12/2/2023 0 Comments Kafka franz metamorphosisIn addition to Kafka's German, Czech, and Jewish heritages, there was also the Austrian element into which Kafka had been born and in which he had been brought up. But even if Kafka had not been Jewish, it is hard to see how his artistic and religious sensitivity could have remained untouched by the ancient Jewish traditions of Prague which reached back to the city's tenth-century origin. His close relationship with Dora Dymant, his steady and understanding companion of his last years, contributed considerably toward this development. Although Kafka became extremely interested in Jewish culture after meeting a troupe of Yiddish actors in 1911, and although he began to study Hebrew shortly after that, it was not until late in his life that he became deeply interested in his heritage. In short, Kafka shared the fate of much of Western Jewry - people who were largely emancipated from their specifically Jewish ways and yet not fully assimilated into the culture of the countries where they lived. Yet from the Czech point of view, Kafka was German, and from the German point of view he was, above all, Jewish. Likewise in District 9, since huge portions of the film consist of close-up shots of the lead character’s face as he endures horror after horror at the hands of, principally-not aliens but-human beings.Born in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka is today considered the most important prose writer of the so-called Prague Circle, a loosely knit group of German-Jewish writers who contributed to the culturally fertile soil of Prague during the 1880s until after World War I. Kafka is chiefly interested not in the bizarre process of a person becoming a kind of insect, but the goings-on inside that person’s head as the transformation takes place. The main similarity though, is in the narrative’s psychological proximity to the character experiencing the ordeal. The obvious comparison is “The Metamorphosis”, because the aliens in District 9 are insect-like and the central character in that short story turns into a bug, but there are also shades of The Trial in there. It’s Kafka all over, and I’d be very surprised if he wasn’t a direct influence on the filmmakers. All the same there are striking similarities: an unremarkable, mid-level bureaucrat endures a sudden and terrifying physical transformation and consequent rejection from society. District 9įor me District 9 is a textbook example of how ideas from the page can be transferred to film, and it’s not even an adaptation. There were parts of it that were utterly, cover-your-eyes horrifying, so perhaps ‘enjoyed’ is an odd word to use, but nevertheless, I thought it was quite brilliant, and I’m mentioning it here because it reminded me of one of the greatest short fiction writers you could ever hope to encounter, Franz Kafka. Well, last night I went to see District 9, and enjoyed it immensely. In that instance I didn’t feel that the filmmakers had successfully transferred the story to the cinema. When Litro was focusing on film, I wrote about the difficulty of adapting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for the screen. Yet I want to briefly touch on something from an earlier post, as I saw something last night that gave me some small thoughts about what I wrote back then. I’m writing this a day early, since I’m going to be away for a while from tomorrow and the demands of suitcases waiting to be filled mean this piece will be something of a ramble.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |