The Trial
Orson Welles translates the suffocating logic of Franz Kafka into a cinematic nightmare that is as poetic as it is unsettling.
K., an office clerk, is arrested one morning. Why, by whom, and on what grounds remains unknown. What follows is not a search for innocence, but a descent into a world where rules are impenetrable and every attempt at defense only tightens the system’s grip.
Welles situates Kafka’s universe within a desolate, bureaucratic modernity steeped in Cold War paranoia. Endless office spaces, mechanical routines, and anonymous architecture form the backdrop of a society in which the individual dissolves into structures no one seems to control. The Yugoslav locations further heighten this sense of estrangement—recognizable, yet entirely unmoored.
Where conventional courtroom dramas revolve around evidence and verdict, the true horror here lies elsewhere. Not in punishment, but in the vacuum that precedes it. The accusation itself becomes an existential condition—a shadow that clings to K., detached from time, cause, or logic. His guilt appears not established, but predetermined.
Initially met with indifference, THE TRIAL is now regarded as one of the most accomplished adaptations of Kafka’s work. According to Welles himself this is his finest film; according to Romy Schneider, the only one in which she did not recognize herself.
Read here an in-depth analysis of the 2022 film by our colleague and programmer Lennart Soberon at KASK Cinema (HoGent). Soberon is also a postdoctoral researcher in film at the VUB.
DE GENOMEN BENEN IN DE NOR
FC Dollyshot and De Cinema join forces once again, this time for an open-air screening series this summer at De Nor (Middelheimlaan 59, 2020 Antwerpen)—the free-spirited space run by visual artist Dennis Tyfus in Middelheim Park. DE GENOMEN BENEN (THE GREAT ESCAPE) brings together three films from the 1950s and 60s that approach imprisonment as a system, a mental condition, and a struggle for escape.
In THE TRIAL, Orson Welles presents a world without logic: a trial without charges, a system that never stops. LE TROU (15/07) by Jacques Becker follows five men and one plan—no heroics, only precision. In UN CONDAMNÉ À MORT S’EST ÉCHAPPÉ (19/08), Robert Bresson reduces escape to pure discipline.
A triptych on resistance—from system to body, from collective to individual. One Wednesday evening per month: as the sun sets, the projector flickers to life.
