Highlights Archives
Classic Book & Movie Club: The Trial
The darkly surreal saga of Josef K, the man tried and convicted for unknown crimes in Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial, found its way onto the big screen with a splash in 1963 when Wisconsin native Orson Welles wrote, directed and starred in his film adaptation of the book. The Wisconsin Historical Society pays tribute to Welles' cinematic genius with a free public screening of the movie at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, January 22. This is the third film offering in the second year of the Classic Book and Movie Club series, a joint venture of the Society, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and The Capital Times.
Hailed by critics and moviegoers as cinema that transcends the film noir genre and ventures into the realm of psychological horror, The Trial unfolds in an unnamed but nightmarish city populated by an array of shadowy figures — all of them part of an incomprehensible process that Joseph K can neither control nor escape. Anthony Perkins stars as the hapless protagonist, and Welles plays The Advocate, supposedly charged with K's defense but who becomes a diabolical nemesis. Kafka's sinister tale, as told by Welles, paints a murky picture of a seemingly innocent man mired in a corrupt legal system he cannot comprehend, leading him to sink into paranoia, despair and hopelessness.
Some film critics, and Orson Welles himself, have called The Trial his best film — high praise indeed when you consider his other cinematic credits include such modern classics as Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. Welles' supremacy as a storyteller remains a powerful influence today. His infamous Halloween 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds went down in history as mass media's first wholesale public panic and provided the impetus for filmmakers to retell the story on the big screen — first Paramount Studios producer and special effects master George Pal in the 1950s, then Steven Spielberg in 2005.
Marc Silberman, professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will give a brief introduction to The Trial, then lead a post-screening discussion of it. Admission is free to the public on a first-come, first-served basis.
:: Posted January 20, 2006
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