Lack of Identity

The 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.

On the surface, all is well. Like the book, the movie begins as an anonymous stranger (Maximilian Schell) arrives at a village. He announces that he is the new land surveyor for the "Castle" perched on a nearby hill. Inexplicably, the suspicious villagers already know and fear him. The remainder of the story simply concerns his futile negotiations to gain an identity from the impenetrable villagers and a calling from the inaccessible castle.

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 is no one left to listen. A girl tumbles into the surveyor's bed--and exhibits neither love nor lust. The sullen winter light reveals the endless decay of life.

Yet, for all its external excellence, The Castle is as shallow and enervated as its predecessor, The Trial. Possibly the fault lies with the master himself; his aphoristic sweep seems cinematically untranslatable. As a novel, The Castle has inspired sheaves of interpretations. In one theory, the Castle is seen as religion inhabited by the unseeable God. The land surveyor, then, is on a pilgrim's progression to salvation. More fashionable exegeses view the Castle as untenanted. Heaven is barren and the village is the earth below. In the most perverse--and most Kafkaesque--analysis, the fable is turned. The villagers have only his word that the land-surveyor is what he is: he produces no credentials. Thus discredited, he is under the Ptolemaic delusion that he is the center of the cosmos. It is not the Castle that is empty but man himself, beyond grace, beyond help, beyond hope.

The 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.

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