#WTW: The Trial

(at last! it’s #WhatThomWatched XIX)

The Trial

(1962, Orson Welles; Streaming via Netflix)

Orson Welles’s late films often had fragmented and troubled productions, lackluster promotion and reception, stellar performances from international actors and American character actors but no “stars” — and wildly innovative camera and sound work, sometimes unrecognized in the service of “genre” stories or near-experimental forms. (His final unfinished work, The Other Side of the Wind, which has just become the focus of renewed efforts to fund completion, reportedly takes these experiments further still.) After his unprecedented splash with first film Citizen Kane (at 24!), and subsequent fall from favor and exile to Europe, Welles acted and did voiceover and radio work to fund the occasional film, resulting in several relatively low-budget masterpieces. The Trial, set up by French producer Alexander Salkind, was actually an outlier — a return to a high-profile, reasonably budgeted, important property, with a couple of actual stars attached. As a literary adaptation of one of Franz Kafka’s most important works, it is inarguably successful — few adaptations can claim to have captured the essence of their source material so thoroughly. Of course, if the source is literature’s unparalleled depiction of paranoia, absurdity, and fear in a totalitarian state — instantly banned in its home country and still disavowed to this day — the cinematic representation is not crowd-pleasing popcorn material. It is as cold as a concrete apartment facade and as unforgiving as an impenetrable justice system.

Anthony Perkins plays Josef K., a successful mid-level bank manager who is interrogated in his apartment by two government goons in the first scene, told only that he will be facing charges in an upcoming court trial — but that he cannot know the charges against him, when he will be tried, or even who will act as his advocate. Perkins is not without resolve and courage, and so he attempts to meet the situation head on — demanding answers, trying to work his way through the bureaucracy, and so forth (in this way Welles has somewhat altered the K. of the novel, who is more passive; here some elements which were merely internal thoughts of the novel’s milquetoast K. are brought out and shown to us as (futile) actions) — but instead he’s dragged deeper and faster into a maddening series of increasingly confusing scenarios. As he seems to get a handle on one challenge, the rules shift beneath him and he winds up in a worse situation. Along the way he meets several absurd characters, some diabolical but many ostensibly helpful, and has a series of conversations and encounters. It ends as badly as anyone would expect, inevitable from the first frame.

Near the end of the novel, K. meets a priest who tells him a fable called “Before the Law” (which Kafka had previously published as a stand-alone short story). In the film, Welles asked the art animators Alexander Alexeïeff and Claire Parker to create a series of stills illustrating the fable, using their laborious “pinboard” technique (in which images are created by pushing tiny pins set in a grid pattern some distance through a board — like the toys which allow an impression to be made of an object with sliding pins — and photographed by a light source shining from the side, so that a picture is formed by the oblique shadows of the pins). Welles narrates the stills to create a short film of the fable, and this opens the movie; later, at the point in the story where the fable is told to K., the images are shown as projected slides on a screen. Welles in his character as K.’s antagonistic Advocate controls the projector; Perkins as K. is trapped in the beam, arguing for his life as the images bathe his body in light and darkness; this replaces the book’s exegesis of the fable between the Priest and K. Every element of Kafka’s text, every effect he creates through K.’s internal narrative and confusion, has to be transformed by Welles into a cinematic experience of image and sound; he is a translator, just as Willa and Edwin Muir had to render Kafka’s words in English from the original German in 1937, except that Welles knew that he had to escape words themselves, using pure cinema to create an analogue emotional experience for the viewer. Every scene of The Trial is like this; every choice Welles made (some completely successful, others not) is in service of this mission. And in making these choices, Welles left a staggering amount of material to inspire future artists dealing with similarly-minded projects. The possible connections between The Trial and other films seen and as-yet unseen are myriad.

