The Trial

In 1962, American filmmakers weren't supposed to be intellectuals. For Orson Welles to do Kafka was thought pretentious and perverse, and the result was dismissed as a travesty. With its re-release in a print struck from the rediscovered negative, perhaps The Trial -- arguably Welles's masterpiece, and one of the privileged experiences the cinema affords -- will get its due.

Welles called it "the most autobiographical movie that I've ever made, the only one that's really close to me. It's much closer to my own feelings about everything than any other picture I've ever made." He put all of himself into The Trial: not just his visual and aural brilliance and his love of astonishment, but also his humor, anger, eroticism, and tenderness. Joseph K is Anthony Perkins's other great role: he's warm, responsive, and complete in this performance, which is the more deeply pleasurable because the world Welles builds around him (shooting in Zagreb and in Paris's Gare d'Orsay) is so terrifying and sad. And every movie should have Albinoni's Adagio on the soundtrack. The Trial is an amazingly rich and complex film, but it can be appreciated simply, as an opening-up of life as mystery, crisis, and dream. At the Brattle Theatre this Friday and Saturday, September 24 and 25.

-- Chris Fujiwara