Kafka – the movie Thursday, Jun 28 2007

Kafka (1991):

• starring: Jeremy Irons, Theresa Russell, Joel Grey, Ian Holm, Alec Guiness
• director: Stephen Soderbergh
• Writer: Lem Dobbs
• rating: NR
• release date: January 1, 1991

Kafka – the movie is a paranoid thriller set in 1916 about the cover-up of the murder of one of Kafka’s friends and colleagues by officials in a totalitarian state.

Kafka – The Movie (1991):

starring: Jeremy Irons, Theresa Russell, Joel Grey, Ian Holm, Alec Guiness
director: Stephen Soderbergh
release date: January 1, 1991

Kafka – The Movie is an interesting film from Steven Soderbergh that casts Jeremy Irons as the tortured Franz Kafka, combining elements of his real life and his own blend of Kafkaesque man-made hellishness.

Kafka is stuck at his dead-end job that is filled with a zany bunch characters that you would likely find in one of his own surreal stories. That maddening feeling of where we are being led and how to sift through the mess is a viable trait of Kafka’s work, and despite the convolution of everything going on, it warrants at least another viewing to try and trace and discern those fictional aspects fused with biographical reality.

Jeremy Irons is appealing in the title role, and the choice to film it predominantly in black and white is a good one.

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What does Kafkaesque mean? Thursday, Jun 28 2007

The adjective kafkaesque comes from Franz Kafka and refers to the style with which he wrote his books, especially his nightmarish type of narration, in which characters lack a clear course of action, the ability to see beyond immediate events, and the possibility of escape. The term’s meaning has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical.

Waking up and being a human sized insect but being able to fit under a regular door and subsequently kicked by your father. THAT’S Kafkaesque.

The school is so… Kafkaesque!

The system IS Kafkaesque.

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Franz Kafka Thursday, Jun 28 2007

Name: Franz Kafka
Birth Date: 1883
Death Date: 1924
Gender: Male
Occupations: novelist, short-story writer
Literary movement: modernism, existentialism, Surrealism, precursor to magical realism
Influences: Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Nietzsche
Influenced: Albert Camus, Federico Fellini, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Salman Rushdie

Franz Kafka earned a law degree and worked for an insurance firm while writing mostly short fiction on the side. He began publishing in 1907, but what are now considered his major works appeared posthumously. His short stories and essays, such as The Metamorphosis (1915), appeared in his lifetime, but his three unfinished novels were published posthumously (against his wishes) by his friend Max Brod: Der Prozess (1925, The Trial), Das Schloss (1926, The Castle), and Amerika (1927). Kafka’s work, with its themes of alienation from society and a general anxiety over just being alive, had a strong influence on authors and intellectuals. Kafka’s style is so consistent and unique that it has become its own brand – Kafkaesque.

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