Reminds me of:

So with that in mind: As I was clipping stills for this #WTW, I found myself arrested by composition after composition. I finally made myself stop — arbitrarily — once I’d grabbed a hundred “too good to pass up” frames. After a couple general Reminds me of paragraphs, I’m going to switch into a mode that I haven’t used in past pieces; I’m just going to share a few of these shots and talk about what they evoke for me. But first, here are just a couple of the most obvious connections my mind leapt to during Welles’s film:

If you’ve read #WTW 8 (Svankmajer’s Alice), you know that I’m an Alice in Wonderland freak. I’m not claiming any academic literary connection between Carroll and Kafka, but of course The Trial shares a structural conceit in common with the Alice books and with plenty of other satirical works: It’s episodic, with our identification-figure hero(ine) meeting a series of mad (British-sense-crazy-mad and plain old American-sense-angry-mad) characters, some helping, some hindering, but all frustratingly enigmatic. My limited research would seem to indicate that despite his rehabilitation in 1963 by some Czech scholars, Kafka is not generally recognized in his native Czech Republic* as a major intellectual force; as he wrote exclusively in German and his books were banned for the better part of half a century, he’s better known in Europe and in America via the English translations of the Muirs. But subversives like Svankmajer couldn’t have missed him — he along with all of the Czech New Wave filmmakers came roaring out of the gate in the mid-1960’s just as Kafka gained some regard among the Czech intelligentsia. I have no idea if Svankmajer studied Welles’s film, but in the specific case of Něco z Alenky there are several strong visual connections: repeated doors and passageways, sometimes leading to remote and unexpected spaces (often literally via a cut in Welles’s case); outrageous differences in scale, specifically between a person and a door in the Alice story and in one Trial shot; objects piling up and becoming obstacles (mountains of paper in The Trial; socks and other items in Alice), and many more — just the decayed and decaying look of the spaces in the two films are similar.

Gilliam’s Brazil is also clearly influenced by both Kafka and by the Welles film; again there are direct visual connections, most notably the never-ending office with rows of clerks at desks, and again the pile of paperwork (a bed for the Perkins and Romy Schneider characters to make love in, an instrument of suppression and murder for Robert De Niro). Just as I began work on this piece, I saw Ex Machina in theaters (look for a #WTW Glance someday), and I was struck by its incredible use of an extant location to create an otherworldly atmosphere; it would be impossible to separate Ex Machina in its final form from the amazing Juvet Landscape Hotel in Norway, which stands in for the Oscar Isaac character’s remote home and research compound. This in turn reminds me of Brazil’s use of locations such as the empty flour mill that creates the “futuristic” ministry offices and the power station cooling tower in which Jonathan Pryce is tortured; and now of The Trial’s amazing use of the Gare d’Orsay, an abandoned Paris train station, to create most of the film’s interiors: the Advocate’s office, the law courts, the endless rotting corridors, doors, and random rooms.

The exteriors, as well, are simply found spaces in Yugoslavia (the Czech Republic was not a location option for Welles in 1962) and its Brutalist concrete apartment buildings, open fields, and an “industrial fairground” in Zagreb which (along with a truly staggering number of extras) allowed Welles to create the tracking shots of the office where Perkins works. Welles said in interviews that this space was larger than any soundstage then in existence, which means that these images inevitably nag at our brains (pre-CGI, anyway) as impossibly vast, at least in comparison with contemporary films. There are loads of other examples of filmic found-spaces, often used to represent totalitarian cultures, oddly enough; see George Lucas’s first feature THX-1138, for example, and its use of the tunnels and stations of the just-constructed BART subway system in San Francisco. I’m sure someone’s already done their entire film-studies thesis just on the use of transportation tunnels and waiting rooms in these films; in the case of The Trial, Welles lucked into the Gare d’Orsay when other plans fell through, and he immediately connected the train station with the ghosts of all the people who had used it throughout the decades, including prisoner transport to Germany during World War II, “...a place of great sorrow.”**

There are endless other bits of memories and film connections jogged by The Trial. It’s silly, but the little girls who rush up the steps to the painter’s studio made me think of the opening scene of Richard Lester’s The Knack...And How to Get It where an endless stream of swinging-London girls are lined up on the steps waiting for their turn in Ray Brooks’s apartment; there is a similar sense of underlying menace.

