Black and Blue

Though we didn't view the film in its entirety, I have a feeling that watching too much of Orson Welles' adaptation of The Trial might just have ruined a beautiful Thursday. The black and grey of K.'s world with its strange sense of industrial attics, contrasted with the dark blue and bright white of the sky outside our classroom window, made for a class that was at once torturous and intriguing.

I'll be the first to say that last Thursday was "one of those days." Attending class to talk about The Trial after CT's bout with the rain seemed to betray the waiting I'd done, cloistered in my dorm room, waiting for a dry spell so I could run to get lunch. However, upon watching several key scenes from later in the film, I gradually began to appreciate what Welles was attempting. Steel girders slapped across bookshelves in the house of a lawyer: something's gotta be in play.

What most interested me was how much larger some of the book's settings were depicted on camera. Take that same lawyer's house, for instance. Whereas Kafka offers readers a sense of claustrophobia in the lawyer's abode (which goes to show how stifling the law can be), Welles' sound stage looked like a wing out of Bruce Wayne's mansion. I interpret this to be something that Welles did to put K.'s feeble defense in perspective with the giant of the law. This keen difference distracted me from the blue sky outside the classroom (that's where the 'intriguing' comes in) and made it all the more desirable once the picture stopped ('torturous').