This article appeared in the July 19, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962)

In 1913, just over a decade before he died of tuberculosis, Franz Kafka published his first collection of short stories, Betrachtung (Meditation or Contemplation). Among them is the brief story of a “Red Indian” riding on horseback, described by critics as as one of Kafka’s most cinematic: “If one were only an Indian,” he writes, “instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.”

To mark the centenary of the Prague-born writer’s death, this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival screened, along with the usual program of premieres and films making the circuit, a retrospective dedicated to Kafka’s influence in the movies: “The Wish to Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema.” Some of the choices were obvious—Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962) and Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka (1991)—but others seemed to invoke that vague and near-meaningless term “Kafkaesque.” David Lynch’s The Grandmother (1970) and Federico Fellini’s Intervista (1987), for example, are so markedly different in tone that anyone unfamiliar with Kafka’s work would wonder what the hell he was writing about. Indeed, throughout the course of the festival, the Kafkaesque became something of a puzzle to be solved.

My experience of Karlovy Vary was nothing close to Kafkaesque, though the inclusion of Fellini’s typically festive film proved illustrative: in 1938, a young journalist arrives at Cinecittà Studios on assignment for Cinema magazine, there to interview someone like Greta Gonda, and is meanwhile swept up in a drunken daydream of filmmaking and fascism. Somewhere within the many narrative layers is an adaptation of Kafka’s Amerika, which only ever surfaces thematically. Instead, the film’s primary Kafkaesque quality is its vague procession of incoherent narrative threads and maybe-Kafka-inspired images (concluding with a pastiche of cowboys and Indians).

The festival is a circus in much the same spirit as Intervista—busy, confusing, and eminently fun. Teenagers come from all over the Czech Republic to work the pop-up sausage stalls, in dorky company polos one moment and raving the next, while tourists haunt the various Art Nouveau hotels that overlook the river Teplá, traipsing up the hill for a soak in the natural hot springs (whose waters you can drink from little ceramic teapots; it tastes of blood but purportedly has health benefits). The brutalist Hotel Thermal marks one end of the strip and the festival’s home base, while at the southernmost end lies the Grandhotel Pupp (pronounced “poop”—one of many fun Czech words heard at the festival, alongside “drinky” and “cigarety”). The Pupp’s dining room was used for the filming of Casino Royale in 2006, and the bar consequently serves only “Vesper” martinis, while the building itself inspired Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). As in Intervista, the real and film worlds blur together.

In attempting to capture “the elusive nature” of Kafka’s writings—as Karlovy Vary Artistic Director Karel Och phrased it—Welles certainly comes closest, and his aesthetic choices seem clear inspiration for most other filmmakers in the retrospective: forced perspective, chiaroscuro lighting, Dutch angles, distorted architecture. No coincidence that these formal qualities derive from the German Expressionism of Kafka’s time. Hannah Arendt said the writer was intent on destroying the “evil of the world” by “exaggerating the contours of its horrible structure,” and as Welles proves best, cinema can visualize this project in a uniquely affecting way. Welles also understood that Kafka could be funny, and reportedly spent much of his time on set cracking up with Anthony Perkins, whose Josef K. ultimately dies laughing.

This is not the typical interpretation of Kafka’s work (though Kafka himself was known to read his stories aloud to friends while in hysterics); mostly what people see is horror. David Lynch, who called Kafka the one artist who could be his brother, had two works in the retrospective: the third episode of his surrealist Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series (2017) and The Grandmother, a 33-minute short best described as a nightmare. In the latter, set in a pitch-black void, we see a little boy physically and emotionally abused by his parents; he then wets the bed and plants a seed there, growing a grandmother to love him; when she dies, the last image is of the boy writhing alone in bed. Kôji Yamamura’s 2007 adaptation of A Country Doctor, though animated, functions in much the same mode, resembling twisted Quentin Blake illustrations that would keep children awake at night.

