A Trial Run

After viewing the opening scenes of Orson Welles's film adaptation of Kafka's The Trial, I wanted to blog a bit about its visual take on claustrophobia. The film opens in K's apartment, the ceiling of which hangs about two feet lower than most other ceilings I've seen in residencies. K is barely able to stand at full height and seems to be pressed down in his house, a notion closely related to the novel's assertion that we are not even safe from the hands of authority in our own dwellings. I'd even go further to say that because Welles shoots his scenes almost entirely from low angles, he's insinuating that even things familiar and homey to us may be turned into oppressors.

The difference lies in how the ceiling and shots become higher once K leaves his room. When he is eating his breakfast in the community dining room, the camera looks down on K and ceilings are nowhere to be found. I for one felt a little easier once he was seated at the table eating food, something familiar and normal. Perhaps this also had to do with the fact that someone friendly was serving him, a situation absent from his own bedroom. The presence of this friendly figure actually made the room bigger for me (or at least distracted me from the feeling isolation that otherwise pervades the building). I'm interested to see how locations other than K's apartment, especially the courtroom, play on these different forms of claustrophobia and safety.