I’ve also come to love actor Akim Tamiroff through his repeated appearances in late Welles projects (Touch of Evil, Mr. Arkadin a.k.a. Confidential Report) and, unexpectedly, all over my movie collection (Alphaville, The Great McGinty, even the original Ocean’s 11!) — he’s just one of those actors with so much versatility and who is always a delight to see. Here he is the ruined Bloch, K.’s fellow petitioner of Welles’s Advocate (and, suggested, creepily, a fellow sexual partner of his assistant Leni). Tamiroff is always great — for me he’s like a Slavic version of Michael Redgrave.

Special section: A few visual notes

So first we have the opening pinboard shots created by Alexeïeff and Parker. I was disappointed at first to realize that this section was not fully animated; it’s a set of stills (which of course works well for the projector scene at the end). But then I turned to one of the many “dark” sections of my disc collection — DVDs that I had to have over the past 15 years, purchased, and have not (to date) watched . . . . Some long-ago review (who am I kidding? it’s clearly DVD Savant’s) triggered a purchase of the Facets disc The Animation of Alexeïeff, which contains all of the films created with this technique, including several French commercials. So I wound up watching them all, including a short documentary piece in which the animators demonstrate how the pinboard works for a class of respectful art students. The fact that you can watch the entire output of a unique art form in under a couple of hours is a testament to how difficult and time-consuming pinboard animation is; it took Alexeïeff and Parker years to create animation that lasts mere minutes. The Trial is the only use of a pinboard in a commercial film, and with the history of the form in mind, it looks like another of Welles’s genius moves, bringing an obscure art form from the European avant-garde into service of his storytelling.

When we first see Perkins, it’s immediately apparent that he’s a perfect embodiment of K. — his lanky thinness exudes fussiness, propriety; he’s reminiscent of the line drawings that Kakfa himself did for the manuscript, included in many printed editions of the novel.

In addition to the Brazil connections already mentioned, The Trial naturally features scene after scene of figures watching Perkins from the background, usually the two policemen who are following him but sometimes others (as with this fleeting shot of someone in the apartment block across the way, hard to see in this picture but unmistakably there). Gilliam similarly put several shadowy characters in the background of his film, including himself.

Along with the tremendous found-space sets that Welles employed — the train station, the industrial fairground — he was able to secure huge numbers of extras, whom he choreographs into vast arrays of swiveling heads and staring eyes, and who sometimes exclaim or cheer in concert. Perkins’s first entry into the courtroom, led hand-in-hand by a little boy, is an example, with a huge audience of spectators, blending into the raised dais of advocates and judges — spectators? or are they all functionaries of the court of one kind or another?

The run-down spaces function literally, of course, as uncared-for government offices and corridors, but sometimes they approach the surreal in their configuration; Perkins moves through spaces that evoke Escher’s Relativity and his other engravings of “impossible” buildings, in this case through similar angles.

Among many surprising (and unexplained) visuals in the movie, at one point Perkins wanders through a field of elderly, half-naked people frozen in place, each labeled with a number. Their staring faces are the focus of the scene; it’s like something Bergman would do. It’s hard not to imagine that Welles is thinking specifically of Bergman, and other pitch-black international filmmakers like Tarkovsky or Bresson.



I’ve already mentioned the focus on papers and manuscripts above; the key shot is Romy Schneider and Perkins making love in a pile of abandoned papers, watched over by a judge’s portrait (on its side, as if in a bed, like the Advocate in the other room); papers throughout the film are an obvious impediment to Perkins, never completed, never informative, and the network of informants, policemen, lawyers and judges seem to accomplish nothing beyond endless watching.

