Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...different order. At two hours, it is far too long, no matter how good the stories. Last week a sensitive-and not always flattering-portrait of a New York City policeman was buried deep in the program. Sander Vanocur's evocative interview with Clay Shaw, portraying Shaw as Kafka's loseph K. in the Mardi Gras world of New Orleans, was the night's ninth story. First Tuesday's 50-minute investigation of the Army's chemical-biological warfare program, by far the best single story produced by either video magazine, came on after some...
...play takes place, according to the program, in "The Artist's Mind." What bugs this prisoner, unlike Kafka's "K." (see CINEMA), is not ignorance of his crime, but of how much time he has left to complete his creative projects. His jailers not only refuse to tell him, they make work impossible by badgering him with camaraderie and kindness-dropping in for chats, cleaning out his cell, entertaining him with inane games and tricks. Nothing these caricatures have to say is particularly trenchant or arresting. But the way they say it is an elegant example of inventive...
...works of Franz Kafka have been translated into every major language-except that of cinema. Orson Welles' film version of The Trial failed to crack the surface of bureaucratic terror and reveal the author's psychological insights. German Director Rudolf Noelte's adaptation of The Castle, Kafka's last, incomplete parable, fares little better...
...Kafka's heroes are like the sculptures of Giacometti: all elements of mask and attitude are burned away until only an irreducible essence remains. As the surveyor, Schell accurately embodies the man known only as "K." His agony and bewilderment are true, to the final exhausted syllable. The villagers are a finely balanced mixture of arrogance and dread. Kafka's tales all take place in limbo; the movie fills its snowbound setting with an unworldly black-comic air appropriate to the author, whom Thomas Mann called "a religious humorist." Pompous officials deliver pronunciamentos even when there...
...film version allows no such richness of interpretation. As if Kafka had written some Now film to capitalize on student unrest, the movie promotes itself as the story of "one man against the Establishment." That is absurd-but not the absurdity that Kafka was writing about...