Turning the Reel
From Cinema to Cinematic Writing and Back Again
The Case of Franz Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared1
Michiel Rys
Abstract
This paper investigates the representation of dynamics, motion and gestures in the works of Franz Kafka and in the film adaptation of his novel The Man Who Disappeared. The first part of the paper critically recapitulates the research that revealed the ways in which Kafka was influenced by new visual media and early cinema. In the second part, we investigate how some of these influences are reworked in the film Class Relations (1984) by Straub/Huillet. Their adaptation slows down the cinematic dynamics, hints at the photographic origins of the moving image and questions established cinematic codes.
Résumé
Le présent article se propose d’analyser la représentation du mouvement et du geste dans Franz Kafka et dans l’adaptation cinématographique de son roman L’Amérique ou le Disparu. La première partie du texte passe en revue les travaux ayant montré l’influence des nouveaux médias visuels et du cinéma des premiers temps sur l’art de Kafka. La second partie examine la manière dont ces influences sont reprises et repensée dans le film Klassenverhältnisse (1984) de Straub/Huillet. Leur adaptation freine le rythme du mouvement cinématographique, attirant l’attention sur les origines photographiques de l’image mobile tout en interrogeant les codes hégémoniques du cinéma.
Key Words
Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared, Straub/Huillet, Class Relations, cinema, stereoscope, literature, uncanny
Notwithstanding the radical differences between the media of cinema and literature2, recent literary
studies have revealed the various ways in which early cinema has had a great influence on modernist writers of the 1910’s and 1920’s. The links between film and the modern (urban) experience or mental 1. Special thanks to Maarten Van Dyck and Vincent Eelen for the linguistic editing.
2. Murray outlined these dissimilarities between the inherent qualities of the word and the picture. Edward Murray, The Cinematic Imagination. Writers and the Motion Pictures (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972): 109-115. The economical directness of the visual stimulus, which displays no “soulscape” but an exterior experience, is measured against the power of the word to reveal the inner life of characters. Obviously, both media attempted to overcome these generic boundaries.
life were clear from the outset3 and urged some authors to react to the medium, either by vehemently
condemning the new medium, or, adapting to it. James Joyce, for example, never mentioned the importance of cinema for his literary prose. Still, there are noticeable connections between his writing, film theory (e.g. Eisenstein) and film practice (e.g. the use of techniques such as close-up).4
In Germany, the debate between cinema and literature raged as well.5 Alfred Döblin made his
views on “Kino-Stil” [cinema style]6 and “Döblinismus” [döblinism] explicit in his programmatory
metapoetic statements7 and already implemented his cinematographic preferences in his early works, not
to mention his plans for a cinematic novel.8 His attempts must be seen within a framework that redefines
naturalism and wants “to restrict itself to what can be perceived by the sensory organs.”9 Indeed, early
film caused a literary turn to exteriority, that left psychology and causality behind – hence Döblin’s rejection of authors such as Arthur Schnitzler. Döblin’s ideal form of literature “beschränkt sich auf die Notierung der Abläufe, Bewegungen, - mit einem Kopfschütteln, Achselzucken für das Weitere und das ‘Warum’ und ‘Wie’”10 [is limited to the notation of development, movement, - with a shake of the head,
a shrug concerning further implications and the ‘why’ and the ‘how’].
Franz Kafka’s work is situated in this intermedial framework as well. He was influenced by the new visual modalities of photography and cinema. Caroline Duttlinger reveals the ways Kafka processed photography in his diaries, letters and novels.11 Anke Biendarra uses, as does Duttlinger, the photograph
as an epistemologic or hermeneutic tool, allowing for a new perspective on Kafka’s novel The Man
Who Disappeared.12 With respect to cinema, it was Hans Zischler13 who traced Kafka’s interest in the
new medium, reading his diaries and letters. Zischler convincingly showed the importance of cinema in Kafka’s personal life. It was a refuge and a source of distraction for him (“Sinnlosigkeit”), which left traces in his diary, that include observations of daily urban life and motion. So, Zischler and after him 3. James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (London: Athlone, 1999): 64: “It also implies a homology between cinematic spectatorship and urban experience, with both being characterised by distraction, diffusion and anonymity.” Peter-André Alt, Franz Kafka. Der ewige Sohn (München: C. H. Beck, 2005): 217: “Das neue Medium wiederholt mit seinen künstlerischen Mitteln die Selbstinszenierung der Moderne, die sich auf zahlreichen Feldern der sozialen und intellektuellen Erfahrung des Menschen vollzieht.” [The new medium mirrors through its aesthetic means the self perception of modernity, that unfolds itself in various fields of social and intellectual experience of the human being.] See also Jacqueline Sudaka-Bénazéraf: Franz Kafka. Aspects d’une poétique du
regard (Leuven: Peeters, 2000).
