The Wish To Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema

The Wish To Be a Red Indian

This June we mark the centenary of the final moments, the very last breaths, of the writer Franz Kafka, who passed away at a sanatorium in the Austrian town of Kierling, having eventually succumbed to the tuberculosis initially diagnosed in August 1917. As enigmatic as they were distinctive, both Kafka and his works have been defined with considerable insight by Milena Jesenská, though she had but a few hours available to write his obituary: “Kafka was a recluse, a wise man in dread of life. He was shy, anxious, meek and kind, yet the books he wrote are gruesome and painful. He saw the world as full of invisible demons, tearing apart and destroying defenceless humans. […] He was an artist and a man of such anxious conscience, that he could hear even where others, deaf, felt themselves secure.”

It is no coincidence that, while considering the title of a programme dedicated to cinematic reflections on Kafka’s work, we should ultimately have chosen a short story from the collection Contemplation (1912), the first of his books to have been published. In the context of this writer’s early literary endeavours, the piece in question is one of the most curious as well as the most difficult to fathom; it is reminiscent of a chiselled diamond, by means of which the author strives to lend form to both image and idea; with the aid of words he sets the stage. A supremely kinetic force is channelled by the magic of Kafka’s sentences; moving images – the content of which undergoes radical transformation – serve to exert a fascination upon us. Radiating from the text, in as many words, we find a class of imagination that could well be defined as cinematographic.

For decades, Kafka’s oeuvre has functioned as a continuing provocation to filmmakers. It is as if he were slyly challenging them to attempt to capture as authentically and intensely as possible the elusive nature of his formulations, of his narratives, of the realities he has crafted and the feelings of apprehension he elicits, yet also of the comic situations he has created. To reflect upon Kafka, to “see” Kafka, is a fascinating and never-ending process, not only for filmmakers. Implicit within this process is the ongoing need to sustain a certain mystical expectation of the much desired discovery of something fundamental in life, the understanding of one’s own existence. 

We could have approached the Kafka programme from many different angles; however, in this regard we have chosen to pursue two principal pathways. First, we present directors who, by means of either faithful or free adaptations, have resolved to enter into direct confrontation with Kafka and his evocative imagination; and, second, in an imaginary subsection one might call “influences”, we examine the concept of the “Kafkaesque”, whether attributable to a filmmaker, to a film or to our own era, the term “Kafkaesque” here to be understood as a form of shock wave passing through the greater part of cinematic history.

Orson Welles’s The Trial has arguably been the most frequently discussed Kafka adaptation over the past sixty or so years; after all, this film enacts a confrontation between two craftsmen and uncompromising titans in their given disciplines. Kafka’s short story A Hunger Artist received a politically alarming and turbulent update in the 2016 satire Artist of Fasting by Masao Adachi, the enfant terrible of Japanese film. As an exile in West Germany, the inimitable Jan Němec came up with a stirring piece of experimentation in his iconic Metamorphosis from 1975. Seven years earlier, this arresting figure of the Czechoslovak New Wave had set out to compete at Cannes; the festival, however, was cancelled half way through. One of Němec’s contenders was to have been German director Rudolf Noelte, who was putting forward his outstanding adaptation of the novel The Castle, the cast of which, alongside Maximilian Schell as the land surveyor K., also included Iva Janžurová. Vladimír Michálek conjured up a remarkable visual conception in his debut America (1994), an inherently postmodernist adaptation of Kafka’s novel The Man Who Disappeared.

The endless list of titles, whose creators, with laudable humility, acknowledge the cardinal influence of Kafka’s work, should also comprise the unjustly neglected film by Martin Scorsese from 1985 After Hours, or the Italian duo The Audience by Marco Ferreri and Federico Fellini’s Interview. As complements to this colourful group of Kafka-inspired filmmakers, we could likewise mention the Senegalese Ousmane Sembene (The Money Order), Roman Polanski (The Tenant) or Shin’ya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo). A striking example of the Kafkaesque, both in a domestic film context and beyond, is encountered in the artistry of Pavel Juráček and his celebrated Joseph Kilian.

And while we are on the subject, what was Kafka’s view of the cinematograph? In one of his travel diaries dating from early 1911, written while he was visiting Friedland (Frýdlant) and Reichenberg (Liberec), he describes his experience of the Kaiser Panorama, the predecessor of the cinematograph, an apparatus for viewing stereoscopic images. He first noted that “the scenes are more alive than in the cinematograph since they allow the eye the stillness of reality.” Then follows a singular observation, which has the potential to prompt many hours of reflection: “The cinematograph lends the observed objects the agitation of their movement, the stillness of the gaze seems more important.” Yet, being a person of contradictions, elsewhere he describes his assiduous attendance of film performances, perhaps also on account of the fact that the darkened motion-picture theatres provided a haven for this unconventional young man, a welcome refuge from the insidious oppressiveness of the world, a moment of liberating oblivion. And this is also where we are headed, accompanied by audiovisual interpreters of Kafka’s unparalleled writing, in a year which not only marks his anniversary, but also gives us the chance – through film – to return to his literary works and to allow ourselves once more to be drawn into the world of Franz Kafka.

Lorenzo Esposito & Karel Och