Kafka’s Parable “Before the Law” Narrated by Orson Welles & Illustrated with Great Pinscreen Art — openculture.com

On Friday, we featured Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” adapted in 1963 through the work-intensive but aesthetically stunning means of “pinscreen animation” by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker. But they hadn’t labored over it in total obscurity; the year before, no less solid a pillar of American film than Orson Welles had commissioned their work for use in his adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, another work of literature deeply concerned with the absurd. Critical opinion varies about the film, which some consider Welles’ best work, others consider his worst, and others still consider a mixture of the two. It certainly remains one of his least-seen works, and yet it contains the most mainstream thing Alexeieff and Parker ever did. Very few deny the effectiveness of the film’s prologue, which combines images straight from the husband-and-wife team’s pinscreen with Welles’ unmistakable voice reading “Before the Law,” a parable from Kafka’s novel. Alexeieff and Parker’s images are still, rather than animated, which must have cut way down on the production time.

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