4. Thomas L. Burkdall, Joycean Frames: Film and the Fiction of James Joyce (New York-London: Routledge, 2001).
5. The reactions of German authors are collected by Anton Kaes (ed.), Kino-Debatte. Texte zum Verhältnis von
Literatur und Film (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1978).
6. The translation of the German quotes are my own, except where otherwise specified.
7. Alfred Döblin, Aufsätze zur Literatur (Olten: Walter, 1963). The essays An Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker,
Bemerkungen zum Roman and Reform des Romans illuminate Döblin’s early interest in cinematographic
description, with a focus on an objective, external display of daily life.
8. Gabriele Sander, Alfred Döblin (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001). Erich Kleinschmidt, “Roman im “Kinostil”. Ein unbekannter “Roman” – Entwurf Alfred Döblins,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 63 (1989): 574-586.
9. Judith Ryan, “From Futurism to “Döblinism”,” The German Quarterly 54.4 (1981): 415-426 (417). 10. Döblin, Aufsätze, 16.
11. Carolin Duttlinger, Kafka and Photography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
12. Anke S. Biendarra, ““Man photographiert Dinge, um sie aus dem Sinn zu verscheuchen”: Zu den Motiven der Photographie und des verstellten Blicks in Kafkas Romanfragment Der Verschollene,” Orbis Litterarum 61.1 (2006): 16-41.
Elisabeth Lack14 revealed Kafka’s preoccupation with representations of movement and moving bodies.
They shed a light on Kafka’s interdisciplinary reception of contemporary discourses on the problem of movement, amongst which silent film is an important point of reference. As a matter of fact, intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Max Brod, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno linked Kafka to photography, silent film in general and with Charlie Chaplin in particular. Alfred Döblin’s review of Kafka’s novels brings to mind his own literary demands.15 Whereas Duttlinger focused on
photography, it was Peter-André Alt16 who first examined the influence of film on Kafka’s narrative style
and revealed the cinematic origin of some motives in his work, such as the doppelgänger in The Trial. The history of early cinema parallels the development of Kafka’s work. It too evolves from the use of experimental fragments towards larger narrative units. Moreover, Kafka turned to the surface as well, focusing on at times unmotivated movement, gesticulation and facial expressions.17
The invention of cinema was (after devices such as Joseph Plateau’s Phenakistoscope, Edward Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope and Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope) a decisive step in man’s endeavours to technologically reproduce movement. Lack18 and Duttlinger19 pointed out the ways in which Kafka tries
to capture movement in his diary entries and letters by splitting up the movements in their successive phases. They both compare Kafka’s analytically depicted moving bodies with the visual experiments of Muybridge, which break up the movement of a horse in its details and still states and which anticipate the invention of cinema. Muybridge’s study The Horse in Motion shows the separate phases of movement that suggest an overall dynamic image flux, when they are displayed after each other quickly.
Kafka too is mainly interested to break the image flow in order to capture the frozen moments, or “Bewegungsstillegungen”, that altogether suggest the idea of motion.20 Alt as well points to Kafka’s
attempts to catch the quick movements of animated pictures or fast urban experience in its fragmented sequences. In Contemplation and The Judgement, Kafka combines “Einzelbilder” to a new, dynamic whole. Thus, both literature and animated pictures appear to be tied to Zeno’s paradox of the flying arrow – an image that is attested in Kafka’s diaries, that links him to the technological presuppositions of film and its illusionary dynamics, known as Wertheimer’s phi phenomenon.21
The end of Kafka’s story The Judgement is narrated by use of a quick series of images.22 It also
brings to mind the cinematic trick of the fastened, reversed or backwards image flow, known in cinema 14. Elisabeth Lack, Kafkas bewegte Körper. Die Tagebücher und Briefe als Laboratorien von Bewegung (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2009).
15. It is fruitful to compare Döblin’s poetical statements with his reviews on Kafka and Joyce, who seem to fulfill his poetic demands. It is with “schlichte Sprache” [sober language] that Kafka is able to penetrate “die Tatsächlichkeit” [factuality] and to demonstrate the life of the common man, since the author “steht dem lebendigen Leben am nächsten kraft seines Materials, des Wortes” [bears resemblance to real life through his material, the word] (Döblin, Aufsätze, 22). Kafka’s novels, through their episodic structure, also meet his “Regenwurm” [earthworm] idea (Döblin, Aufsätze, 21).
16. Alt, Der ewige Sohn, 214-219; Peter-André Alt, Kafka und der Film: Über kinematographisches Erzählen (München: C. H. Beck, 2009).
