The Castle (1994)

 

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov and Sergey Selyanov

Based on a novel by Franz Kafka

Cast: Nikolay Stotskiy as the Land Surveyor; Svetlana Pismichenko as Frida; Anvar Libabov as Helper Arthur; Viktor Sukhorukov as Helper Jeremiah; Igor Shibanov as Brunswick; Andrey Smirnov as the Teacher; Vladislav Demchenko as Varnava; Bolot Beyshenaliev as the Village Senior; Svetlana Svirko as Olga

An Abstract Candidate

 

Long before his crime films, the controversial or confrontation content of his films, Aleksey Balabanov began with films like Happy Days (1991) and this adaptation of the unfinished Franz Kafka novel, which begins with hurdy gurdy music announcing our protagonist played by Nikolay Stotskiy, a land surveyor wandering through the snow. This feels different from later films, yet in itself, it seems not at all different from the worlds of Balabanov's dog-eat-dog gangsters and death, only here it is a period piece and everything has an irrational sense of humour to it.

The land surveyor's fate is pretty much summed up when, in that introduction, he slips on the ice following immediately after by the title credit. Most of The Castle is taken from its source, Kafka's work one of irrational worlds, The Castle taking the simplest premise of a land surveyor in an unknown European world trying to reach the titular castle, only to be constantly be prevented from doing so as he goes. Balabanov's film has its own quirks, and this feels more openly humorous than his later films, even if a very twisted sense of one. Set within an imprecise nation or time, absolutely a period from a century or so earlier, the bureaucracy here from the book feels as much a satire in itself as it is still irrational. His own touches, not expected from a director who would become very nihilistic, is the wackier takes on this world.

Aspects are direct from the source - the land surveyor ends up with two male assistants abruptly provided to him, jokers who seem more inclined to act like prats to the point it seems like they are not sane, possibly sabotaging his progress on purpose but as much likely to be his increasing paranoia. Aspects do have weirdness entirely for Balabanov, where with the aforementioned hurdy gurdy music prominent throughout, he emphasises this as a world of dance and music. Only with special permission, which takes a while, can you play your own waxes of music, and there is someone assigned in the community to make them for the castle, whilst dancing is common place, from maidens attempting the can-can to strange juddering by men in union on stages. These acts seem the only entertainment in general, not just in the pub. Boys, actual choir boys alongside a unisex child choir, are prevalent throughout, possibly with sinister intentions but also because they are a commodity in themselves. Even with the castle, when we eventually enter it, they have a system where members inside can call on a young boy of his choice to come to his room just to sing, even in the midst of a meeting. Considering, when forced to take a test, the land surveyor gets interrogated whilst a choir is on hand to sing in the background, this film's take on music is very important, which also means the sound design and Sergei Kuryokhin's score itself become a prime focus.

The music is compelling in itself, and Sergei Kuryokhin, a former keyboardist for a rock band named Aquarius, was a prolific experimental musician up to his 1996 death as well as a composer for cinema. Since this is a rare moment to talk of him, learning of him for the first time through his work with The Castle and impressed by it, I cannot pass either probably one of his most infamous moments, aptly suitable for this film's tone. Whilst a tangent, it befits the ideas The Castle touches upon, that with a reporter named Sergey Sholokhov, well regarded as a film and theatre critic too, Sholokhov and Kuryokhin created a hoax, during an interview on the television program Pyatoe Koleso (The Fifth Wheel) on 17 January 1991 on Leningrad Television, that Vladimir Lenin consumed psychedelic mushrooms and eventually became one himself. Whilst some immediately presumed it was a joke, this stunt, which was built around an elaborately constructed argument over an hour's worth of programming, a show hosted by Sergey Sholokhov seen as a factually accurate news and cultural show at the time, managed to capture a rare moment in Russia's time period as well as manage to have people believe it was true.  “Lenin was a mushroom” is a phrase that has relevance decades later as a pop cultural phrase, and there is even an account the day after the episode aired, a group of Bolshevik veterans approached an official at the Leningrad Regional Party Committee and demanded to know whether it was true that Lenin had been a mushroom¹.

