| From the man who wakes up one morning transformed into a bug, to the man arrested in his bedroom by a shadowy, extra-legal police force despite, seemingly, having done nothing wrong, the author Franz Kafka has put his protagonists into some of the most identifiable and bizarre predicaments of twentieth century literature. It is no surprise then that many notable directors have undertaken the challenge of translating the tales of these protagonists onto film. Themselves possessed of inspired and unique minds themselves, it should also come as no surprise that these filmmakers each take a distinctly individual approach to the source material, often with an agenda markedly different from Kafka's own, and, by extension, produce final products that differ greatly both from each other and from the source material.;The goal of this thesis is to provide case studies of three such adaptations of Franz Kafka's work: Orson Welles's The Trial (1962), adapted from the novel Der Prozeß; Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's Klassenverhältnisse (1984), adapted from the incomplete novel Der Verschollene; and Michael Haneke's Das Schloß (1997), adapted from the novel of the same name. These case studies will explore the problems inherent in adapting literature to film in general, and more specifically, present an analysis of those elements of the original texts which the filmmakers in question retain in their respective adaptations as well as those they eschew and the rationales behind these decisions. |