17. Cf. Sudaka-Bénazéraf, Franz Kafka, 120-128. 18. Lack, Kafkas bewegte Körper.
19. Duttlinger, Kafka and Photography, 33-61. 20. Lack, Kafkas bewegte Körper, 187.
21. Timothy Corrigan & Patricia White, The Film Experience (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004): 76. 22. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 74-79.
since Lumière’s film on workers pushing over a wall. The way the son in Kafka’s Judgement holds on to the railing summons up the image of a man with his back towards the water:
Auf der Treppe, über deren Stufen er wie über eine schiefe Fläche eilte, überrumpelte er seine Bedienerin (…). Aus dem Tor sprang er, über die Fahrbahn zum Wasser trieb es ihn. Schon hielt er das Geländer fest, wie ein Hungriger die Nahrung.23 [On the staircase, which he rushed down as if
its steps were an inclined plane, he ran into his charwoman (…). Out of the front door he rushed, across the roadway, driven toward the water. Already he was grasping at the railings as a starving man clutches food.]24
In fact, this idea of dynamics through fragmentation corresponds with two types of seeing that Kafka hints at in his diary, after visiting the “Kaiserpanorama” (in fact a sort of stereoscope) in Prague, February 1911.25 In this note, two modes of vision are contrasted. According to Kafka, the panorama
and photography offer static images that one can observe and study in all their details. Cinema, Kafka argues, shows restless motion, which only allows for a superficial gaze. 26 A gaze that cannot process all
aspects and detail to which it is exposed; a gaze that is comparable with the perception of quick urban life and traffic.27 Kafka describes his visit to the Kaiserpanorama as follows:
Die Bilder lebendiger als im Kinematographen, weil sie dem Blick die Ruhe der Wirklichkeit lassen. Der Kinematograph gibt dem Angeschauten die Unruhe ihrer Bewegung, die Ruhe des Blicks scheint wichtiger. (…) Warum gibt es keine Vereinigung von Kinema und Stereoskop in dieser Weise? (…) Die Entfernung zwischen bloßem Erzählenhören und Panorama sehn ist größer, als die Entfernung zwischen Letzterem und dem Sehn der Wirklichkeit.28 [The images more vivid
as in the Kinematograph, since they allow the gaze the tranquility of reality. The Kinematograph gives the spectacle the restlessness of its movement, tranquility of the gaze seems more important. (…) Why isn’t there a combination of cinema and stereoscope in that manner? (…) The distance between hearing narration and seeing panorama is bigger than the distance between the latter and seeing reality.]
Thus, Kafka links the stereoscope with vivid reality, and fantasizes about a combination of the two visual media. Both Zischler29 and Alt30 maintain this idea is impossible and state that Kafka always processed
23. Franz Kafka, Sämtliche Werke (München: Suhrkamp, 2008): 769.
24. Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1971), EPUB edition.
25. Zischler, Kafka geht ins Kino, 39-46; Alt, Kafka und der Film, 145-159; Lack, Kafkas bewegte Körper, 185-187; Duttlinger, Kafka and Photography, 51-61. Cf. Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London: Reaktion Books, 1999): 70-71.
26. In this way, Kafka’s understanding of the panorama contrasts with the view of contemporary scholars, who emphasize exactly the dynamic aspects of the technological medium. With regard to the vivid and dynamic dimension of panoramic presentations (in the common sense of the word): Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013): 366.
27. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 48-79. 28. Zischler, Kafka geht ins Kino, 39-40.
29. Zischler, Kafka geht ins Kino, 44: “Die gewünschte Vereinigung von Kinema und Stereoskop kann es nicht geben – es sei denn, der Film käme zum Stillstand und würde zum “lebendigen Tableau” erstarren.” [The desired union of cinema and stereoscope is impossible – except if the movie would come to a halt and would fossilize to a vivid tableau.]
30. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 159: “In Friedland fragt sich Kafka im Februar 1911, aus welchem Grund es “keine Vereinigung von Kinema und Stereoskop” gebe. Die Antwort darauf, die er selbst verweigert, fällt nicht schwer:
both media separately in his writings. Duttlinger shows how Kafka juxtaposed both perceptive modes in The Man Who Disappeared. She links this with separate mental states of the observers, rather than exposing a unified, true stereoscopic mediation of the observed itself.31 Perhaps, there is one example
that can be read as a unified attempt to attune both technologies to a paradoxical whole that incorporates three-dimensionality, rest and movement at the same time – cinema, ossified “zum lebendigen Tableau”32
[a vivid tableau]. The following description of the image of a judge in The Trial catches the eye:
Besonders fiel ihm ein großes Bild auf, das rechts von der Tür hing, er beugte sich vor, um es besser zu sehen. Es stellte einen Mann im Richtertalar dar; er saß auf einem hohen Thronsessel, dessen Vergoldung vielfach aus dem Bilde hervorstach. Das Ungewöhnliche war, daß dieser Richter nicht in Ruhe und Würde dort saß, sondern den linken Arm fest an Rücken- und Seitenlehne drückte, den rechten Arm aber völlig frei hatte und nur mit der Hand die Seitenlehne umfaßte, als wolle er im nächsten Augenblick mit einer heftigen und vielleicht empörten Wendung aufspringen, um etwas Entscheidendes zu sagen oder gar das Urteil zu verkünden.33 [He was particularly struck by a large
picture to the right of the door, and he leant forward to have a better view of it. It represented a man in a judge’s gown; he was sitting on a high, throne-like chair with gilding which stood out in many places. The unusual aspect was that the judge was not calm and dignified; he was clasping the back and arm of the chair firlmly with his left arm, while his right arm was completely free, only the hand on the armrest, as if at any moment he was about to leap up with a vehement and perhaps outraged gesture to say something decisive, or even pronounce sentence.]34
Firstly, Kafka uses the polysemic German word “Bild”, which rules out a clear definition of the image as a photograph or a painting. Whereas in Orson Welles’ film adaptation the painting is signed by the painter, one is allured to connect the image to Titorelli only later on in the novel. Yet, in that particular passage, his paintings of landscapes are exactly alike. In that way, they do not underpin the concepts of originality and aura which Walter Benjamin associated with the work of art. On the contrary, the paintings resemble mechanically developed and reproducible photographs. This brings us back to the “Bild” of the judge, which in a way transcends the photograph. The verb “hervorstach” suggests a sense of three-dimensionality or depth, typical for the stereoscope.
Secondly, the image is peculiar because of its representation of movement. The judge is in a position that oscillates between actual standstill and implied motion. The use of the subjunctive makes it into a gesture that is in need of impossible, limited and conjectural interpretation. It is reminiscent of one of Roland Barthes’ descriptions of an image “flux”35 or a paused frame in the way Laura Mulvey
eine Synthese ist unmöglich, weil sie das Kino dazu zwänge, eine Bewegungslosigkeit der Bilder zu schaffen, die ihm auch in seinen beruhigteren Nah- und Momentaufnahmen fremd sein muß.” [Kafka wonders in Friedland in February 1911, why a combination of cinema and stereoscope does not exist. The answer, that he himself withholds, is simple: a synthesis is impossible, because it would force cinema to produce motionless images, which are even in the more calm close ups and freeze frames foreign to cinema’s nature.] Alt reads Kafka’s statement in a slightly different way, compared to Zischler. Zischler interprets it as a wish, while Alt reads it as a question on the technological reasons of the impossibility.
31. Duttlinger, Kafka and Photographie, 75. 32. Zischler, Kafka geht ins Kino, 44. 33. Kafka, Sämtliche Werke, 318.
34. Franz Kafka, The Trial. Translated by Mike Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 76. 35. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000): 89.
understands the new technological possibilities of digital media.36 The description meets Kafka’s
imaginative thoughts on the ideal form of technological visualization with its ambivalence of movement/ stillness.37 It also calls to mind the topos of the audience that is shocked by Lumière’s realistic movie of
the arrival of a train that threatens to break out of the screen, in the same way as the judge appears to be coming out of the frame as well.38
The idea of standstill returns in Benjamin’s and Adorno’s interpretations of Kafka’s gestures and relates it, amongst others, to silent film. “Verewigte Gesten bei Kafka sind ein erstarrt Momentanes.”39 [In Kafka’s text, immortalized gestured are the ossified
momentaneous.] The surface of the body became a new, authentic way of expression that precedes the symbolic realm. In Kafka as well, gestures suggest meaning, but they are mostly ambiguous hints to a irretrievable “Vorwelt”.40 Max Brod’s essay on the cinematograph highlights the hermeneutic importance
of the gesture in silent film, that speaks for itself, apart from words.41
Kafka’s gestures often stand for themselves and cannot always be accompanied by a narrative explanation, as Brod seems to argue in respect to the case of silent film. Kafka appears to question the idea that the body can fulfil the role of a standardized sign system, such as Brod seems to perceive it. The “als (ob)” [as if] clause (with subjunctive) or the verb “scheinen” [to seem] often accompany the gestures, as in this example from The Man Who Disappeared: “Dieser, der das Telephonieren, wie es Karl schien, mit besonderem Interesse beobachtete, sagte (…).”42[He, who, it seemed to Karl, was
following the telephoning with particular interest, said (…).]43 In The Trial, Josef K. can interpret one
ambiguous gesture in different ways: “Der Mann hinter ihm, mit dem er sich schon früher unterhalten hatte, beugte sich wieder zu ihm, sei es, um ihm im allgemeinen Mut zuzusprechen oder um ihm einen besonderen Rat zu geben.”44 [The man behind him, whom he’d been talking to before, leant down again,
presumably to give him either general encouragement or a specific piece of advice.]45
The body movement even gradually becomes independent in this sentence taken from Kafka’s fragment The Urban World: “Hier verstummte der Vater, bewegte aber sein Gesicht, als rede er noch.”46
[Here the father fell silent, but moved his face as though he were still speaking.]47 This example brings
to mind early attempts (such as Edison’s “Kinetophone”)48 to link the animated images with sound, for
36. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006): 7-8. 37. Cf. Duttlinger, Kafka and Photography, 51-61.