To get back on tangent, even The Castle itself has its stranger moments even above the intentionally absurdist tone, having not even taking into consideration one of the more broad and sillier running jokes, that at certain periods an alarm will call, and in any building as they all have tiny doors set up within them, a herd of pigs run through in and out. Where the pigs go to and from is never explained, and once it ends, with everyone having to stand out when the alarm goes, the alarm stops and everyone can then sit down. I will not attempt to "read" Kafka. His is a fascinating life internally, complicated knowing he never wanted his work even published originally, and that alongside being released posthumously against his will, The Castle is unfinished, something Aleksey Balabanov goes against by having an actual ending of sorts. The term "Kafkaesque" in this case is a world of illogical and cruel structure against oneself, where for the land surveyor, he cannot as a stranger stay in the inn originally, and no strangers can be in peoples' houses. With the black clothing of many almost puritan, there is a structure of strict law here, which does leave one to also wonder how much of this film as an art house production is a critique of the Soviet Union or touched by it, something which cannot be denied. More so as, whilst there is law, the Castle itself is a vague force, and bureaucracy is the source of power here even if one hand clearly does not know what the other is doing. The land surveyor at one point is informed he was not needed, a mistake of someone still sending a letter out and taking years for confirmation to not have land surveying in the first place.

Notably, and this is where The Castle in this form has an actual ending, whilst there is strict law, you can change identity, one mistake particularly with the land surveyor becoming obsessed with the wife of the wax music maker becoming his folly, as a name can be exchanged for another with ease. Considering the original source novel, for an ending, cuts off at when you finally get into the castle and the protagonist is in the middle of listening to a person of rank inside the fortress, recreated here but continued in original material, does not undercut the source as a travesty. It was an accident of a work never finished, of an author who originally wanted his entire life's work burn by those who knew him, that gained an accidentally great ending by never leading to somewhere. In contrast, Aleksey Balabanov to his credit managed with Sergey Selyanov, more known for producing films including Balabanov's Cargo 200 (2007), to find an ending which does not resolve a thing but leaves at a right point, adding to the irrationality of the world our lead entered. Adding an ending to this narrative was a risk, but it works here, with some hope but also because of this twist emphasising the point of Kafka's work well in itself. His is a world, and in mind to a director here growing up in the Soviet Union, this is a world of forced order where people happily comply with its ill-logic. The only truly sympathetic people the land surveyor finds are Barnabas the professional messenger and his sisters, formerly of a higher standing and viewed as beggars and prostitutes by he rest of the community, the sisters having to be sex workers or try to woo higher ups, even posing as their own siblings, due to one slighting a high ranking official's flirtations being a cause of their downfall in the social pecking order.

Even that the land surveyor is married at one point, to a barmaid who he is caught undressed with, and ends up in a caretaker job at a school, becomes a farce of social norms being illogical, constructs which exist but have no ground in reality. More so with how the modern world is, as throwbacks to conservative views of social structures in family are being fought for, even if at the expense for people's rights and healthy social norms, even logical and empathetic views of society, Kafka's work is unfortunately quite relevant still in the modern day. For me this is becoming more so as his work is about social structures which, presumed holy, are human constructors which distort and are irrational when you stop and consider what they are and how they fail. This can go from The Castle to The Trial (1925), that a man is on trial for a crime he is not even sure he has any connect to let alone committed, and even Amerika (1927), a work set in the USA by a man who never went to the country, and built his own version from research, which still has an unfortunately relevant paranoia in that survival, even in a book started in 1910s, involves having to search for work that is menial and takes a person's whole day to finish for some wages.