Welles created deservedly famous shots around mirrors in Citizen Kane (Kane receding into an infinite mirror corridor) and The Lady from Shanghai (the final confrontation in the funhouse), but The Trial boasts mirror games at an entirely new level of sophistication. In this scene, Perkins is walking down a bank of mirrored panes of glass; one pane is missing, and Schneider is standing there instead — but the bookcases which are mirrored from one room almost match the ones in the adjacent room, so Schneider appears to be an apparition — as if she exists only in a reflection. The effect is disquieting!

And it leads to amazing compositions like this: Perkins and Schneider are just standing and talking to each other; in their world, nothing would seem amiss. But from our perspective, Perkins is forced to talk to Schneider’s back. Once I’d fixated on this shot, I was excited to find variations on it elsewhere; look at the second still, in which, again, two characters are having a perfectly normal face-to-face discussion, but the arrangement of actors and mirrors in the shot means that we see Perkins talking to a person who faces his back. These are masterful uses of film to convey mood and meaning; visual compositions that match Kafka’s literary devices to represent alienation and paranoia (even as we confront our antagonist, he stands ready to stab us in the back).

Welles’s use of light and shadow is often incredible, of course, but some of the compositions go beyond the unexpected; as part of Perkins’s run from the artist’s wood-slatted studio, in one shot he’s suddenly running down a corridor composed of similar slats. For me, the end result actually evokes the pinboard stills, with a similar texture, but in real life:

The recurrence of those stills as slides projected on a screen is very much a Wellesian touch — think of the Citizen Kane opening, with the projected newsreel in the screening room — but the sense of unease is heightened here with lighting choices that read to the eye as impossible: If Perkins is standing between the projector and the screen, he can’t be a shadow; he’d be in the beam. This arrangement also changes between shots. If you’ve read the book (or the source fable) it’s interesting that K’s head is floating in “the radiance that issues from the Law” which the guard by the gate must always keep his back to; here the Advocate in shadow is filling that guard role, as if to indicate that although K. will always remained frustrated by his inability to advance, he does come to some form of enlightenment regarding his own fate — consistent at least with Welles's conception of the character.

But then — the guilt!

Anthony Perkins is a stunning actor. I haven’t personally seen him in many non-Psycho roles, and that’s completely unfair to him — this movie proves that he’s got formidable acting chops, including a great sense of comic timing. I vaguely remember him in Catch-22; I should look for some more of his earlier work.

Having watched this relatively recent restoration (from 2012, I think), I’ve now seen (or own) all of Welles’s twelve completed feature films with the exception of his Shakespeare adaptation Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff). I was hoping for a full Criterion edition one of these days, or maybe a blu-ray like the Macbeth disc from Olive Films. And just a few months ago, in February, Steven Morowitz and Joel Bender of Distribpix Inc. found a pristine print, so I (along with my expert-in-filmed-Shakespeare friend Bardfilm) am on pins and needles awaiting some kind of announcement of a new video version. T'would be wondrous to behold!

I own several Welles films, documentaries, and books, but the treasure of everybody’s collection is Simon Callow’s meticulously researched three-part biography Orson Welles. Except to date we only have part one (The Road to Xanadu) and part two (Hello, Americans), bringing the detailed account of Welles’s life up to 1947. Part three (One Man Band), desperately awaited for 8 years, is supposedly coming in December and will include (one expects) the production story of The Trial. I wish I had it at hand, although truth be told I’m probably lucky that I don’t — Callow’s pages of analysis on Welles’s projects (films, plays, radio productions and other works) covered in the first two parts are definitive. When I (when the world!) finally gets to read Callow on The Trial, I may have to come back here and put some real insights into the comments.

Pitch:

Welles’s visuals — his dramaturgy, actually; his packing of performance, acting rhythm, sound, set design, and the final visuals in any given scene — are wondrous. So many of the episodes are winners, but the one that had me actually agape is the late-act scene with the portrait artist. There are plenty of written and filmed metaphors of man under surveillance by society, but I’ve never imagined one as witty, novel, or — after the laughter — as troubling as the artist who cannot escape the perpetual, probing, prepubescent eyes of his “fans.”

