The temporal and geographical distortions that characterizes Kafka’s prose seems particularly difficult to adapt to the language of cinema. The Trial, his best-known novel, is characterized by its lack of forward motion, sending its protagonist on frantic narrative loops that continuously frustrate his desire for progress. Aside from its opening chapter, the book is pointedly free of any references to time and any routine events that would give the reader an indication of how much time has passed (i.e. sleeping, dining, showering). The whole plot could take place over a weekend or several months. Welles re-enforces this sensation on a filmic level, as there are no nighttime or evening shots in the film, which gives the impression that the action is unfolding in a perpetual daytime.
It’s K’s aim to gather information, then to use this information to contextualize his present situation and thus prevent himself from being convicted. The driving force of the novel is K repeatedly searching for and being denied access to this information, and, instead, any attempt he makes to get a clearer picture of his situation only leading him to more questions and increasing his sense of uncertainty. Crucially, K is always kept at a fundamental remove from the court itself and has to engage with it indirectly through a myriad range of representatives. As a result, the universe appears random and incomprehensible; K frantically undertakes a desperate search for concrete truth while failing to make any substantial progress. Welles communicates this sensation status and circularity on a formal level using lengthy, serpentine tracking shots that hover around a particular point of focus, circle back to the same composition several times, and continuously re-frame where the audience would typically expect a cut. The prolonged lengths of the shots create a sense of elongated time and frustrates our desire for forward motion, resulting in a sensation of anxiety, restlessness, and immobilization.
Take, for example, an early, dialogue-heavy scene in which K is awoken in his room by a policeman. For most directors, this would be simple to shoot: start with a master shot that clearly establishes the bedroom’s layout, then alternate between complementary close-ups of K and the policeman talking. In Welles’ hands, however, it unfolds in one shot. Though the camera is constantly re-framing – in tune with K’s movements – almost all of the compositions are wide or medium two-shots, and the shot is orchestrated around 3 recurring angles: one looks directly at the front door, with K – framed from the waist-up – in the foreground and the policeman in mid-ground, slightly left of center and taking up a thin sliver of the frame; one features both K and the policeman framed in full shot, with the policeman filling the left third of the composition (now the largest figure in the frame) and K standing against the right wall of the room, a large chunk of negative space separating them; one features K in medium-shot, the upper-half of his body taking up the entire left half of the screen, and the policeman squeezed into the right third. This sequence is therefore built on an intentionally frustrating mixture of momentum and stasis, which is heightened when a second policeman unceremoniously enters to replace the first, yet the visual scheme doesn’t change – which makes sense thematically, as this policeman simply parrots what the first was saying, again offering no clear answers. Throughout this scene, ambient noise is dialed down to the point of near-muteness except the sound of a ticking clock, which is amplified to further heighten the sense of pressure. Additionally, because there are no reverse-angle or establishing shots of the room, its layout remains vague. This leads to one particularly disorientating camera move a few minutes into the scene, in which K walks behind his bed – which the viewer has been led up to this point to believe is positioned against the back wall of the room – to suddenly reveal an expanse of space. The bed is abruptly revealed to lie in the center of the room, greatly undercutting the viewer’s perceived sense of on-screen space.
The compositions are often very architectural, often filled with low-hanging ceilings, imposing walls, and prominent floors. A myriad of structural materials such as tunnels, hallways, doorframes, and columns often frame the action. This sense of a networked, maze-like landscape that’s hostile, claustrophobic and difficult to navigate. In addition, K is frequently placed very small in the frame, making him appear overwhelmed by the environment, and is sometimes the only element off-balancing an otherwise neat composition. The city appears engulfing and all-consuming, and the lack of interior and establishing shots creates a sense of perpetual confinement – the gulf between private and public space, transitional and concrete, increasingly dissipates. Additionally, Welles largely refrains from using establishing shots that would help the viewer to understand how the locations relate to each other spatially; increasingly, Welles restricts the action to a series of single rooms – self-contained, enclosed spaces – without clearly delineated boundaries, which makes it difficult to tell when K has significantly changed location. The geography grows increasingly vague as the film goes on, with fewer and fewer transitional spaces. K is hardly ever shown in a transition between locations, there’s just a direct transition from him in one to him in another.
Interiors appear immensely large and intimidating, an effect largely created through Welles’ near-constant use of wide angle lenses, which emphasizes the size of rooms, often making them appear impossibly huge (and many of the elements of the set are disproportionately, almost comically large – such as the door outside the Tribunal and K’s office floor), while also slightly distorts space, creating the sense of a disorientated mental perspective while emphasizing the colossal indifference of these inhuman structures. As in Kafka, these low-key abstractions are used to plunge us into a landscape equal parts an externalization of an existential state and an absurdist, hyperbolic re-imagining of post-industrial institutions, which deliberately foster individual disorientation as a method of indoctrination.