Michael Haneke is
the perfect person to adapt Franz Kafka.
This was my first thought when I saw the film The Castle in the library.
Watching it I am only confirmed in my opinion. He is perfect because his films depict an acute coldness in
a random, violent world. He was
the filmmaker who directed the sadistic Funny Games, where two young men torment a family, a work in the genre of
‘house invasion’. The White
Ribbon, which shows death in small town Germany, The
Time of the Wolf about an apocalyptic world and a
family’s attempts at survival and Benny’s Video where
a love interest shoots his possible girlfriend with a secretly acquired bolt
gun. A bundle of laughs he is not.
This is what makes him great at
adapting Kafka; he understands the terms of the cruel absurd that the Czech
author was writing under. Haneke
is ok with a story that is neigh-on impossible to interpret, he’s ok with
showing humanity in some of it’s worst lights and he is more than capable of
rending the images of the book into cinema. He is, as I say, the perfect choice.
When I read The Castle I was struck by how visual it is and its sense of desolate beauty
was potent. If there is any work
of literature can accurately depicts the dark logic of nightmares it comes from
Kafka. This is also what makes
Kafka a problem; he makes reading into a torturously painful experience. It is quite an experience, especially
when you think that he never really finished most of his longer stories, so to
think of them that they could go on is fairly unbearable. There has been nothing I’ve read that
has scarred me so piercingly, only Paul Auster’s Oracle Night comes close, so treat this is a sort of warning. As someone once wrote ‘when I read
Kafka’s novels I feel for him, when I read his diaries I feel for his family’.
There has also been some talk about
exactly how ‘great’ Kafka was. I
read an article that argued how he was vastly overrated and that he really
couldn’t be understood unless you lived in Prague about the same time as he
did. This impossibility to
interpret Kafka gives rise to whole schools of Kafka studies making it, like
some other modernist texts, more like something to do with the occult. I appreciate the uncompromising
strangeness of his writings, which can make anything meaningful out of it
obscure, and perhaps there is something to be said of deconstructing them in a
way that removes the author’s intentions more away from the critical discourse,
but I believe that it is his images that remain relevant to people decades
on.
The images in Kafka are the images of
being in-between things, of rationally not knowing what to do; of being stuck
and inadvertently guilty of something we did not realise was a crime. These are images, I imagine, that
people can respond to as they call out to our pity and compassion to these
hopeless protagonists. Certainly
they resonate with me. It must
also resonate with Haneke as he displays the barbarous bureaucracy in delicious
beauty and poise.
Kafka is difficult and maybe it is best
just to treat them as stories that have no meaning outside of their words, and,
really, is that not enough?
No comments:
Post a Comment