The Trial (new restoration)

France/Italy/West Germany/1962—directed by Orson Welles | 119 minutes

“Say what you like, but The Trial is the best film I ever made.”   – Orson Welles

In the aftermath of his indelible performance as a shy motel owner in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Anthony Perkins became so associated with the persona of Norman Bates that traditional Hollywood work was hard to come by. Orson Welles, however, believed that Perkins’ vulnerability as Norman might make him the perfect embodiment of Joseph K in his film adaptation of The Trial, Franz Kafka’s classic tale of meaningless legal and social persecution in an authoritarian state, and the paranoia it inspires.

In Welles’ controversial interpretation, the great director has orchestrated Kafka’s tragic yet often comic fable as an overwhelming visual experience – a landscape in which an individual seems to grow ever smaller as he protests his fate. Never one to obey the rules, Welles tinkers with Kafka, changing and rearranging the plot, yet he remains faithful to the novel’s essence. Welles called it his first movie since Citizen Kane to be edited exactly as he intended, and now it’s been restored to the visual splendor he envisioned. With Welles, Romy Schneider and Jeanne Moreau. In English.

“A frenzy of expressionistic images bursts through the screen to evoke an oppressively incomprehensible system of edicts and constraints. Who better to reveal the system’s evil genius than Orson Welles?”  – Richard Brody, The New Yorker