heeelllloooooo there!
Why the hell is Orson Welles' The Trial a cult item? It's based on a story by Franz Kafka! It stars Anthony Perkins (shortly after Psycho, at that)! Directed by Orson Goddamn Welles! By the praise Citizen Kane gets, you'd think every one of his films would be revered, if not puzzled over for their failures. Instead, it seems like the consensus is that Kane, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight and The Magnificent Ambersons are Great Films, and you're on your own for the rest. Those last two aren't even available on DVD in America right now!
"Bollocks!" I say! The Trial is at least as great as Touch of Evil, and it seems like it was released more or less as Welles intended (though it looks like there was an edited version in the US). That's more you can say about Touch of Evil. All The Trial needs, I reckon, is a Criterion DVD release with cleaned up audio.
Welles' European years generally get short shrift, though, and I guess The Trial is no different. It makes me glad that it's at least available on DVD (among a slew of bootleg copies, though). Like I said, seems that it's a bit of a cult item; it's at least generally well-regarded by the subset of people who have seen it and have rated it on Amazon and IMDB. Yes, that's part of the same demographic that once put The Dark Knight as one of the top 5 films of all time, but it's still high praise from a relatively large group. Does 4-stars from Roger Ebert sound better?
(Side note: I generally don't link to Ebert because he's that much better a writer than I am, but I do like that review an awful lot for its insights. I will try to avoid doubling over on it. What he has to say about Perkins' sexuality is fascinating, though.)
But on to the film itself: it's a story centered on accusation. Anthony Perkins plays Joseph K, who is accused of... nothing in particular, and eventually he stops asking. But he's put through the rigeurs of a legal system that seems to only consist of loopholes and an unrelenting, loopy but lockstep logic. Everything seems to be going against him in this series; every person, no matter their intention, seems to be getting in the way somehow. He never sleeps once he wakes up at the start of the film. At every turn, it seems like the world is out to trap him. In its shadows, in its rules, in its multitudes.
It's those multitudes that caught my eye on this first viewing; almost every scene that takes place in a space that would be cavernous is filled, packed with details. The actual courtroom where Perkins is on trial is a large auditorium consumed with people. It echoes the stage of Charles Kane's big campaign speech. But where that was a triumph for that character, this setting is terrifying. Joseph delivers a speech, too, but it's harried and interrupted. The room is relatively small, but every frame is packed with so many people watching this "trial" that it is intimidating, even for a viewer from home.
Perkins carries himselfs perfectly, too, giving his character the perfect blend of innocence, determination and frazzled intensity. The guy's under stress, and it's not just his trial, from what we see of his workplace. His office is an endless sea of rows of people at typwriters, typing furiously. It's a constant, noisy racket, made only noisier by the lousy sound quality on the version streaming on Netflix. Just walking from the door to his desk (a lone desk on a short pedestal above the other desks) seems to take minutes, and there isn't an open space within the frame in that whole time. Later, we see there's a computer, and this, too seem to be the length of infinity, a giant even among the standards of the early computers.
Welles was a master at using expressionism to get into his characters' heads. It was somewhat subtle in Kane, but increasingly apparent by Touch of Evil. In this movie, it's at an absolute peak. His lawyer, The Advocate (Welles) lives within what appears to be a maze of bookshelves, walls and windows, lined with hundreds of lit candles. It's as intimidating as the castles in Super Mario Bros, where it always seemed like the same castle with new traps. There's a sense of paranoia and dread here that's impenetrable, and the very use of objects plays a large role in it. Would the mood be the same if The Advocate's study was littered with random objects, rather than seemingly infinite newspaper bundles? I think not. Would The Advocate himself seem as much like a big deal if his office was lit with a few lamps or a chandelier? These things get into your head, too, don't they?
The effect changes the tone from a could-have-been comedy to a psychological torture. I imagine this movie was one of the influences on Scorsese's After Hours, which has a similarly absurd plot (that one is Kafka-esque, this one is by Kafka). But where Welles' movie creeps along with great fear, Scorsese's is comedic in its absurdity. The strangeness. Note how the protagonists wind up chased by groups: Joseph by a horde of young girls, After Hours' Paul by an angry mob of people he'd run into over the course of the movie. The latter is directly threatening the protagonist's life, yet it's taken as a dark comedy. We understand their misunderstanding, and their familiarity makes it funny. Not so in The Trial. The girls (again, we're talking huge numbers that overwhelm the frame) seem to only annoy with their persistent adoration of Joseph. They are less a character and more an unrelenting force, much like the movie's events. More unsettling is when they're locked out of a room with shabby wood, perfect for peaking within.
It's interesting that this is the kind of story told by two great filmmakers in despair. Welles always seemed to be despairing in his later career, with his films almost obsessively centered around men whose world is collapsing while he scrounged for funds for his projects. Scorsese found himself needing to show resilience with After Hours. It's the mark of their genius that the freedom afforded by surrealist stories let them consolidate their strengths, but their genres reveal much about the film makers. In The Trial, the protagonist is constantly being watched or surrounded by others. He's being judged. How much of this is a reflection on Welles film career? His films seem to be awfully perceptive of their maker's place in the world at all times.
In a lot of ways, The Trial is a great film. There's something deeply personal about it, I'd say, that makes the absurdism gripping. The internal logic is fascinating on its own, anyway. Some of it, too, is the grand scale of so much of it. Much has been written about Citizen Kane's... well, everything. But its camera tricks specifically. The Trial contains much of this ambition in its very framing of things, and not for the sake of doing things on a grand scale. Put aside just great film making; The Trial is straight-up great psychological trickery.
Expect it to come up again when I do After Hours some day.