* I offer an apology to anyone who might find my usage of “Czech Republic” for the current nation incorrect or offensive; I recognize that this is not a settled matter for everyone. However, as far as I can tell, in the U.S. this is the correct current nomenclature.

** Huw Weldon BBC interview with Welles from 1962, transcript hosted by Wellesnet.

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#WTW: The Prisoner

(#WhatThomWatched Number Fifteen....)

The Prisoner

(1967-1968, Don Chaffey/Pat Jackson/Patrick McGoohan/David Tomblin; A&E Home Video disc set)

This singular television program ran on BBC competitor channel ITV (the “I” is for “independent”) for 17 episodes. It set a bar for how challenging a show can be that has rarely been passed since. It’s not fully successful, but it’s never less than provocative and far-reaching. Unlike most television, it is the creative vision of a single person — Patrick McGoohan, its creator and star, author or co-author of some episodes, credited or uncredited director of others. Some of the episodes still rank with the finest television shows ever broadcast; some fail now only because their tricks or themes have been copied so many times since then; and still others fail because they represent such a huge conceptual reach that audiences then (and still now) can’t find its wavelength. But it’s always, at any point, thoroughly entertaining.

The Prisoner has a simple conceit: In the opening credits (with no audible dialogue, over a driving theme from Ron Grainer, also the composer of the iconic Doctor Who theme), the protagonist steers his mod convertible into a London parking garage, storms into a secure office with a letter of resignation, and causes a desk-pounding, teacup-spilling scene. He then speeds home with the proverbial smile-playing-about-his-lips, too focused on his upcoming island vacation to note the black hearse and top-hatted men following him. After being gassed and abducted, he wakes up in a posh apartment to discover that, along with hundreds of other (presumably) former spies and intelligence assets of unspecified nations and political orientations, he is a prisoner of the Village. This is apparently some sort of organized retirement for folks who served god-and-country and are too dangerous (or are too tempting as targets) to live freely, but our man chafes at the forced anonymity — each resident is known only by an assigned code number — and at the authority figures’ one repeated question for him: Why did he decide to resign? Now known only as Number Six, he explores the comfortable confines of the genteel (and escape-resistant) Village while being subjected to a series of complex mind games designed to wrest the answer from him, unsure at any moment who he can trust but always bedeviled by his lead jailor/torturer/inquisitor, Number Two. It’s a nigh-perfect hook for an episodic show, although its creators were wise to limit it to 17 installments — the hero can stay ahead of the captors, but he still has to lose every week — he cannot escape.

Over this premise McGoohan and co-creators George Markstein and David Tomblin layered an almost absurd (and often absurdist) amount of surrealistic detail, often choosing the boldest and least-expected visual over a more conventional one even at the expense of the narrative. This includes Village residents in incongruous costumes essaying incongruous leisure activities, a silent cadre of efficient henchmen-and-women who appear to arrange things behind the scenes, surveillance footage viewable by the leadership which can include any location and shots from improbable camera angles, a bevy of mysterious instrument panels and sinister contraptions, endless syringes and shots forcibly given which convey any magical outcome (up to and including switching two persons’ selves into the other bodies), and so on.

And typical to the show’s tone, lead antagonist Number Two is played by a different actor each week; as time goes on it becomes clear that each leader’s failure to break Number Six is resulting in them being replaced by some impenetrable management structure (Number One, possibly?), but for the first several episodes this is just another in a pile-up of disorienting detail which keeps us just as confused as Six. 