38. Cf. one of Kafka’s diary entries. See Zischler, Kafka geht ins Kino, 15. 39. Theodor Adorno, Prismen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977): 259.
40. Lack, Kafkas bewegte Körper, 17-19. Adorno, Prismen, 255. Hermann Schweppenhäuser (ed.), Benjamin
über Kafka (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981): 12, 18, 36, 166.
41. Kaes, Kino-Debatte, 40: “Dies bewundere ich; noch mehr aber, wie durch Gesten die kompliziertesten Voraussetzungen deutlich gemacht werden.“
42. Kafka, Sämtliche Werke, 135.
43. Franz Kafka, Amerika. The Man Who Disappeared. Translated with an Introduction by Michael Hofmann (London: Penguin, 2007), EPUB Edition.
44. Kafka, Sämtliche Werke, 271. 45. Kafka, The Trial, 76.
46. Kafka, Sämtliche Werke, 979.
47. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1923 (New York: Schocken, 1983), EPUB edition. 48. Harry Geduld, The Birth of the Talkies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975): 21-22.
example of the phonograph – endeavours Kafka might have known.49 Except in the case of live performed
music or sound, all efforts of linking the two failed, because synchronization of sound and image proved to be impossible at the time;50 the surface thus remains independent from explicit signification and
intention.
Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared is, according to Sudaka-Bénazéraf and Alt, a further step in
the development of the author’s cinematic style of writing. Kafka finds new ways in cinema to bring the narrative to life, to create dynamic and fast images.51 Here too, the representation of traffic (cars, boats
and trains) represents a shock experience for the unaccustomed perceiver Karl. Kafka uses flickering light as a cinematic metaphor for the observation of the hectic traffic from a balcony.52 Kafka uses different
“camera perspectives” in The Man Who Disappeared to represent the cinematically depicted chase scene from different angles53 and he focuses on the perceived objects.54 Alt’s examples are numerous. His
findings result in the following conclusion: Kafka, despite some photographic passages, obviously tries to introduce motion and dynamics in his literary descriptions and uses cinematic techniques to achieve this goal.55
Kafka’s novel The Man Who Disappeared was adapted for the screen by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, two collaborating French filmmakers of critical, modernist movies who experiment with cinematic language. Laura Mulvey, in an interview with Roberta Sassatelli, explicitly names these two avant-garde directors concerning defamiliarizing types of film which counteract the ideologically determined ways of seeing as reproduced in Hollywood movies.56 Mulvey summarizes her book Death
24x a Second in two principles of uncanniness:
[T]here’s a double uncanniness: of the preserved, fossilized image, the image of human life which then continues after death, the presence of the photographed body as it were; this is an extension of Barthes’ argument about the presence of death in the photograph into the extended duration of cinema. Then there is the question of the animation of the human image, that I argue relates to the automaton, and the uncanniness of the machine, of the mechanical figure. So you both have the uncanniness of the porous boundary between life and death, and the uncanniness of the porous boundary between the mechanized robot and the human figure. (Sassatelli, Interview, 137-138) 49. Research of Stabla Zdenek has shown that in Prague, the home city of Kafka, such a performance of coloured image and sound was organized in the Grand Hotel by Emile Joffé in 1896. The event enjoyed a lot of media attention at the time. Moreover, “after Joffé’s performance in Prague, one cinema establishment after another added a phonograph to its showing.” Stabla Zdenek, “The First Cinema Shows in the Czech Lands,” Film History 3.3 (1989): 203-221. This article shows that cinema was well established in Bohemia, even before the first permanent cinema theatres were founded. The influence of cinema on Kafka might therefore go back further than assumed by Peter-André Alt. The link between The Urban World and such new technological endeavors is of course conjecture. Yet, the text can be read against this background, which sustains the idea that (moving) image and sound become independent with early film.
50. Geduld, The Birth, 43-45.
51. Duttlinger differentiates between the cinematic scenes and the photographical, static aspects of the novel. She demonstrates Kafka’s reception of Holitscher’s photographs of the New World. See Duttlinger, Kafka and
Photography, 62-99.
52. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 64-71. 53. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 83-84.
54. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 94-95. Alt, Der ewige Sohn, 350-353.
55. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 64-72, 80-100. Sudaka-Bénazéraf, Franz Kafka, 120-128. 56. Sassatelli, Interview, 127.
These two types of the uncanny, which cannot be completely separated from each other, come to the fore in Straub/Huillet’s arthouse film adaptation of The Man Who Disappeared. In its own way, the film reflects on time through its unusual representation of movement and on the mechanization of the human body and its gestures.
The opening shot, which lasts for thirty seconds before the credit titles appear, already illustrates the film’s preoccupation with time through (lack of) movement. The camera focuses on a statue and the frame does not show any movement at all. We hear sounds of far away traffic, which suggests that time goes by and the camera is still rolling. If it were not for this background noise, the spectator would have the idea of looking at a photograph, or a still frame, as in Dziga Vertov’s A Man With a Movie Camera.57
In Class Relations, there are no absolute freeze frames, but they accomplish the same effect: the elusive cinematic image is retained. The projection of this motionless image allows for detailed observation, which Roland Barthes preserved for photography.58 The spectator is, through static frames, confronted
with a “cinema of delay”. This way, the viewer, allured to perpetrate “fetishistic scopophilia”59, is able
to get a hold on the details of the image.
The movie is characterized by an overall slow pace. This has to do with the scarce use of shots. Shots in Class Relations, generally, do not change in quick succession, so that the spectator has time to adapt to the frame (there are only a few exceptions in the most dynamic scenes). So, Class Relations slows down the cinematic pace and makes viewers aware of the paradox that underlies every form of moving pictures: the phi phenomenon that can be described with Zeno’s paradox of the flying arrow (cf. supra). The motionless frame also brings with it some uncanny collateral damage. With its photographical aura, it brings in the alienating “presence of passing time and of the mortality that Bazin and Barthes associate with the photograph.”60 It alerts the spectator of the relationship between the “now” and the “then”, as is
the case for the photograph.61
This effect of delay is achieved by several cinematic artifices that limit motion. Straub/Huillet frequently use the technique of the very first statue shot. In many cases, the off-screen is the actual scene of activity and dynamics. In these instances, the camera frames an immobile figure. In conversations, the speaking figures often appear off-screen, so that even the limited movement of the lips is avoided. The frame disregards the talking and moving body.
A repeated technique consists of a fixed eye, while the characters walk out of the frame. The camera keeps on capturing the scene for an inordinate amount of time, since nothing happens anymore. Again, the spectator sees a static, photographic image. In the meantime, he hears the characters disappear 57. Cf. Barton Byg: Landscapes of Resistance. The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (Berkeley – Los Angeles - London: University of California Press, 1995): 20-25 (22): “‘The imposition of things’ is precisely the source of the moments of joy to be found in Straub/Huillet films, as they evoke the photographic immediacy of early cinema.” Straub/Huillet highlight the photographic basis of the filmic image.
58. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26-28, 42, 55. 59. Mulvey, Death, 165.
60. Mulvey, Death, 166. 61. Mulvey, Death, 57.
in the off-screen. This produces an uncanny effect, which oscillates between the progressive passing of time of cinema and the fixated moment of photography. The off-screen is therefore a useful instrument that makes motionless screen versions of dynamic novel passages possible. The chapter “Ein Asyl” [An asylum] offers plenty of examples. Firstly, the violent, dynamically depicted confrontation of Karl and Delamarche takes place out of the frame, while the camera is fixed on a door. Secondly, the novel displays a brass band passing by in detail. Karl, completely enthralled and entertained by the scene, sees this event from a bird’s-eye view, cannot hear the characters speak because of the music,62 as in silent
film. In Class Relations, on the other hand, this dynamic scene is not shown directly – the spectator sees Robinson, Karl, Brunelda and Delamarche standing still on the balcony and hears, once again, the noise that has its origins off-screen.
Alt and Sudaka-Bénazéraf pointed to the cinematic dynamics of Kafka’s traffic descriptions throughout the novel. The highly dynamic passage in which Karl perceives the traffic from his balcony in New York63 is omitted in the film. Also, the bustle in Hotel Occidental (when Karl searches for
food and when he is dragged into the panopticon-like porters’ lodge) is not displayed. Yet, there are scenes that show traffic: the entrance of the boat in New York’s harbour, the traffic in New York, the traffic on the way to Ramses and the train scene at the end of the film. The first two examples bring in remembrance Kafka’s fragmented perception from the subway or tram. Kafka’s description consists of the same sequence of disjointed images that he uses to describe films.64 As regards the film, the camera
moves with the vehicle in all cases. Yet, there is a difference: movement is slow, so that it is not an overwhelming, impenetrable experience. The third example, on the other hand, shows up-speed traffic, that is discontinuous. The rhythm in the traffic strongly resembles the pace that Kafka described in
The Man Who Disappeared65. The shot ends with another still frame that shows the remote city. The
movement of the train at the end of the film, finally, does not allow a “Ruhe des Blicks” [tranquility of the gaze] and is in line with Kafka’s description at the novel’s end.
