Metamorphosis
The Wish To Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema 2024 / Die Verwandlung / Germany 1975
Synopsis
Jan Němec emigrated in 1974 as one of the key figures of Czechoslovak cinema and undeniably the most progressive of them. In West Germany he adapted Kafka’s Metamorphosis for German and Austrian television, a project he had been working on ten years earlier. Back then, in a short introduction, Němec described the concept he would later apply in his television film as well: “Metamorphosis tells of the turbulent destiny of Gregor Samsa. And we are attempting, with the aid of a camera, to look at the world from his perspective for the duration of his life: This means that the film will be a wholly subjective account: We never see Gregor Samsa; his every movement, his every gesture, will be rendered by the camera.”
Lorenzo Esposito
About the film
55 min / Black & white, Data Files
Director Jan Němec
/ Screenplay Jan Němec podle stejnojmenného románu / based on the novel of the same name by Franz Kafka
/ Dir. of Photography Nicole Gasquet, Thomas Mauch
/ Music Eugen Illin
/ Editor Horst Rossberger
/ Art Director Gerd Krauss
/ Production Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF)
/ Cast Heinz Bennent, Zdenka Procházková, Edwige Pierre, Achim Strietzel, Tamara Kafka, Gunnar Holm-Petersen
/ Sales ZDF Studios GmbH
About the director
Jan Němec (1936 – 2016, Prague). Selected fimography: Diamonds of the Night (1964), The Party and the Guests (1966), Oratorio for Prague (1968, short doc.), Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1975), Landscape of My Heart (2004), The Wolf from Royal Vineyard Street (2016).
Contacts
ZDF Studios GmbH
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