Klassenverhältnisse

Here, the sometimes robotic acting and the unconventional framing and editing somehow intensify the unsettling and disconcerting character of Kafka's cosmos of blocked paths, locked doors, rigid rules, brutal lawlessness, looming violence and hopeless dreams. Kafka's projection of a fantastical American nightmare is in this case also more directly inflected through considerations of political economy.

This film creates a silent world of dreams or better said nightmares with the help of rough cuts. Those rough cuts seem to condemn the characters to a narrow and cruel world which can be taken as the reason why they "act" so deadpan and have no alternative other than speaking if only coldly. I took Rossman to be the ultimate alter-ego of Kafka as a Jew who wants to have a hope and settlement in an absurd world which only deprives him of the former. That's an invention in cinematic language.

S/H effectively reproduce a Kafkaesque atmosphere, but the sources of dread are rooted in a specific social order (Marx). The formal presentation (stark B+W, expressionist lighting, angular staging) combined with the increasingly prickly dialogue magnifies a brutal world where power is exercised through capital or those close to capital, which inevitably filters down to the lower orders. Submission or resistance to metaphorical violence: a choice. It's grim but not without hope. It's also great.

Kafkaesque

i liked Amerika more than the Trial, and I like Straub&Huillet's film more than Welles'. Although the directors do take plenty of liberties with the material, they expertly follow and expand on the spirit of the book. The dialogue is in a very peculiar German, the actors always stumbling over certain words, to an ambivalent effect - between comedy and self-irony. Once you get used to it, it's quite bittersweet and, I gotta say it, kafkaesque.

cool, i imagine one talking about this with some swiss curators at a kunsthalle after party where they serve the driest prosecco

28 Subat '14, Bilgi Sinema &

birebir teatral cekilmis amerika uyarlamasi. kitabi begenen niye? filmi begenmesin sasarim

Do you like the idea of early Fassbinder with less humor or Godardian cinematic referentiality? Or early Wenders without his innate sense of warmth and humanism? How about Bresson without any of his pesky spirituality? If so, than this just might be the movie for you. To be fair, this might be better than i'm giving it credit for if it actually had proper subtitles (although the Straub/Huillet stance on subtitles perhaps indicates a deep-seated pretentiousness within their whole sensibility).