Clearing Up Kafka: Agnieszka Holland on Franz
Since the 1990s, Polish director and screenwriter Agnieszka Holland has made a wide variety of films since the 1970s, but she has a string of movies about people who had lives that seemed a little to weird to be real.
But they were.
Europa Europa, for example, told the story of Solomon Perel (Marco Hoffschneider), a Jewish German teenager who survived the Holocaust by living as a Hitler Youth. The real Solomon Perel appears at the end if you think story sounds unlikely.
She’s also responsible for Shot in the Heart, which documents how writing Mikal Gilmore (Giovanni Ribisi) had the unenviable task of convincing his brother, convicted killer Gary Gilmore (Elias Koteas) to withdraw his demand that the State of Utah execute him for his crimes.
Her most recent Oscar nomination came from In Darkness, where she recounts the story of sewer inspector and petty thief Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), who saves the lives of Jews hiding under the Polish city of Lvov, despite having formidable prejudices of his own. In most situations, he’s probably steal their possessions instead of saving their lives.
Holland’s own life has had its surprises. While born in Warsaw, she went to college at Prague’s FAMU and studied literature under Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). She took part in the Prague Spring and wound up being imprisoned for it. She later had to start her career over in France when martial law was declared in Poland. Despite some formidable struggles, she’s also a three-time Oscar nominee and attended a retrospective of her work at the Motion Picture Academy in Los Angeles.
Her latest movie Franz is a look at the Czech writer Franz Kafka (Idan Weiss), and her off center approach might be ideal for telling the life of the man who gave us The Metamorphosis, about a salesman waking up to find himself turned into a giant insect and The Trial, about a fellow who is constantly dragged from one place to another unsure of what crime he is supposed to have committed.
Franz tells both his life and how his perspective and his stories seem uncannily modern despite the fact that he died at age of 40 in 1924. Holland and screenwriter Marek Epstein (Holland’s Charlatan) eschew a conventional time and show how Kafka, who was Jewish and wrote in German, has now become Prague’s most famous citizen despite the fact that few of his stories were published during his lifetime.
The movie is playing in theaters and will be coming to Blu-Ray next month through Kino-Lorber. In a recent Zoom conversation, Holland, whom I’ve known for several years talked about how Kafka’s stories of absurdity and Sisyphean struggles have reached an audience he may never have imagined.
DAN LYBARGER: You referred to the time that you had been held by Soviet authorities as your Kafka period. Why did you feel that?
AGNEISZKA HOLLAND: Because any kind of authoritarian regime which uses legal power over you, illegal violence, somehow resonates as Kafkaesque situation.
Because mostly it’s not personal violence, it is bureaucratic violence. It is some kind of the machinery which dehumanizes you and makes you the victim of some guilt, which you don’t feel. So that is the typical situation which the people are thinking about Kafka. Of course, his work has several other layers and is also more metaphysical than only political somehow. But those feelings are metaphysical as well, or existential maybe.
And it’s not the accident that Kafka was a god to existentialist writers like Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus. He was a model to them. He was like prefiguration of their own philosophy somehow.
You had directed a version of Kafka’s novella The Trial yourself. But from watching your movie, I can now see that the more you study him, the less you feel like you know him, because there are huge gaps in the record about him.
With even the records, not so much, because, you know, practically it’s very few artists who are so well described by themselves, because he had that, you know, multi-volume diaries when he described every movement of his soul and every event of his days. There are tons of letters, especially to his fiancée or to other women, and a lot of statements, especially of Max Brod and other friends, not speaking about his work, his literary work.
So you have impressions that you know everything about him, and the more you know about him, the less you know about him. But I think that it’s like that with every single rich interior human being. And I think that we ourselves, we think that we know a lot about ourselves, but in reality we don’t. And I think that the human being is a constant mystery. What is fascinating with the fiction or with the literary or filmmaking work about the real people or about invented people, it doesn’t matter so much. It is that constant search for the new aspect of the human soul.
When you and screenwriter Marek Epstein were coming up with this, I noticed that you don’t quite do a standard biopic because you change chronology, and you also show us what it is like to walk through Prague now that Kafka is very much in the city as if he is alive.
