Karlovy Vary Exhibition curators The Kafkaesque cinema of Hollywood

When it comes to famous Czech writer Franz Kafka, filmmakers around the world have long been inspired to adapt his work outright or make decidedly “Kafkaesque” films, filled with the kind of angst, alienation and he absurdity that made the novelist one of the most important and distinctive figures in 20th century literature.

Now, a century after his death, Prague-born Kafka will be the subject of a film retrospective at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, which will include titles by Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, Federico Fellini and Steven Soderbergh. “It's incredible how this writer [Kafka] “was able to influence not only literature, but also cinema for many years,” explains Lorenzo Esposito, co-curator of the retrospective with Karlovy Vary's artistic director, Karel Och. The Hollywood Reporter.

The retrospective will include classics such as Orson Welles The trial (1962), which features Anthony Perkins as the baffled bureaucrat Josef K. Martin; Scorsese's Kafkaesque New York-set comedy-drama After hours (1985); Fellini Interview (Interview); Soderbergh Kafka (1991) and its 2021 reissue Mr Kneff – both starring Jeremy Irons as an insurance agent and writer – alongside lesser-known adaptations like Jan Němec's Metamorphosisa German TV movie.

For Esposito, Kafka stands out for his unique understanding of the human condition and the difficulty – and absurdity – of living in the modern world. “Ultimately, what is truly disturbing about Kafka, and what connects him with all of us, is that he not only clearly understood the political and economic structure of the world we live in, but also that he understood our powerlessness to change it,” he says.

Karel Och spoke about the Kafka retrospective from his office in Prague, just a few steps from where the great Czech writer lived and worked: “I am sitting here 200 metres from where Kafka was born and 400 metres from where he wrote his most famous books. So the festival is closely connected to the place where Kafka lived, where he walked, where he wrote, where he spent time with his family and friends. So if we don’t do it, who else will?” Och explains.

The KVIFF retrospective, entitled The Desire to Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinemais divided into film adaptations and films influenced by Kafka's literary works. The line between adapting a Kafka work into a film and taking elements of a story to create one's own film is thinner than the Karlovy Vary audience might expect.

Esposito points to one of the KVIFF sidebar picks, Fellini's interviewwhich has often been interpreted as an adaptation of Kafka's novel. America novel, published in 1927. This is not the case, he adds, because the Italian author was in fact at the Cinecittà studios in Rome preparing the adaptation of Kafka's literary work, to then transforming the film into a surreal mix of documentary, autobiography and film-within-a-film after becoming the subject of a film where a Japanese television crew interviewed Fellini about his life and films during filming.

Another retrospective title, The audience (The audience), a 1971 film by director Marco Ferreri, was originally an adaptation of Kafka's 1926 novel. The castleabout a man who struggles against an overwhelming bureaucracy. Until the Italian director realized he would have to pay to adapt the classic novel. ” He [Ferreri] I thought there were no rights holders,” says Esposito, which led to changing the plot of the film to become the story of a young man with the crazy idea of ​​going to Rome to meet the Pope.

In another example of “based on” becoming “inspired by,” Esposito recalled that David Lynch once filmed Kafka's landmark short story Metamorphosis – the story of a man who wakes up transformed into a giant cockroach – into a screenplay, only to decide not to make the film “because he said the book was too good to make a film.”

But Lynch's respect for Kafka's literary work extended to the iconic television series Twin Peaksincluding an episodic scene set in the office of FBI Director Gordon Cole, played by series co-creator Lynch, where a portrait of Kafka is clearly visible framed and placed on the wall.

The Karlovy Vary retrospective is scheduled to mark the 100th anniversary of Kafka's death in June 1924. Soderbergh will be in Karlovy Vary to present his two versions of Kafka, Och says: “Two different edits of the same material shot in Prague in the early 1990s.”

It was only through his friend Max Brod, who defied Kafka's deathbed request to burn his literary works, that the world came to know great writings like The Trial, The Castle and the little story Metamorphosisas a source of cinematographic material. Ochs argues that Kafka's literary works and the films they inspired between 1954 and 2017 speak volumes about our troubled times.

“If you think about Franz Kafka's writing style, the way he describes relationships between people and the way he perceives reality around him and through his writings, it's timeless,” he says. he. “But it seems very relevant to our times because of the confusion and the fact that times seem to be a little more aggressive than before. Kafka was very sensitive, and if you are sensitive these days, your sensitivity is attacked from so many places and elements. So it's quite violent, and the fact that he talks about it through his words is fascinating and very, very modern. »

Esposito adds: “[Kafka] It simply talks about something that affects us every day, happiness and unhappiness and we can all understand that, especially nowadays, during these very violent and tragic days that we live, with wars and many deaths.