The cinema must show what Kafka refused to name. That obligation changes everything.
The Problem of the Visible
Kafka's power is inseparable from withholding. The Castle exists at the end of a road K. never quite reaches; the court in The Trial convenes in rooms that may or may not be there; Gregor Samsa's transformed body is described just precisely enough to resist a single fixed image. The prose keeps meaning in suspension. Film, by its nature, cannot. The moment a camera points at anything, that thing is decided.
This is the central problem every adapter faces, and it is not merely technical. It touches the deepest question about what Kafka's fiction is doing.
Welles and the Concrete Nightmare
Orson Welles's The Trial (Le Procès) — released in 1962, based on Kafka's novel — remains the most sustained attempt to bring a Kafka novel to the screen, and the most honest about what that attempt costs. Welles himself acknowledged the contradiction: he admired the book and knew that admirers make dangerous adapters. His solution was not to simulate Kafka's ambiguity but to replace it with a different aesthetic register altogether — the overwhelming, expressionist grotesque.
He shot largely in the abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris, using its vast derelict spaces to produce a world of bureaucratic enormity rather than bureaucratic vagueness. Anthony Perkins plays Josef K. with a twitchy, almost guilty energy that tilts the character toward complicity in a way the novel deliberately refuses to settle. The film is forceful, strange, and visually extraordinary — but it is a Welles film that takes Kafka as its occasion, not a transcription of what Kafka wrote.
That distinction matters not as a criticism but as a description. Welles closed off the novel's interpretive openness with a specific visual argument. On whether Josef K. is guilty of something — one of the genuine unanswered questions in the text — Perkins's performance leans toward yes. The court scenes are not frustrating labyrinths so much as vivid, almost theatrical displays of power. The novel's queasy irresolution becomes, on screen, a confident nightmare.
After Welles
Later adaptations have tended to circle the same problem from different angles. Steven Soderbergh's Kafka (1991) takes a different approach: rather than adapt a specific text, it uses the biographical figure of Kafka himself as a character in a thriller built from the furniture of his fiction. The result is more homage than adaptation, and sidesteps the central problem by not claiming to translate any single work. It is a film about the cultural idea of Kafka, which is a more manageable subject than Kafka's prose.
Michael Haneke's Austrian television production of Das Schloß (1997) attempts something more disciplined. Haneke, alert to the resistance in Kafka's material, does not attempt to resolve where the novel refuses to — but television's visual logic still imposes a specific K., a specific village, a specific woman named Frieda. What the camera fixes, the imagination no longer roams.
What the Comparison Reveals
The interest of watching these films lies partly in what they teach about the source. Every cinematic choice is an interpretation that the prose kept open. Where is the court? Welles answers with an abandoned railway station. What does the Castle look like? Haneke provides one. Every answer forecloses the productive uncertainty that makes the novels rereadable for different reasons in different decades.
This does not mean that The Trial as Kafka left it cannot be filmed — only that filming it requires accepting that the medium's specificity will become part of the meaning. The best adaptations work as arguments about the text, not substitutes for it. Welles made the strongest argument, in the strongest cinematic idiom, and it is still worth watching precisely as a disagreement with the book it is drawn from.
The ambiguity Kafka built into his prose is not a surface quality that a clever director can preserve by keeping the lighting uncertain. It is structural. Film and prose are different kinds of knowing, and Kafka — by luck or design — wrote for the kind film cannot reach.
End of article · Afterlives