Orson Welles' Trippy Kafka Masterpiece 'The Trial' Comes To Life - Watch The Restoration Trailer

Unless you're torrent-savvy, Orson Welles' trippy and disturbing 1962 film "The Trial" is hard to find. Various restorations from 35mm negatives have appeared over the years, but Welles fans have long since resigned themselves to lower-quality rips on DVD, VHS, or the Internet. That's no longer the case, as Rialto Pictures is releasing a long-awaited 4K restoration of Franz Kafka's adaptation starring Anthony Perkins as a man persecuted for an unspecified crime. The 4K restoration of the 60th anniversary opens at Film Forum on December 9 before going nationwide, and IndieWire has the exclusive trailer below.

“The Trial” also stars Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider and Elsa Martinelli as the women who tangle with Josef K. (Perkins) and his trial. The film, which sometimes played in repertoire rooms in poor quality formats, was restored by Studiocanal and La Cinémathèque française. The image and sound restorations were carried out in 4K at the L’image Retrouvée laboratory from the original 35mm negative. Misunderstood at the time but later revered by critics including Roger Ebert, "The Trial" uses the expressionist cinematography of Edmond Richard, who also made several films for Luis Bunuel. Its disorienting scenic design has proven inspiring to many filmmakers - you can even see touches of "The Trial" in Terry Gilliam's films - even though the film itself has largely been lost to time. The director, of course, has a cameo in the film.

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From: "The film's world resembles a nightmare, with its hero moving from one surreal situation to another. Water towers open to archive rooms, a woman does the laundry while that through the door a trial is taking place, and huge trunks are being dragged through empty landscapes, then back.The black-and-white photograph shows Welles' love of shadows, extreme camera angles and the spectacular sets. He shot it mainly inside the Gare d'Orsay in Paris, which, after its closure as a train station and before its revival as a museum, offered vast spaces; the office where Joseph K is made up of rows of desks and typists stretching almost endlessly, like a similar scene in the silent film "The Crowd". Kafka published his novel in Prague in 1925; this reflected his own paranoia, but it was prophetic, foreseeing Stalin's gulag and Hitler's Holocaust, in which innoce nts wake up one morning to find they are guilty of being themselves. It is a tribute to his vision that the word "Kafkaesque", like "Catch-22", has gone beyond the work to describe the things we all see in the world."

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