A moody film, lit with a dark brown look, The Castle is also very different from what the image of Aleksey Balabanov is for many, unless you were aware of Of Freaks and Men (1998), a film which reflects this film tone, especially in its openly aesthetic touches such as the titular castle being only initially sense in dreams/hazes of the protagonist. Seen as monochrome shots of the castle in the background whilst in the foreground is a bubbling oil-like body of water, the castle is always out of reach even when he someone manages to finally get inside it. Even with a tinge of a happy ending here, it makes sense to have it in context. Barring Barnabas, whose sisters will still try to achieve that illogical thing called status in the castle, that children (at least one boy) are the people who will see how strange this world they live in is is not out of place for Balabanov. If anything, more overtly humorous than his other work, such as the assistances pretending to be horses for a sled, it befits the moments of strangeness of his later films, only with the sense that when he became more commercial with the crime films, Aleksey Balabanov's take on an illogical world became a dog-eat-dog one where the criminal underworld was the only way to survive.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

 

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1) How Vladimir Lenin Became a Mushroom by Eric Grundhauser, published for Atlas Obscura on December 5th 2017. As an additional note, I recommend looking into Sergei Kuryokhin's music, starting with Sparrow Oratorium (1993), the random album of his I looked into just by a few tracks during the writing of this review; just by itself, least beginning with the first track Winter (Зима), presents something truly as unconventional and memorable as The Castle as a film or the Lenin mushroom phenomenon.

The Trial (1962)

 

Director: Orson Welles

Screenplay: Pierre Cholot and Orson Welles

Based on a novel by Franz Kafka

Cast: Anthony Perkins as Josef K.; Jeanne Moreau as Marika Burstner; Romy Schneider as Leni; Elsa Martinelli as Hilda; Suzanne Flon as Miss Pittl; Orson Welles as Albert Hastler; Akim Tamiroff as Bloch; Madeleine Robinson as Mrs. Grubach

An Abstract Film Candidate

 

Adapting Franz Kafka's tale, in which a man named Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) is charged for a crime he had no prior knowledge of and is never told the charge at all, The Trial opens with a prologue based on a passage from the text. Of a man who waits outside "the Doors of the Law", aging and dying whilst both never being allowed in and the guard to inform him the doors were for him only. Dreamlike and of an unknown subtext, director Orson Welles himself narratives over the evocative hand drawn illustrations of this miniature narrative by Alexandre Alexeieff, a melancholic and strange one apt for a Kafka adaptation.

As a director who continually evolved, Orson Welles here was in total exile from Hollywood, immediately changing to a new world in terms of cinema. Whilst this is a French-Italian-German production, I ended up thinking of Mickey One (1965), as much because both used jazz in their scores but because, the later an Arthur Penn production in Hollywood influenced by European cinema, both exist in abstract worlds where the leads are in continuous paranoia of unknown forces. In Mickey One, it was a young Warren Betty as a stand-up comedian; here, it was Anthony Perkins, a clerk who suddenly wakes up in his introduction with a police officer in his bedroom.

There is a huge distinction in casting Perkins. Tragically his career was shadowed by Psycho (1960) and Norman Bates, which is worse because that was an incredible performance in itself, but here you can see his talent. He is perfect as a Kafka character, the nervous twitch of a man confused by a world which is based greatly on misperception. It is certainly, undoubtedly, an idiosyncratic film, for were it not for the fact he would move to even more experimental work like F For Fake (1973) in the seventies, this would be Welles' proudly entering into abstract cinema. An eerie one, where Perkins' Josef K. finds himself pin ponged between unknown forces, from large courts which amass a crowd, to Welles himself playing Albert Hastler, an advocate who could help Josef were it not for the fact that these cases are endless, Josef eventually meeting old people, half dressed with numbers hung round their necks in a hall, he is effectively among. That Bloch (Akim Tamiroff), one of Hastler's clients, has been in his shadow for years, effectively part of his furniture sleeping in a spare room, emphasises eventually the Advocate is just a figure who toys with his clients.