Yeah, it is. I thought that it will be troublesome to make a regular, you know, linear biography about Franz Kafka. It is more like the puzzles, like the pieces, fragments, you know, in the little kaleidoscopic way. And gathering so many, so many like scenes and situations and images and sounds together, I think it gives us some chance to touch some kind of the truth, at least subjective truth. It’s my truth.
But in the same time, it is a bit like that every viewer can make his own way through that maze of images and scenes and construct his own image of Franz Kafka. When I was talking to the different audiences of different aged, different knowledge of his work, non-knowledge at all, and in different countries, I received a lot of feedback and it was not always the same kind of feedback. I’m not speaking about the judgment, I’m speaking about the experience. And it was planned like that, that it’s a little— that you can make your own Franz out from the elements I’m giving you.
Because there’s one sequence I saw where you have him in the apartment, and it was similar to a scene in Orson Welles’ adaptation of The Trial, where Josef K (Anthony Perkins) is in an enclosed area, and you see little girls’ faces looking in at him from a wall. In your film, you see people looking in at him from windows, and it turns out they’re actually looking at him from today’s Kafka museum.
In the beginning of The Trial, Josef K. sits suddenly sees that the neighbors because we wanted it to express exactly how he feels like. Only later, after the movie was finished, I found someplace the description in some of his friends was writing about it, that he was in reality living in the room like that.
Yeah, I just think it’s funny that both you and Welles got that same sensation. It’s kind of dangerous to examine someone who is long dead because a lot of times it’s medical, and you can’t If someone is dead, you can’t go, “He is schizophrenic, or he is on the spectrum.”
Yeah, sure. It’s impossible to give the exact diagnosis. You can have some intuitions. And when the real character becomes the hero of the fictional work, because that is not a documentary, it is some some subjective vision of his persona and his life. You can have the different hypothesis, but I didn’t push it so far.
But several people who, especially younger people who watched the film, they took it very personally. They took that as that they are like Franz, you know, and they’ve been mostly the people in some kind of the spectrum, neurotypical, and they felt that the fact that they are considered of being different or odd, it’s a bit like it was with Franz and that his behavior and his tics or his different kind of reaction to the reality, he became close to them by that. I think it’s okay, I think it’s good. Like the first viewer, it means first Q&A I had after the film was ready was in Warsaw.
And the first person who asked the question was a young man who said, “You made the film about the most famous autistic person in the world. Are you one of us?”
It touched me somehow, you know? Because, the people identify with the film or the subject of the film or the character of the film for very different, very subjective reasons. And to give them that opportunity for the identification, it’s good. It’s like why also you are writing or filming fiction, that you give to people the alternative of the life they can connect to.
Of course, one thing I thought was kind of intriguing is some way your Kafka is astonishingly prescient because when everyone else at the dinner table is getting excited about asbestos, We understand his indifference because we know it’s going to go badly. Or when they have the meeting at the insurance company and he’s laughing because I would not want to deal with an insurance organization that can’t even keep their own building from having water leaks.
Yeah, it’s a lot of details like that. I appreciate that you noticed.
Hermann Kafka, Franz’s father comes off as greedy and cruel, but at the end of the film you feel for him because he’s lost his son.
Yeah, I also feel for him. And when I was doing that contemporary scenes of the tourist business, in Prague, which explode after the revolution when the— before Kafka was practically unknown in communist Czechoslovakia. But when the free market came, they realized how good of brand he is and how it’s possible to make the business out of that. And I was going often to Prague.
I was doing several films there. And I was following quite often, you know, the tours, which sometimes were very funny because the guides have been telling, you know, bullshit.
Oh, yes, like the Kafka burgers.
Holland: And I was asking myself, what will happen if Franz wakes up? What will be his reaction? And I knew only one thing, that the reaction of Hermann will be the pure happiness.
It’s so funny to me that both the communists and the Nazis hated him.
He was like clairvoyant. He’d seen the mechanism of the arbitrary and authoritarian bureaucracy, which has to dehumanize the people and change them to the numbers. And everything becomes non-relevant. And if you are guilty or not, it doesn’t matter. You are guilty. And all that situations we know from Stalinist trials or from the concentration camps.
