Making Connections Based on Themes in The Trial

The film The Trial is based on the novel of the same name by Franz Kafka, and without a doubt, translates quite easily to the screen in so much as it retains all of the qualities of any Kafka work – severe, questioning, dream-like and hyper-real.


Anthony Perkins plays “the accused” in this film, and Orson Welles takes on the role of the narrator (and advocate) offering advice on his behalf. Delusions of persecution abound – is Josef K. (Perkins) a victim of society? Perkins’s character claims he is not so much a victim, but rather a member of society. Are we then to believe that with membership in society, it is a de facto result that we will experience persecution? Further, without the law(s) and without order, all seems to be lost in the film.

Amidst the chaos of the entire universe, Josef K. experiences the action of the film: his life on trial. And as he is sentenced, so the entire universe is simultaneously sentenced to lunacy. Ultimately, one has to consider that even in its worst version, the Law run amok, isn’t it still somehow better than chaos?

Where The Trial Connects With Other Works

The Trial also grapples with themes of guilt and innocence, and how the individual is always somehow (at least marginally) implicated in the crimes of the many – namely, the Institution, capital “I.” Another place this leads me to is Camus, and the book The Stranger, wherein a crime is committed, although one of passion, perhaps, and then the individual is subject to judgment by the rules of the many, or the Institution, in this case, again, the Law.

Playing out this relationship of tangent to tangent, this also then made me re-consider William Kentridge’s History of the Main Complaint (1996) which I was fortunate enough to see last month at the SFMOMA. Is it colonialism’s attempt to bring “order” to a strange land through the rule of Law that makes me think of a relationship among all these elements?

Post copyright 2009 Matty Byloos