend of Welles told the San Francisco Chronicle, “It was intentional on Orson’s part: He had these three gorgeous women trying to seduce this guy, who was completely repressed and incapable of responding.” Per Roger Ebert, “That provides an additional key to the film, which could be interpreted as a nightmare in which women make demands Joseph K is uninterested in meeting ,while bureaucrats in black coats follow him everywhere with obscure threats of legal disaster.” This illustrates the ways in which the state singles out your very humanity and calls it legally unacceptable to give them legal power of you as an individual. This shows the very use of persecution by the state in many authoritarian regimes.  


Camerawork: 

Welles portrays the film like a nightmare, guiding our protagonist on a surrealist journey. Water towers open up to file rooms, a woman is doing laundry outside of a trail room while a trial is taking place, huge trunks are dragged across empty landscapes and then back again. He presents a world that doesn’t make sense and a world that seems to know something that we don’t. We as an audience almost feel like something is being withheld from us, a deeper understanding of how this world in which the character lives works. This same train of thought should be utilized to see our world, in all of it’s absurdities. We should be examining the things that are being withheld from us as they are probably methods of control. One day we will wake up to find that our world is working in opposition to us.


Best Shot: 

The best shot in the film is a great representation of being Kafka-esque. It shows our protagonist in a sea of workers. The film is about the methods of control the state institutes in our society to best control and extort us. The illustrates the use of the individual as a exchangeable piece of a machine, a machine who’s sole goal is to contribute to the state’s desires. 




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