Double Feature: Death By Bureaucracy (Zerograd and The Trial)
Nothing in life is certain and that’s why we, as a species, love making up arbitrary rules. Human society is built on set guidelines, every major religion rallies around strict regulation, heck we even invented bigotry just because forcing others to adhere to invisible barriers make us feel so good. To be fair, there’s an argument to be made about how narrowing our options in life helps to focus and infuse it with more meaning (as long as we’re not restricting others). But more often than not, being lead through an unending maze of rules and regulations opens our eyes to just how pointless it all really is.
For today’s double feature we have two movies, both of which have recently been restored and re-released, that tackle the maddening maze of bureaucracy. A classic adaptation of a brilliant novel, and a contemporary critique of a slowly collapsing government. Franz Kafka would be proud of both if he wasn’t busy sitting in some nth dimensional waiting room waiting on the approval of a co-signed notary stamp that can only be obtained from a cosmic being whose office hours appear as frequently as Miyake events. Or so I hear.
The Trial (1966, dir. by Orson Welles)
The Trial begins as an unknown man strides directly into Josef K.’s (Anthony Perkins) bedroom to inform him that he is under arrest. Josef asks what it is he’s being arrested for but the police officer refuses to respond. Soon there’s multiple detectives, plus several eyewitnesses ready to testify, and yet none of them will tell him what it is he’s done. They depart as quickly as they arrived, leaving Josef to navigate the world in the face of these outrageous but damning accusations. Cut to a positively dreamlike sequence of events, as he sets forth to work out a defense for himself all the while being continually stalked and even abducted by police officers.
Josef seeks out a lawyer named Hastler (Orson Welles) on the advice of his uncle, but Hastler seems entirely uninterested in helping Josef clarify his circumstances. As he attempts to pursue various possible paths to freedom, Josef gets distracted by various people and things; such as endless corridors, wide open office spaces, faceless crowds, corrupt cops and magistrates, empathetic women who offer him help and / or try to seduce him, a painter of judges who wields power by appealing to vanity of the court, and vicious children who mock and taunt through slatted wood passageways. The film culminates in a surreal sequence of events, beginning with Josef’s upcoming birthday and ending with two executioners arguing with the condemned man on how best to do away with him.
With its brilliant source material, striking cinematography and an excellent central performance by Anthony Perkins, it’s not hard to see why The Trial was Orson Welles’ favorite of his films. it’s easily the best adaptation of Kafka on screen if for nothing these than Welles’ dazzling directorial skill – full of eyes watching through walls, claustrophobic scenes of people pouring into rooms, more doors opening just as one is closed. The Trial is not only beautiful, shot on location in the then-abandoned Gare d'Orsay, but also continuously inventive in its storytelling on all levels. Nobody walks in a straight line unless theyre forced to by structures, instead characters are always zig-zagging around rooms and creeping around corners. Perkins feels perfectly cast in that regard; a brilliant mix of free-flowing anxiety with a wide-eyed desire to do things the right way, all fueled with a burning indignation that seems to both bolster and undercut his goals as much as the world around him.
Of course, we never find out what Josef K actually did. He’s resentful of these false accusations and yet he’s also very willing to follow through the structure of the law in order to fight his case despite the fact that its this exact structure that’s unfairly persecuting him. The beauty of The Trial is in the depth that these tangled webs go to, questioning why it is that we are so dead set on trying and solve logically a situation that’s inherently illogical. By never questioning that the police should even be standing in his bedroom to begin with, Josef has already accepted a fate of shuffling through the void towards his own damnation. As Hastler says: "You don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary.”
(Beautiful 4K restoration available from Studiocanal, and PS, I covered this movie previously on Cinema60 if you’re interested in more of an in depth discussion and detailed breakdown.)
Zerograd (1988, dir. by Karen Shakhnazarov)
When unassuming office worker Aleksei Varakin (Leonid Filatov) arrives from Moscow to Zero City he expects the trip to take no more than a day. He’s only arrived at this unremarkable small town to check in on how production was going for a design revision on a specific panel that his company purchases in bulk. Yet, despite planning ahead and following all regular procedures, nothing seems to be going as planned. First security doesn’t have his pass to enter the factory, then he realizes he wasn’t even expected today despite previous phone confirmations otherwise. By the time he steps into the factory Director’s office and gets an eyefull of the stark naked secretary, Aleksei knows something about this place is… off.
It’s not until he later finds himself in an empty local restaurant, staring into the eyes of a cake baked to look exactly like his own face, that Aleksei really starts to panic. “If you don’t eat it, the chef will kill himself” his stonefaced waiter warns, just as a painting across the room lifts to reveal a six-piece band playing an ominously jazzy waltz. Flustered, Aleksei gets up from his table and turns to leave, just as a shot rings out behind him. His fate has been sealed – he is unable to leave Zero City until the local authorities can officially rule out the possibility that Chef Nikolaev wasn’t actually murdered.
Zerograd showcases some of the best beats of soviet satire, delivering each line with a sublime deadpan that manages to heighten in absurdity so delicately you barely even notice just how farcical its sense of humor is. Released only a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the film primarily toys with a pervasive sense of decay – both structural, spiritual and moral. First there’s the local train station that seemingly only serves passengers once a day. Then there’s Zero City’s history museum, full of glistening wax tableaus (hilariously staged) and laughably false factoids that ties this nothing town back to great moments in history. It takes a speech by the local police detective on the importance of ditching individuality in favor of conforming in the interest of the whole that the film starts to truly cohere. The way he gently nudges Aleksei to coming around on the idea that the Chef Nikolaev may have been murdered, despite Aleksei’s own contradictory eyewitness account, which then snowballs to the idea that Aleksei should just pretend to be the son of Nikolaev for appearances sake. Its exactly the sort of highly logical nonsense that’s become distressingly recognizable in our current global landscape of ‘fake news’ and straw-man logic.
Zerograd parallels to Kafka’s The Trial are overt, as are its Terry Gilliam-esque visual punctuations, but its sensibilities are staunchly contemporary – make it a triple feature by watching it with Kin-Dza-Dza! (1986). What makes Zerograd unique is the ominous, existential dread that cuts through its droll sense of absurd normality. In one of its many laugh-out-loud creepy scenes, a wide-eyed child stares directly through Aleksei’s soul and predicts not only his inability to leave this city, but the exact date and time of his death. Aleksei is clearly unnerved, but even then there’s a dull recognition that this psycho child could very well be correct. Like Josef K, he rejects the conclusion but can’t seem to pull back far enough to realize that the process holding him there doesn’t even exist. The film ends on a note reminiscent of many new Hollywood films, with Aleksei attempting to break free from the invisible chains of this oppressive society only to realize that, outside of the structure he’s always known, he has nothing to escape to.
Zerograd is available in a beautiful 2K restoration by Deaf Crocodile on Blu-Ray and coming soon to VOD.