The film has an inherently surreal nature to itself, but interlaces it with an oppressive tone from the opening scene, not only with Josef being woken up in bed but with other policemen in his room, trying to steal shirts from him as impounded goods and even his co-workers in the lounge. The world, through a very distinct script, is full of traps, where authority can (in this scene) try dominate Josef by claiming a word does not exist is one, to describe an oval marking on his bedroom floor from where a dentist's chair used to be, only to question when he talks of this word as if he said it first. That those police, who tried to steal his clothes, when he makes a charge of misconduct, find themselves in the broom closest of his work place being punished by whipping shows how perverse and dog-eat-dog this existence is.

In a world where there is seemingly no tangible authority, not even a precise explanation to how it works let alone why Josef is even on trial, the film is also befittingly strange in appearance. Shot in Italy, France and even Croatia, the architecture looms over Josef as one man in the centre, and the locations created for the film contribute as much for this. His work place is a vast hall of desks, his superiority only shown in having a raised platform for his desk, not even having walls. Environments at one point do bleed into each other. Some are created locations of dreams and nightmares, from winding and endless corridors of files on shelves, to a room where the floor is entirely covered in manuscripts and documents. Even some of the aspects dated of the early sixties now have an appropriately weird aesthetic, like a giant wall expanding computer the male engineers have naturally christened female like a boat.

That is before you considering the characters and the cast, populated in legendary French stars even in minor roles, from Jeanne Moreau as Marika, as Josef's next door neighbour or a tiny cameo by Michael Lonsdale as a priest. Romy Schneider, making her role in That Most Important Thing: Love (1975) with Andrzej Żuławski merely an escalation, plays the maid and mistress to Hastler, who is attracted to guilty men and, for no reason, has webbed fingers on one hand which never becomes a plot point. Then there are specific characters, from Welles' corrupt figure of power, given his commanding voice and prescience, to a painter who specialises in commissions for the judges, already a figure with an eeriness to him as, predating Beatlemania, he is inexplicably hounded by young (teen) girls who would mob his home/work place, a merely cage of wooden pallets, if he had left the door open. There is a lot of explicit sexual and political layers, and flat out innuendo, including questions of Josef's behaviour such as the presumption, when his young female cousin visits as a sympathetic voice, that he is going to "corrupt" her. And Schneider, whose character of Leni is the other most prominent character, is at once fascinating if her own curious figure due to her fetish.

That is before the ending, rewritten by Welles as a co-writer, with unexpected death by dynamite. This is all in mind that, throughout, The Trial is still sombre, that its weirdness is contrasted by a sumptuous production with dread inducing atmosphere and exquisite dialogue, a melancholic conclusion as, by the time Welles himself in the end credits lists off the production crew in narration, he befittingly gave the author of The Metamorphosis both an alien yet profoundly atmospheric adaptation.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Paranoid/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Class Relations (1984)

From https://pics.filmaffinity.com
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Directors: Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet

Based on the novel Amerika by Franz Kafka

Cast: Christian Heinisch as Karl Roßmann; Nazzareno Bianconi as Giacomo; Mario Adorf as Onkel; Laura Betti as Brunelda; Harun Farocki as Delamarche; Manfred Blank as Robinson; Reinald Schnell  as Heizer; Anna Schnell as Line; Klaus Traube as Kapitän; Georg Brintrup as Student; Hermann Hartmann as Oberkassierer; Gérard Semaan as Schubal; Jean-François Quinque as Stewart; Villi Vöbel as Pollunder

Straub-Huillet adapting Franz Kafka? Yes, that did happen and this is the most accessible of their films as a linear narrative, whilst not losing an ounce of their difficult idiosyncratic style. Class Relations is based on Kafka's unfinished novel Amerika, where he notably never travelled to America but created a version based upon research and his fears, is still an unconventional production in that it is a minimalistic, slow paced work in which a German immigrant to the United States finds himself falling through an exploitative world that makes no sense, all depicted by the directors' stark static shots and precise formal style with an eye laser focused against this kind of capitalist environment.