All that, it echoes to what Franz Kafka several decades before described without even imagining. He wasn’t political. It means he was not thinking in that terms. He had some kind of the very clear intuition about where the world is right now and where it’s heading.
Lybarger: You’ve done biopics before, but you had to do it differently simply because he’s somebody everybody thinks they know, but because it’s, as you said, he’s heavily documented, but there are still mysteries about him.
Holland: It means everything, the most important things were happening in his head and between his head and his hand. And that is very difficult to tell the story about it. You have to find another language to try to reach the truth or some subjective truth, but authentic truth about himself.
Yeah, because I was reading The Metamorphosis again, and I just thought I can see why you chose The Penal Colony as a story of his to illustrate versus The Metamorphosis, because 90% of that is in Gregor Samsa’s head.
Absolutely.
You know, I don’t know if you know the story when The Metamorphosis had been published, one of his rare writings which was published during his life. It was published by a famous Berlin publisher, and the famous designer was supposed to do the cover, and he wanted to put the insect on the cover, and Franz reacted in a very, very strong way that he’s very much against it, that you cannot show the insect, because the insect is not the insect. The insect is how Gregor feels of being.
The difference, right? So you cannot— you can, of course, shoot The Metamorphosis, but only if you will be shooting it only from his point of view. We cannot see him. We cannot see him as a human being because after, no one will understand.
The film is somehow primitive medium. You believe in what you see. And in The Metamorphosis, everything is in the head. You don’t see it. And The Penal Colony, it is what it is. It means you have to see what is described. It’s very graphic, and it’s very matter-of-fact. And at the same time, it was considered after the Second World War, like the most premonitory, clairvoyant writing until our days. That is obligatory reading in the German high schools. So it had incredible impact, political impact on the generations of people, and especially German people after the Holocaust, after the Second World War.
And the reaction of when he read one of the first novels he read in public was what we show in the film. It was the people have been outraged and, you know, and shocked and, you know, and leaving massively, you know, the room. And we wanted to have a similar kind of reaction from the theater audience, which is not so easy because in our days, the people are blasé with the violence.
But still, we had a lot of very, very violent reactions from the audience. So we’ve been happy, you know, that we somehow translated well what he, what he was telling.
In the preface for my personal copy of The Metamorphosis, David Cronenberg acknowledges the debt The Fly owes to Kafka, but he admitted there’s a huge difference with what he did with The Fly. He may have been inspired by The Metamorphosis, but he had to completely take a different story and use Kafka motifs.
Yeah, but David Cronenberg, he likes realistic language. I’m much more realist than Franz was. It means everything, which is described. I analyzed The Trial really very well because I adapted it for Polish television after we directed it together with my ex-husband (Laco Adamik). And I think it was a very successful adaptation because I think it was very close to him. And it was very matter-of-fact. We didn’t use any kind of special tools. Everything had been not overblown.
And at the same time, it felt that it’s exactly what is— not exactly. It’s some key. We found some key, I think, to that adaptation, which I felt that it’s relevant with what Franz had in his head. But, of course, you never know. Maybe somebody has a different key, and that different key can be as good as my key.
It must be gratifying that some of your more recent films have been really strong like Green Border, Charlatan, and Mr. Jones. You’re still making worthwhile stuff.
Holland: Well, I’m kind of proud of those films, you know. especially all you mentioned, I think are important somehow and especially with the— when doing Green Border and Franz, I felt that I finally achieved the freedom which I always wanted to have.
This is a movie that seems to be resonating with younger people. Are people surprised that you are in your 70s and you’re making this kind of movie? Kafka didn’t get to live very long himself.
Holland: Many artists in that time were dying young. Tuberculosis was that special sickness of the sensitive people. So many poets, also Frédéric Chopin or Anton Chekhov or— poet Heinrich von Kleist or writer Georg Büchner. So many of great people died in the age between 30 and 40, and the intensity of their work have been like if they lived for 70 or 80 years. So finally, We are living in the times when it’s possible to live intense life and live long. As a humanity. It’s also why some films I did, I felt that I have to do it, like Mr. Jones or Green Border, even if I know that one film is not changing the world.