Kafka on screen: the trials and metamorphoses of Kafkaesque cinema
One hundred years after his death, the anxious and alienated fictions of Franz Kafka still haunt and fascinate filmmakers, many of whom have tried to capture that Kafkaesque atmosphere.
¡Que viva Kafka! On 3 June 2024, the 100th anniversary of his death, the Prague literary giant featured in one biopic playing in European cinemas – Judith Kaufmann and Georg Maas’ romantically oriented The Glory of Life. Meanwhile, cameras were rolling on another, Agnieszka Holland’s “kaleidoscopic mosaic” Franz, at Barrandov Studios on the outskirts of the city where he was born in 1883.
That neither Kaufmann, Maas nor Holland are themselves Czech is unsurprising, given how Kafka’s filmmaking compatriots have tended to avoid direct contact with his complicated legacy. During the period of Soviet-dominated, communist-ruled Czechoslovakia that lasted from 1948 to 1989, Kafka – while never formally banned – was certainly disapproved of in official circles. In 1987, a Los Angeles Times correspondent was able to write: “It is hard for readers to associate Kafka with Prague in the way they associate Dublin with James Joyce or Paris with Marcel Proust. The Czech government feels no pressure from tourists demanding to see sites described in the works of Kafka.”
Thirty-seven years later, Kafka is one of Prague’s prime, most inescapably visible visitor-magnets. He is as celebrated at home as he is revered abroad. But while his impact on global cinema has been immense – one of the few real points of creative contact between Davids Lynch and Cronenberg is their ardent Kafkaphilia – his representation in Czech film remains relatively tiny. The only major Czech or Czechoslovakian director to adapt Kafka for the screen has been Jan Němec (most famous for 1964’s Diamonds of the Night). In 1975, Nemec essayed a bold, economic, 55-minute television version of The Metamorphosis – in which POV shots from the perspective of the hapless, insect-transformed Gregor Samsa obviate the need to depict the character directly – after fleeing to exile in West Germany.
The only Czechoslovakian, Czech or Slovak Kafka adaptation for cinema was made shortly after the declaration of the two new countries’ independence on 1 January 1993: Vladimír Michálek’s opulently appointed, visually striking Amerika (1994), shot at Barrandov. Both The Metamorphosis and Amerika were screened this summer in a 22-title retrospective at the Czech Republic’s most important cinema-related event, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), in the picturesque western Bohemia spa town that Kafka himself never actually visited. Co-curated by the festival’s artistic director Karel Och in collaboration with Lorenzo Esposito, the KVIFF retro (entitled The Wish to Be a Red Indian, after busy cinemagoer Kafka’s famed, film-inspired one-sentence prose-poem) included several Kafka adaptations. These included the better-known big-screen version of Amerika, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s determinedly austere Class Relations (Klassenverhältnisse, 1984), plus the single best-known example of Kafka on film, Orson Welles’ expressionist, unapologetically semi-faithful The Trial (1962).
Also present were titles engaging imaginatively with Kafka’s own life, most notably Steven Soderbergh’s quasi-biopic thriller Kafka (1991) and its recent silent-movie remix Mr Kneff (2021). There was also Peter Capaldi’s uproarious, Oscar-winning short Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1993), starring Richard E. Grant as a suitably bug-eyed version of the author, struggling with writer’s block during the composition of The Metamorphosis.
Capaldi’s jeu d’esprit certainly brings out all the humour in Kafka, a writer whose legendarily phantasmagoric explorations of paranoia, claustrophobia and bureaucratic oppression are no less effective for often being so darkly comical: when Kafka staged public readings of his work, he sometimes had problems finishing sentences due to his own doubled-up hysterics.
Kafka’s brilliant, precise-but-dreamy German prose, with its reinvention of legal and technical terminology (“He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him,” enthused Nabokov) poses obvious, severe problems in terms of translation into other languages and also in terms of transposition to other media. David Lynch wrote a screenplay of The Metamorphosis but abandoned the project over the specific issue of language.
Arguably the most successful examples of “Kafkaesque cinema” – as opposed to films which depict Kafkaesque situations, which are teemingly myriad – tend to be the funniest and the most oblique. Two outstanding examples in the Karlovy Vary retro, neither of them based on any specific Kafka text, were Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi (1968), a Senegalese production based on Sembène’s own novel about a feckless layabout who becomes enmeshed in a bureaucratic labyrinth, and Josef Kilián, a 38-minute 1963 short filmed on and around the streets of Prague by co-directors/writers Pavel Jurácek and Jan Schmidt.
Josef Kilián is perhaps the most remarkable cinematic fruit of an early-60s period of relative cultural “freedom” that followed the cautious de-Stalinisation initiatives of Czechoslovakian president Antonin Novotný. It appeared in the same year as the Liblice Conference of May 1963, an event organised by Marxist intellectuals to debate the life and work of Kafka (when his domestic renown and reputation were still very much at a low ebb), and which is now seen as an early harbinger of the 1968 Prague Spring.
An absurdist tale of a man who hires a pet from a cat-rental shop but who, when he goes to return the feline the next day, finds that the establishment has suddenly disappeared, Josef Kilián wittily deploys modish French New Wave devices – freeze-frames, impromptu interactions with passing-by members of the public – to sketch a self-contained vignette of sinister but cumulatively droll intensity. Laughter in the dark, indeed.
The Wish to Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema ran at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.