Why the hell is Orson Welles' The Trial a cult item? It's based on a story by Franz Kafka! It stars Anthony Perkins (shortly after Psycho, at that)! Directed by Orson Goddamn Welles! By the praise Citizen Kane gets, you'd think every one of his films would be revered, if not puzzled over for their failures. Instead, it seems like the consensus is that Kane, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight and The Magnificent Ambersons are Great Films, and you're on your own for the rest. Those last two aren't even available on DVD in America right now!
"Bollocks!" I say! The Trial is at least as great as Touch of Evil, and it seems like it was released more or less as Welles intended (though it looks like there was an edited version in the US). That's more you can say about Touch of Evil. All The Trial needs, I reckon, is a Criterion DVD release with cleaned up audio.
Welles' European years generally get short shrift, though, and I guess The Trial is no different. It makes me glad that it's at least available on DVD (among a slew of bootleg copies, though). Like I said, seems that it's a bit of a cult item; it's at least generally well-regarded by the subset of people who have seen it and have rated it on Amazon and IMDB. Yes, that's part of the same demographic that once put The Dark Knight as one of the top 5 films of all time, but it's still high praise from a relatively large group. Does 4-stars from Roger Ebert sound better?
(Side note: I generally don't link to Ebert because he's that much better a writer than I am, but I do like that review an awful lot for its insights. I will try to avoid doubling over on it. What he has to say about Perkins' sexuality is fascinating, though.)
But on to the film itself: it's a story centered on accusation. Anthony Perkins plays Joseph K, who is accused of... nothing in particular, and eventually he stops asking. But he's put through the rigeurs of a legal system that seems to only consist of loopholes and an unrelenting, loopy but lockstep logic. Everything seems to be going against him in this series; every person, no matter their intention, seems to be getting in the way somehow. He never sleeps once he wakes up at the start of the film. At every turn, it seems like the world is out to trap him. In its shadows, in its rules, in its multitudes.
It's those multitudes that caught my eye on this first viewing; almost every scene that takes place in a space that would be cavernous is filled, packed with details. The actual courtroom where Perkins is on trial is a large auditorium consumed with people. It echoes the stage of Charles Kane's big campaign speech. But where that was a triumph for that character, this setting is terrifying. Joseph delivers a speech, too, but it's harried and interrupted. The room is relatively small, but every frame is packed with so many people watching this "trial" that it is intimidating, even for a viewer from home.
Perkins carries himselfs perfectly, too, giving his character the perfect blend of innocence, determination and frazzled intensity. The guy's under stress, and it's not just his trial, from what we see of his workplace. His office is an endless sea of rows of people at typwriters, typing furiously. It's a constant, noisy racket, made only noisier by the lousy sound quality on the version streaming on Netflix. Just walking from the door to his desk (a lone desk on a short pedestal above the other desks) seems to take minutes, and there isn't an open space within the frame in that whole time. Later, we see there's a computer, and this, too seem to be the length of infinity, a giant even among the standards of the early computers.
Welles was a master at using expressionism to get into his characters' heads. It was somewhat subtle in Kane, but increasingly apparent by Touch of Evil. In this movie, it's at an absolute peak. His lawyer, The Advocate (Welles) lives within what appears to be a maze of bookshelves, walls and windows, lined with hundreds of lit candles. It's as intimidating as the castles in Super Mario Bros, where it always seemed like the same castle with new traps. There's a sense of paranoia and dread here that's impenetrable, and the very use of objects plays a large role in it. Would the mood be the same if The Advocate's study was littered with random objects, rather than seemingly infinite newspaper bundles? I think not. Would The Advocate himself seem as much like a big deal if his office was lit with a few lamps or a chandelier? These things get into your head, too, don't they?
The effect changes the tone from a could-have-been comedy to a psychological torture. I imagine this movie was one of the influences on Scorsese's After Hours, which has a similarly absurd plot (that one is Kafka-esque, this one is by Kafka). But where Welles' movie creeps along with great fear, Scorsese's is comedic in its absurdity. The strangeness. Note how the protagonists wind up chased by groups: Joseph by a horde of young girls, After Hours' Paul by an angry mob of people he'd run into over the course of the movie. The latter is directly threatening the protagonist's life, yet it's taken as a dark comedy. We understand their misunderstanding, and their familiarity makes it funny. Not so in The Trial. The girls (again, we're talking huge numbers that overwhelm the frame) seem to only annoy with their persistent adoration of Joseph. They are less a character and more an unrelenting force, much like the movie's events. More unsettling is when they're locked out of a room with shabby wood, perfect for peaking within.
It's interesting that this is the kind of story told by two great filmmakers in despair. Welles always seemed to be despairing in his later career, with his films almost obsessively centered around men whose world is collapsing while he scrounged for funds for his projects. Scorsese found himself needing to show resilience with After Hours. It's the mark of their genius that the freedom afforded by surrealist stories let them consolidate their strengths, but their genres reveal much about the film makers. In The Trial, the protagonist is constantly being watched or surrounded by others. He's being judged. How much of this is a reflection on Welles film career? His films seem to be awfully perceptive of their maker's place in the world at all times.
In a lot of ways, The Trial is a great film. There's something deeply personal about it, I'd say, that makes the absurdism gripping. The internal logic is fascinating on its own, anyway. Some of it, too, is the grand scale of so much of it. Much has been written about Citizen Kane's... well, everything. But its camera tricks specifically. The Trial contains much of this ambition in its very framing of things, and not for the sake of doing things on a grand scale. Put aside just great film making; The Trial is straight-up great psychological trickery.
Expect it to come up again when I do After Hours some day.
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