Directed by Steven Soderbergh, 1991, 98 minutes

Whilst investigating the death of a fellow office worker Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons) uncovers a complex and dangerous conspiracy. As he attempts to confront the authorities that he believes are responsible for a host of disappearances Kafka discovers that powerful forces are manipulating every aspect of the world around him.

Franz Kafka chronicles the neuroses of a generation defined by cataclysmic social change. His writing articulates many of the fears and prejudices that would bear bitter fruit in the genocide and destruction of two world wars. The first half-of the twentieth century also saw the rapid rise of cinema and Kafka’s stories have been adapted frequently for the screen. Here Steven Soderbergh directs a screenplay by Lem Dobbs that was originally written in the 1970s’s; their Kafka emerges hollow-eyed from the Prague offices of the Workman’s Accident Insurance Institute, a world of petty ritual, obscure reports, and bulging box files. This paper-driven society shows the first signs of technological developments that will dramatically extend its capacity for social control. In “Kafka” the file clerk is a paradoxical figure, powerless but also powerful. As in Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ (1985) clerical error can lead to disappearance or death as well as summary dismissal and office life is defined by paranoia. A similar sense of pervading unease breathes through the poetry of T. S. Eliot whose jittery images of London office life and queasy flirtation with anti-Semitism are almost contemporaneous with Kafka’s world. These elaborate bureaucracies also resemble the patent office where Einstein conceived the scientific theories that would drive technology still further and faster through the second half of the twentieth century. In Kafka’s world information, science and machinery have become the primary tools of social control. Works like ‘The Trial’ (1914) and ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1914) locate his work within the critique of authority expressed in the philosophy of Sade and Foucault. His writing foreshadows modern traditions of dystopian writing found in George Orwell, William Burroughs, Margaret Atwood, and others. In Soderbergh’s film a conspiracy of state and business interests develops chemical technologies to engineer a ‘more efficient person’. Dissenters are tracked, logged, and recorded before removal from the body politic for chemical re-education or disposal. The film’s grotesque George Grosz-inspired capitalists and smug police-state bigots are symptoms of profound social malaise; corrupt capitalism and the pseudoscience of eugenics which would precipitate widespread societal collapse during the 1930s. The sinister office setting of “Kafka” may be thematically appropriate but casting Kafka’s own workplace as a villainous henchman of state control is unfair and inaccurate. Kafka’s work on accident prevention and safety may appear dry or abstruse but he enjoyed his work and appreciated the genuine practical benefits that he achieved for working people during his years at the Workman’s Accident Insurance Institute.

Kafka’s writing was partly inspired by prevailing social and political conditions, but his psychopathology is much more complex. Tales like ‘Metamorphosis’ (1915) express a profound fear of authority; a condition that may stem from fear of his bullying father, and an acute discomfort with the body, particularly sexuality. His writing is coloured with constant self-flagellation and acute hypochondria. Soderbergh and Dobbs are less comfortable when dealing with this side of Kafka. Jeremy Irons looks very like photographs of Kafka; his nervous, graceful movements capture the author’s fussy dandyism, but he portrays Kafka’s relentless self-abnegation as gentle self-deprecation and an appealing awkwardness. Kafka was raised in a secular Jewish household, he lived amongst Czechs in an Empire where German was the official language and was surrounded by increasing currents of anti-Semitism. It is perhaps unsurprising that this left him culturally adrift, but alienation is only part of a more profound sense of paranoia. It’s instructive to compare Kafka’s writing to the work of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), a near contemporary whose work explores similar themes of social unease and mental disintegration. Schulz writes from the perspective of an intimate Jewish shtetl community; his work is enriched by love for his eccentric family and a fascination with the idiosyncrasies of his hometown; this lends his work a sense of self-confidence and ease totally lacking in Kafka. In the Soderbergh’s film Kafka must learn to accept his Jewish heritage before can confront the sinister forces that surround him, symbolically he finally gains entry to the Castle through a passage hidden inside the Jewish cemetery and the film ends with quotations from his infamous letter to his father which are selected to express gentle acceptance of his faith in the face of his death rather than attempts to analyse his fear and self-loathing. For readers who are familiar with Kafka’s work this seems too simple a resolution for such a troubled psyche.

Walt Lloyd’s exquisite black and white photography suits the subject perfectly and paints a beautifully gothic Prague in dark shades and sharp, angled light. Barred shadows seem to enmesh and crush the protagonists. The influence of Expressionist cinema is everywhere, from the film-posters for ‘Caligari’ (Robert Wiene, 1920) to character names like ‘Orlac’ and ‘Murnau’; at the film’s climax we see Kafka climbing over the projected image of a living brain. When Kafka penetrates the Castle, the photography offers a startling surprise which signifies that events inside the Castle are may be more real (or modern) than the world outside. The film is blessed with a fine score by Cliff Martinez which employs the brittle, intricate sound of the hammered dulcimer to suggest Kafka’s incisive but vulnerable persona.  The film is considerably enlivened by some entertaining cameo performances: Sir Alec Guinness is Kafka’s languid, evasive manager and Joel Grey has fun as the petty tyrant who rules Kafka’s work life. Simon McBurney and Keith Allen engage in some broad slapstick as inept office assistants Oscar and Ludwig (figures borrowed from Kafka’s ‘The Castle’, 1926). Theresa Russell and Maria Miles have thankless roles that reflect Kafka’s inability to write realistic female characters. Disappointingly actresses Theresa Russell and Maria Miles have little to do other than act as a foil for Kafka’s shyness and their presence understates the significance of the author’s formative relationships with women, particularly Milena Jesenska.

‘Kafka’ seduces the senses but ultimately disappoints as an introduction to the writer’s work. The symbolism is often heavy-handed and the tone uncertain. The giggling, chemically controlled zombies that caper through Prague’s darkened streets are unsettling but the frisson is negated by a hackneyed plot and some awkward comedy. Humour is a significant component of Kafka’s writing, but it is bleaker than the slapstick found here. Kafka laughs at himself, but his humour is corrosive, constantly undermining his own personality. In choosing to focus on Kafka’s cultural unease and disregarding his tragic sense of his own worthlessness the film becomes a simple political conspiracy thriller. Soderbergh and Dobbs have crafted a pleasing ‘Kafkaesque’ entertainment but in focussing on the more sympathetic and readily understandable aspects of Kafka’s personality they penetrate no deeper than cliché and fail to reach the neurotic core his writing.

Quote

“…you despise the modern, but you are the very forefront of what is modern, you write about it, you document it” Doctor Murnau (Ian Holm)

Connections

Film

The Hourglass Sanatorium (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydra) directed by Woiciech J Has (1973)

‘Brazil’ directed by Terry Gilliam (1985)

‘Name of the Rose’ directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (1986)

‘Shadows and Fog’ directed by Woody Allen (1991) – Allen’s affectionate pastiche of expressionist cinema.

‘Naked Lunch’ directed by David Cronenberg (1991)

‘Institute Benjamenta’ directed by Brothers Quay (1995)

‘Dark City’ directed by Alex Proyas (1998)

Reading

Franz Kafka, The Trial, Penguin, 1914

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis, Penguin, 1915

Franz Kafka, The Castle, Penguin, 1926

Franz Kafka: The Complete Short Stories, Vintage Classics, 1992, ISBN 978-0749399467

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles and other stories, Penguin, 1937

David Zane Mairowitz and Robert Crumb, Kafka for Beginners, Icon, 1993

Reiner Stach and Shelley Frisch, Kafka: The Decisive Years, Princeton 2005

Reiner Stach and Shelley Frisch, Kafka: The Years of Insight, Princeton, 2013