“It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream—of a nightmare,” Welles begins The Trial in voiceover. For him, it was the Joycean nightmare of history that best encapsulated the Kafkaesque. But equally, Welles saw the Kafka protagonist as something more than mere victim: “I find in the book repeated indications that K. is a pusher,” he told an audience at the University of Southern California in 1981. “Not little Mr. Nobody, not the poor little faceless accountant, but a young man very anxious to get ahead in this awful world.” Somewhere between this and Lynch’s Freudian fever dream is an approximation of Kafka’s own life.

A prosperous, middle-class Jew speaking both Czech and German, Kafka was never at ease among the many cultural tensions of his native Prague (warring nationalisms, rising anti-Semitism). He rebelled against his father, seemingly for the mere fact of being a father, describing his childhood as being full of “laws” that would “oppress” and make a “slave” of him. In other writings, Kafka lamented his day job at an insurance office, though here the oppressive force was not a single human authority but the inhuman labyrinth of administration. And though he died in 1924, before Czechoslovakia would fall to the Nazis, be dissolved and reconstituted, and suffer under an oppressive Communist regime, the “Kafkaesque” is viewed today as a kind of prophecy. Theodor Adorno claimed that it was “National Socialism far more than the hidden dominion of God that [Kafka’s] works cites,” while the writer himself said: “The future is already here within me. The only change will be to make visible the hidden wounds.”

In Kafka’s prescient vision of conformity and repression, audiences are wont to see their own world reflected, no matter how far removed they may be from his time. Soderbergh introduced Kafka by claiming that his film was the last one made in Prague under the supervision of the state film bureaucracy, nine months after the Velvet Revolution—the demonstrations in November 1989 that led to the end of one-party rule in Czechoslovakia—and that much of the local crew was nervous about becoming “freelance” once the centralized Czechoslovak Film Institute (ČSF) was dissolved. Loosely inspired by The Trial, The Castle, and the facts of Kafka’s life, Soderbergh’s film stars Jeremy Irons as a writer caught between anarchists and a mysterious “modernist” regime. When he finally infiltrates the all-powerful castle, this Kafka surrogate discovers a group of mad scientists, apparently inspired by his work, whose business involves abducting homeless people and mind-controlling them into killing dissidents. For the Czech audience of 1991, this likely called to mind the soft Stalinism of the 1970s and ’80s, where any artists critical of the Party were penalized. But for the American audience of ’91, those same “modernists” likely evoked Reaganites and the new world order of neoliberalism.

If Soderbergh sees in Kafka a man alienated from all identities, neither anarchist nor modernist, then he need only adjust his labels. In the Prague of Kafka’s time, he was branded as both “fundamentally German” and “most typically Jewish” by critics. “Am I a circus rider on two horses?” He wrote. “Alas, I am no rider, but lie prostrate on the ground.” The nature of Kafka’s Red Indian becomes clear here: the desire to feel at peace with the world and one’s position within it, or to transform, to disappear, to die. It’s this same desire that has proved a comfort to so many suffering as Kafka did—a recognition of their own alienation, but one that equally allows for so many abuses of the term “Kafkaesque.” What seems muddled in these films are the specifics of Kafka’s discomfort and exile—from the family, the workplace, the minutiae of everyday life in 20th-century Prague, and from the world at large.

Like Kafka’s “Red Indian,” the lone rider who soon finds himself disappeared, it was hard to get a sense of Kafka the man in the retrospective. The films better suit his great aphorism: “A cage went in search of a bird.” Perhaps this is but one pitfall of adaptation. Lynch tried to adapt The Metamorphosis, only to realize “that Kafka’s beauty is in his words.” Or perhaps it’s a case of time dissolving the past—the spurs, the reins, the horse and rider—the further we move along. “The topography that oppressed Kafka does not oppress us,” writes Alan Bennett in the London Review of Books. His world of tight staircases and tiny attics has been cleared away by something like the modern: “Our shorthand for desolation is quite different: the assembly line, the fence festooned with polythene rags, the dead land between the legs of the motorway.” But this is our world, not Kafka’s. “Or, to put it another way, the trouble with Kafka is that he didn’t know the word ‘Kafkaesque.’”

James Wham lives in London and writes for New Left Review and The Baffler.