The Trial 1962

The Trial

1962 · France, Italy, West Germany · Directed by Orson Welles

StrangeMysteryBleak Best saved for later · For patient viewers Drama

A man is arrested without being detained and drawn through a legal system that never states the charge against him.

Edited by Monocurator

The Trial: the film and Kafka’s ending

Compare Josef K.’s final encounter with the published novel and Welles’s explanation of his changes.

Does Josef K. die, and why does Welles change the ending? · Ending spoilers

What happens in the film and novel

Josef K. dies in Welles’s film. At the quarry, he laughs at the men sent to kill him; an explosion brings the encounter to an end. The laugh gives his final response a defiant quality, even though it does not save his life.

In Chapter Ten of Kafka’s novel, the men pass a knife between them. K. thinks he should take it and kill himself, but does not. One man restrains him while the other stabs him. The published ending is therefore a killing by the executioners, despite K.’s troubled thoughts about co-operating.

How Welles explains the change

In his 1962 BBC interview with Huw Wheldon, Welles says he wanted K. to remain defiant. He explicitly confirms that K. is murdered in the film. Welles connects his revision to the Holocaust, arguing that he could not present the earlier ending unchanged after the Nazi death camps. That is the director’s explanation of his adaptation; it does not establish what Kafka would have written later.

Jonathan Lethem’s Criterion essay reports that the smoke’s resemblance to a mushroom cloud was unintended. Production circumstances then prevented Welles from replacing the image. A nuclear reading is possible for a viewer, but it should remain distinct from Welles’s stated intention.

What to expect

Welles turns Kafka’s bureaucracy into vast offices, cramped rooms, shifting scales, and crowds that make accusation spatial. Anthony Perkins gives Josef K. enough nervous resistance to keep the nightmare active rather than purely passive.

How to ease in

Do not try to solve the charge. Follow where Josef is permitted to stand, whom he believes can help, and how each attempted explanation gives the system another way to define him.

Heads-up

A quick, non-exhaustive note Includes institutional persecution, sexual coercion, psychological distress, violence, and an oppressive unresolved structure.
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A man is arrested without being detained and drawn through a legal system that never states the charge against him.

I see every doorway promise an explanation and deliver another audience. Josef keeps speaking as if the right sentence could restore ordinary life, while the spaces insist that ordinary life has already been absorbed.

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I see every doorway promise an explanation and deliver another audience. Josef keeps speaking as if the right sentence could restore ordinary life, while the spaces insist that ordinary life has already been absorbed.

— Momo

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