Kafka (1991)
Filmed in Prague and starring Jeremy Irons (Dead Ringers, M. Butterfly, Lolita), Steven Soderberg’s second film followed his Palme d’Or winner, Sex, Lies and Videotape. Along the lines of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire, the audience is presented with a spectacle. The film is a pastiche of some of Franz Kafka’s greatest novels, including both fictive and non-fictive elements of his life.
Now as then, Kafka’s work stands completely on its own, impossible to translate into any other medium outside the original, literature. In a letter to Walter Benjamin written in 1934 on the subject of Kafka and film Theodore Adorno stated, “[Kafka’s novels] lack in principle the very spectator who might intervene in such experiments.” In other words, Kafka’s writings are not really film material.
Apropos, Kafka the film says more about the medium of film than it does tribute to the enigmatic writer or his work. With this film, Soderberg playfully demonstrated the kinds of things film can accomplish. Kafka demonstrated this on a literary level, to the highest degree. Kafka was, hands down, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. The same cannot be said of Soderberg as a filmmaker. Nonetheless, quite an entertaining and engaging film.
Jennifer Dawson
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Grading
- Story B+
- Acting B+
- Visuals A-
- Originality/Innovation B+
- Enjoyability A-
- Overall B+
- DVD Extras NA
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