The most conspicuous example is the pursuit scene, which is in Alt’s reading one of the most striking examples of Kafka’s cinematic writing style.66 The pursuit scene occurs between two moments
of stasis: after a shot of the police officer and before the motionless image of Delamarche holding his head on Karl’s mouth that lasts for up to five seconds. This passage is filmed in a dynamic way, from three camera perspectives. First, we see Karl and the police officer running away from the camera; then, a pan movement of the camera from a second police officer moves toward the point where Karl comes running into the frame. Karl jumps, as is the case in Kafka’s narrative, the camera is fixed and Karl moves into the frame from behind the camera’s eye. Although this sequence is very dynamic, one cannot 62. Kafka, Sämtliche Werke, 185-190.
63. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 64-65; Sudaka-Bénazéraf, Franz Kafka, 110-111.
64. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 53-56, 62: “Daß Kafka die Charakterisierung des städtischen Verkehrs im Tagebuch zur Einübung in Formen des kinematographischen Erzählens nutzt, zeigt ein Journaleintrag vom 25. September 1912. Er beschreibt hier auf eine Weise, die an die Pariser und Prager Verkehrsschilderungen erinnert, den Film
Die wilde Jagd.” [The fact that Kafka uses the representation of city traffic in his diary to train some forms of
cinematic writing, is shown by a diary entry of the 25th of September 1912. He describes the movie Die wilde Jagd in such a way that brings in remembrance the Parisian and Prague traffic visualizations.]
65. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 65-69. 66. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 80-93.
oversee the artificial character. Karl is not saved by Delamarche, but he runs into a door on purpose. He seemed to have a goal. This version recasts the “Motiv der last-minute-rescue”67 [motif of the
last-minute escape], which was a typical part of comic cinema.68 The representation of Straub/Huillet omits
the haptic and therefore comic element of Kafka’s narrative version. This way, the cinematic motif of the pursuit is subjected to a defamiliarization process, that makes the viewer aware of the artificiality of such scenes, through a self-reflexive gesture.
The stasis of the figures themselves also contributes to the achievement of this alienating stillness. The figures often stand or sit immobile, only moving their lips or not moving at all. Often, even lip-movement is avoided by showing the figure from a low angle or from his side or back (for example when Karl talks to the student on the neighboring balcony). When the latter is the case, the boundaries between film and photograph are questioned yet again.
Other techniques that reduce movement and therefore link the frame with photography are the long-shot and the close-up. Mulvey argues that both generate a delay effect.69 Green appears on the far
away villa doorstep – he shouts, but no movement can be perceived because of the distance between him and the camera. When Karl and the servant in the corridor slowly walk away from the camera’s eye, they gradually create a static long-shot. The fight of Klara and Karl on the bed is an interesting case of close-up. Again, Klara speaks off-screen, while Karl is held on the bed by Klara and, motionless, does not resist. The frame stays static for one and a half minute.
Another case of close-up not only shows the photographic essence of the motionless frames, but leads to an uncanny rendition of the figures. Herr Green gives Karl a letter, in which Karl’s uncle bans him from the family for the second time. We see Karl’s face in close-up, whereas his hands that hold the letter, are invisible. This results in another still frame that lasts over a minute. His face does not express any emotion. This mismatch between (in-) expressivity of the voice, the natural/expected human emotions and the artificiality of his corporeal behaviour has a grotesque and uncanny effect. When, later on, Robinson collapses in a drunken state, Karl walks up to him and utters “Zum Teufel!” [Damn!] in a completely dispassionate way. Hence the dispassionate, unchanging tone in which the figures rattle their lines. Karl is the most obvious example. Except for the highly expressive and fluently speaking uncle, “Oberkellner” [Head Waiter] and Delamarche (which voices power relations throughout the film)70,
all actors articulate Kafka’s original long sentences in an artificial way: monotonously, with unnatural or unexpected pauses in the middle of sentences and noun phrases. These gaps shatter the illusion of naturalism and slow down the pace of the film once again. The figures seem to be on the verge of the human and the inhuman – in this way, they incorporate the uncanny.71
67. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 89.
68. Alt, Kafka und der Film, 80-93. Alt relates the motif to Robert W. Paul, Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin,
Nick Winter et le vol de la Joconde and Die weiße Sklavin. The link with the “cinéma burlesque” of Chaplin was
brought to the fore by Sudaka-Bénazéraf as well. See Sudaka-Bénazéraf, Franz Kafka, 115-118. 69. Sassatelli, Interview, 137; Mulvey, Death, 163-164.
