Few authors of the twentieth century were as sensitive to the relationship between human existence and the apparent randomness of life as Franz Kafka and Albert Camus. Both writers not only imagined characters responding to absurd worlds, but they also unveiled the role of human action in creating absurd worlds. This essay expounds on Camus’s idea of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus and how, understood within its context and alongside Kafka’s The Trial, it characterizes the nature of absurdity as being both universal and historically rooted. Both of these works are put into conversation with Orson Welles’s adaptation of The Trial (1962), highlighting qualities that the film adds to the text. Employing techniques unique to the cinema versus the novel, the film conveys the experience of absurdity within human society.
For Camus the existence of the absurd is reliant on a dyadic relationship with the world at one end: “the primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us […] that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd” (Camus, 1942/1955, p. 14). At its opposite pole stands humanity, for “this world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart” (Camus, 1942/1955, p. 21). Absurdity, therefore, is perceived as this gulf between humanity’s desire for a reasonable world and the world’s refusal to rationalize. Such a description of absurdity is applicable to human existence broadly, but Camus’s thoughts are also an outpouring of a life confronting the horrors of the twentieth century: the Holocaust, two world wars and the rise of totalitarianism. Kafka’s The Trial, written around the beginning of World War I (though published in 1925), was likewise historically rooted. Both of these works confront a world whose absurdity has been multiplied by the machinations of cruel and illogical systems—systems created by human minds. While the absurd society is in the background of Camus’s essay, it makes up the very setting and plot of Kafka’s novel.
The Trial maps the journey of Josef K., a man accused of an unknown crime. His desire for clarity and justice is met by the law with suspicion, and his logical approach to proving his innocence only mires him deeper in this societal labyrinth. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt characterizes such a society by “its disregard for facts, its strict adherence to the rules of a fictitious world” (Arendt, 1951/1994, p. 191). That is, the totalitarian society manufactures absurdity by severing any tie between its systems and the reasonable expectations of its citizens. This is the (in)human world that K. is thrown into—designed by humans yet unfit for them. Arbitrary rules have replaced facts, and society is silent in the face of his questions, trapping K. in a haze of interminable confusion.
While the novel achieves this hazy atmosphere through Kafka’s prose and circuitous narrative, Welles’s film embodies it through use of noir generic conventions, Perkins’s performance and the distorted yet vivid production design, all of which are evident in an early sequence. After opening with a pinscreen parable, The Trial depicts Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) jolted awake in his bedroom by an investigator (Arnoldo Foà). An imbalance is expressed immediately, as Welles frames the doorway with a slight Dutch tilt. This image also sets the tone for the film’s lighting as it evokes noir sensibilities through stark black shadows and indistinct greys. The imbalance is further carried out spatially—oddly, the investigator doesn’t enter from the hallway but from the neighbor’s adjoining room. These qualities all emphasize the contrast between what is being experienced and what would be intuitive and logical.
Flustered by the interrogation, Josef can’t seem to figure out what he’s being charged with or even whether he’s being arrested. Perkins portrays K. as skittish, marked by frantic movements, surprised gestures and a cracking voice. His manipulated tonality and animated physicality amplify the sense that K. is a man characteristically lost. In both his situation and personality, K. is defensive, and is thus vulnerable to the disinterested, unwavering accusations of the investigator. Perkins’s performance is crucial to a distinctly cinematic capacity: the film—through Perkins—expresses what it is to be an embodied person responding to the absurd.
The production design further materializes this capacity. When K. rises from his bed, it’s apparent that the room’s ceiling is unnaturally short—the restriction of space presses in on K.’s freedom as much as the interrogation does. Discussing the adaptation, Cristina Vatulescu notes that K.’s quandary “is often expressed in spatial terms” (Vatulescu, 2013). The architectural designs of the film posit the “coherence of the city as one engulfing structure” (Vatulescu, 2013). Subsequent scenes expand this urban megastructure through rigid concrete and glass, soulless train stations and an office enveloped in a dark void, but the motif is already being cultivated. Even in his apartment, K. is engulfed by this structure, lost within designs that are ostensibly intended to serve humanity—but these designs are unnavigable and inescapable.
In the appendix to The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus discusses The Trial (alongside Kafka’s The Castle) and clarifies that absurdity is simultaneously universal and historically rooted, pointing out that K. “is not Kafka and yet he is Kafka. He is an average European. He is like everybody else” (Camus, 1942/1955, p. 129). Everybody experiences that “wild longing for clarity” (Camus, 1942/1955, p. 21), but the twentieth-century European perceived a sharper rupture between that longing and the (in)human world that European powers had created. Kafka captured that rupture in his labyrinthine narratives, but the challenge for adaptations is how to transfer the linguistic power of fiction into fitting cinematic modes. In Orson Welles’s adaptation, the rupture becomes powerfully expressed through the physicality and tonality of Perkin’s performance, the use of noir conventions of lighting and camera angles, and the confusion of space as conveyed by set design. All of these elements create a distinct cinematic world that is visibly unfit for humanity, so that—as with Kafka’s novel—the absurd society can again be put on trial.
Micah Rickard
Micah Rickard is a Seattle-based freelance film critic and current Film Studies Masters student at the University of Edinburgh. His movie reviews can be found at micahrickard.com, and his work has been published at Bright Wall / Dark Room, Broad Sound, The Other Journal, and Christ and Pop Culture. His writing focuses on the ways that art and entertainment orient our being-in-the-world.
