The Magic World of Orson Welles (40 page)

To see how much difference there is between
The Trial
and Welles at his best, one has only to contrast the opening moments of the film with the
interrogation of Sanchez in
Touch of Evil
. Both scenes take place in drab apartments, both are photographed in long takes with a distorting lens, and both are characterized by a surreal comedy. In both, public officials have forced their way into the most vulnerable areas of a man's private life, police authority literally extending into bedrooms, where we see burly men examining Sanchez's love letters or investigating K.'s relations with the lady next door. The earlier film, however, is clearly the more fascinating, and not only because it is more formally complex, with a more interesting group of players and a soundtrack that does not inhibit the acting. What is also missing in
The Trial
is some reference to an actual milieu. As K.'s landlady tells him, “With your arrest I get the feeling of something abstract.” In the opening scenes the dubbed voices of Hollywood-type police seem oddly out of key with Kafka's Czech names, and Anthony Perkins's distinctly American energy is set off against Jeanne Moreau's European languor. A similar mélange of nationalities can be found, of course, in
Touch of Evil
, which was certainly not intended to represent “the real Mexico”; nevertheless, the crazy, nightmarish distortion of that film was an
interpretation
of a real place, and the various accents are wittily appropriate to the border town. In
The Trial
, by contrast, the setting has become nearly as generalized as the cast: the government architecture of Zagreb, intimating a gray, Iron Curtain socialism, provides background for the early scenes, but then the abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris is used for K.'s encounters with the courts of Law. Whereas
Touch of Evil
had been a dream about America,
The Trial
has become a dream about everywhere, and to paraphrase Andrew Sarris's remark about F. W. Murnau, a film devoted to no place in particular cannot hope to represent everyplace in general.

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.