Or at least the type of structure this calmly hellish, in which the protagonist is a prop from the get-go, when he drops his suitcase on the ship he is on to find his lost umbrella, only to get lost and find himself in an argument with the administration on the ship over the treatment over a minor staff member. In the midst of class bias, complete lies and people desiring to even force him into servant hood, all of it fits into Kafka's take on an illogical world but also suits Straub's Marxist viewpoint, the title change adamant to the issues tackled here. Thankfully, the acting is not the deliberately flat performances of a few early seventies experiments of theirs, but with a cast that occasionally break out into gravitas, usually from the middle management who are selfish and deceitful, whilst a lot of the performances are a minimalistic acting style common from the auteurs that does succeed completely.

Whilst Class Relations is a slow film in pacing, this has to be one of the most dynamic of Straub-Huillet's fictional films as they structure the film over dramatic vignettes where their lead wanders through like a deer in the headlights. No one barring a few people are truly kind, fellow wanderers raiding his suitcase or trying to force him into servitude, and even those who are kind to him can lose their respect for him if lies are said of him being a lewd, unprofessional employee without proof.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3QN2id17kDJRP5v8qHR5BejVZJVSw0FcVTzp9YkxyzrzKzfxzO7S1OR4extGIZ55AHYF4GB-GMumNtzwVHUww8C1d0qBitPj3BDZNPsPTNIlw6ABBsInsYGXetB5btsSbopLd4gDlbQls/s1600/1984+Klassenverhaltnisse+suitcase.JPG

"Kafkaesque" is the notion of an oppressive/nightmarish world of rules and orders which do not make sense. The Castle famously is about a man who cannot get to his goal due to rules and contradictions, which stalls his ability to even to get to the titular castle and befittingly, as another unfinished novel of Kafka's, ends halfway through a sentence. Class Relations imagines this as calmly as you can get, when Orson Welles had to create a highly stylised world for his 1962 adaptation of The Trial, but the notion of Kafkaesque is found here in a different way. Simply as one obstruction along the way is just being forced out on a balcony of an apartment as the mistress of the apartment changes, which means the protagonist is not allowed to re-enter unless told he can. The fact [a Major but subjective spoiler] the film ends with him on a trail on his way to a job suggests a happy ending, but the tone does suggest how it could easily fall into more illogical rules as he claws for even some wages to live off.

It makes Class Relations a faithful work but also succeeds for the directors as everything they depict, no matter how strange, could easily happen in real life in how they show it in a banal, matter-of-fact way. Straub and Huillet adapted Amerika with very clear reasoning and succeeded. In terms of the production, this marks a return to the monochrome films of their career of the sixties, when they had worked in colour for their documentaries and fiction films through the seventies. Possibly the choice was a) for period tone, or maybe even b) as a film shot mostly in Germany (with inserts of American locations) with the cast mainly speaking German to create their own version of America in lieu to possible practical restrictions; it nonetheless suits the tone entirely. Their style for non-documentary films was fully cemented by this time - fixed camera shots and a moderate pace, some Straub-Huillet trademarks found such as the contemplation of the environment or the abrupt introduction of actors, via editing, such as a policeman who adds further hassle for the lead character.

Is it abstract? Not particularly, but in terms of cinema, Straub--Huillet are unique, not a duo to merely say filmed cinema the same way as other art house filmmakers despite many following their example, and to adapt Kafka even this "realistically" doesn't negate the curious nature of an adaptation of a novel by a man who never set foot in the US, and constructed it partially from his own neurosis. Befittingly its own patchwork of European cinema with these themes, Kafka in general meeting these distinct and political filmmakers understandably creates something idiosyncratic. Its definitely a gem from them that could be a good gateway feature too for audiences hesitant to try their cinema.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalist

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

From http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image11/classrelations1.jpg