Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Trial
1962 · Orson Welles · The Trial on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how tiny K looks in these huge rooms. (camera)
Edmond Richard's wide-angle lenses stretch ceilings and corridors far beyond human scale, so Josef K. keeps shrinking against the architecture around him.
Payoff: The bigger the room gets, the smaller his chances of being heard.
Notice a door opening onto a room that shouldn't be there. (cutting)
The editing blurs the seams between spaces so a law court can adjoin a tenement or a sickroom connect to a painter's studio with no explanation.
Payoff: You lose any stable sense of how one place connects to the next. In the reading: any-space-whatever — disconnection. The reading calls this a disconnected space: the links between places gone missing, so you feel lost on purpose.
Notice the rows of identical clerks and desks. (staging)
Crowds are staged as geometric masses, a sea of desks or a herd of accused men, dwarfing any single person including K.
Payoff: The system stays felt rather than fully seen, which is exactly how it keeps its power. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. The reading calls the unseen system an absolute out-of-field: a power you feel but can never see the edges of.
Listen for how detached the dubbed voices sound. (sound)
Welles post-synchronized much of the dialogue and dubbed several roles himself, giving the voices a slightly disembodied quality throughout.
Payoff: Even the sound of people talking feels like it's arriving from somewhere else.
Watch the animated parable that opens the film. (structure)
A grainy pinscreen sequence tells the story of a man waiting his whole life at a door meant only for him, before K.'s story even starts.
Payoff: You're handed the key to the whole film before you know you'll need it. In the reading: the readable image (lectosign). The reading calls this a lectosign: an image asking to be read, not just watched.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the doors, not the verdict. Count how many rooms K. walks through, and how few are meant for him.