It's a feast, visually, and one that continually rewards careful watching. Signs and posters in the background feature Orwellian slogans, all rendered in the Victorian font used throughout the Village. Costumes are opulent and colorful and often dress residents in contrast to their actual functions. And many scenes are blocked and framed to emphasize confusion, mysterious purpose, and layers of reality; the shot below, taken from the key location of Number Two's control room, is a good example of this: facilitated communication via multiple devices; machinery with mysterious purpose, often (as here) outscaling its human operators; and reality interacting with mitigated reality on giant screens:

Watching the documentary that comes with the A&E 40th anniversary disc set (Don’t Knock Yourself Out, from 1997), it’s clear that not everyone associated with the show is on the same page about McGoohan (who does not participate). The series is indelible because of where it goes in the last several episodes, which were completely taken over by McGoohan; some of his colleagues think he was a genius who knew exactly what he was doing, and others speculate that he deliberately took the series off the rails because he was stuck — but there’s no doubt that what he did is unique, compelling, and an honest attempt to say something (and be) different. The last two episodes are still bracing and unexpected when viewed today. The Prisoner was clearly highly influential in many ways, and yet the ending doesn’t resemble anything else on television then or now — it’s closer to a highly intellectualized theater piece.

Reminds me of:

Stylish British 1960’s secret-agent shows, at least at first — obviously I’m reminded of my childhood public television discovery of The Avengers and all those kinky John Steed and Emma Peel costumes (even the Catherine Gale years had an indelible impact on impressionable minds). Those shows were flashier and less ideological but they still seemed to push the limits of television. 

That’s superficial, though: It’s more interesting to consider which other dramatic series have been so much a product of an auteur with a singular vision. David Lynch’s 1990-1991 run of Twin Peaks not only held a similar cachet but was also very peculiar (almost beyond reason) and also let down a large percentage of its fan base when it could not bring all of its story threads and themes to a satisfyingly neat conclusion. The last few episodes of Prisoner at least manage to say exactly what its auteur McGoohan wanted to say: some of the passages are nonsensical, but others have undeniable power, with imagery as fine as any the series has to offer — and all of them would be unthinkable as a conventional product of television-by-committee.

When The Prisoner was originally airing in Britain, it would inevitably have played on the public’s fervor for and familiarity with the previous Danger Man series, in which McGoohan played secret agent John Drake. McGoohan can certainly play other roles and could have created a distinct agent character, but instead he seems to be deliberately and cannily connecting his previous project to this one. Many actors from Danger Man show up again here; the deeply researched Danger Man fansite identifies fifty-six such crossovers, though in no case can an actor be definitively said to be playing the same character in each show. Of course that didn’t stop the theorist-fans from finding connections that “prove” Danger Man’s John Drake is Number Six — after all, any former colleagues or opponents that Drake might have known would be similarly under alias or assigned a number in the Village of The Prisoner. Even without considering the earlier show, the heavy reuse of actors and very few recurring roles (with just a couple of exceptions) adds to the sense of disorientation.

But then — the guilt!

I’d never seen Danger Man and my experience of watching The Prisoner really made me fall for McGoohan. I’m now eager to see it and fortunately for me Shout! Factory did a new DVD set a few months ago which includes all of the earlier shows — literally, two different but tightly related British series (39 half-hour episodes between 1960-1962 and then 47 hour-long episodes in a revamped format from 1964-1967; confusingly called Secret Agent in their U.S. runs). I understand that it’s frothier and more conventional, but even the possibility that his character John Drake is destined to become Number Six makes me want to see it. Though note: At 17 discs, it’ll be a while before the #WTW comes out.

I’d also like to start seeking out some of McGoohan’s film performances. Silver Streak (where he plays the big bad) was one of my favorite films as a kid, but I don’t remember him over the Pryor and Wilder shenanigans. I also noticed the other day that The Quare Fellow, one of those items in my Netflix streaming queue which appeared there at some point in the past (so long ago that I can’t remember why — I’m sure you have yours too) is a starring role for McGoohan from 1962 — I will bump it just a smidge upward in my eventual inevitability index. (And yes, I realize he’s in Scanners. Which has a new Criterion edition, spine #712.)

Pitch:

It takes a bit to warm up to McGoohan here — he’s prickly, self-righteous and uncompromising. But you can’t take your eyes off him. Give him an episode and a half and you’ll be hooked. The middle eight or so stand with the best television episodes in existence, and even with the problems that start to crop up, you’ll want to stay tuned through the sometimes bitter end.

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