70. See Byg, Landscapes, 164-177. Some figures, such as the uncle figure, have, as opposed to Karl, the power to narrate or to read and tell a coherent plot. This mirrors interdependence relations in both Kafka’s novel and the Straub/Huillet movie.
71. Byg, Landscapes, 23-24 interprets this speech (of actors struggling with a foreign language) as a innovative way to bring about a new form of spontaneity and authenticity, that breaks with the rehearsed, repeated lines of traditional cinema.
This uncanny existence repeats itself in the body language. As stated above, in Class Relations, movement is reduced to a minimum. This is true for corporeal movement as well. A short comparison between the aforementioned scene in which a drunk Robinson visits Karl in Hotel Occidental illustrates this “ossification”. Kafka’s Robinson gesticulates, waves his arms, lets his eyes speak, grimaces.72 This
body language disappears in the film, making Robinson into a marionette-like figure. When he collapses, this body movement appears contrived. The “Oberportier” [Head Porter] holds Karl, but he does this rather statically. In this way, the dynamics of the porter taking Karl by the arm, lifting him up and shaking him are processed towards something alienating and mechanic.
The main figure, Karl, always talks in the same way, his look stays emotionless throughout the whole film, he almost never drastically moves (except for the pursuit scene). One of the first scenes in the film contrasts Karl’s marionette-like existence73 with the uncle figure. Whereas Karl makes a
mechanical, passive impression because of the way he talks and moves, the uncle speaks very fluently. Moreover, he uses his body in a natural way to enforce his statements. First, the two figures are separated in different shots. Eventually, they come together in a single frame, making the contrast all the clearer. Indeed, most of the actors perform their roles as if they were puppets. Sometimes, the puppet-figures gesticulate and use their body as a system of signification, but when Karl bows to say goodbye to Mack and Klara, his body motion is somewhat forced. The captain raises his arms at the beginning of the film. His movement, surrounded by stasis, makes a mechanical impression too. When the “Oberköchin” [the Head Cook] in the interrogation scene lays her hands on the chair, this does not seem to have any meaning. As in Kafka’s novel, the gesture is not always decipherable, so that the body surface is questioned as a means of expression. The body language in Class Relations does not compare with the intensified expressive gestures which Max Brod and Walter Benjamin described as the interpretative basis of silent film or the realistic/established performance of contemporary films, such as David Jones’ Kafka adaptation of The Trial. The spectator of Class Relations is confronted with a sort of “underacting” instead of overacting or realism. When the figures do move their hands, these actions are highly marked, and make the spectator aware of “intensely controlled stillness and (…) ability to pose for the camera.”74
Barthes considered the pose as the defining quality of photography, but it is of importance in film as well.75 Especially in Class Relations, where stasis prevails, the gesture draws attention to itself, urges the
spectator to “fetishistically” engage with the image, more than with the plot.76 As the figures mechanically
take their right places in the captain’s lounge on the boat, the film hints at the orchestrated way actors take their positions and strike a pose.
Laura Mulvey incorporates these uncanny effects, that are induced by the mechanical and the motionless, in a feminist critique of standard Hollywood movies. In her provocative and debated essay
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema77, Mulvey attacks these movies that according to her force the
72. Kafka, Sämtliche Werke, 125-126.
73. Schweppenhäuser, Benjamin über Kafka, 17. 74. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 78; Mulvey, Death, 162. 75. Mulvey, Death, 163.
76. Mulvey, Death, 165.
(male and female) audience to identify with the male gaze of the camera and the protagonist. In a fruitful dialectics with critics of her work78, Mulvey revisited her hypotheses several times, leading to her book
Death 24x a Second. Her ideas accurately describe the case of Class Relations and make it possible
to highlight a crucial continuity with Kafka’s novel. Because of the predominance of the passive, motionless image, it can be argued that the movie highlights the “feminine” principle that is invoked by the photographical, meticulously watched images, that lie, from a technological point of view, at the basis of film. On top of that, the male main character is not the one that drives the plot forward, which turns traditional gender roles upside down – as is also already the case in Kafka’s novel.79 To put it
bluntly, the Karl figure does not allow for identification with the male protagonist: neither in the film, nor in the novel.
From the above it becomes clear that, where Kafka tries to bring dynamics into his novel by processing cinematic techniques and motives, the film adaptation by Straub/Huillet appears to do the exact opposite by reducing the narrative’s pace. The movie highlights the motionless and the mechanical, creating uncanny (1) self-reflexive tendencies and (2) effects which are generally related to photography.
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Michiel Rys is a PhD candidate at Leuven University, where he works on the representation of the figure of Robespierre in German literature. His email is: michiel.rys@arts.kuleuven.be
