settima

AnthonyPerkins

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Dec

11

Psycho (1960)

Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in front of the family motel. DP: John L. Russell.

“The mattress is soft and there're hangers in the closet and stationary with “Bates' Motel” printed on it in case you want to make your friends back home envious.”

– Norman Bates

Le procès [The Trial] (Orson Welles, 1962)

Jun

23

National Typewriter Day

Le procès (1962)

Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) crossing an enormous open office space. The endless room is filled with clerks, identical desks, telephones, and typewriters. DP: Edmond Richard.

Office worker Josef K. is brought to trial and at no point told what he is accused of, if anything. Orson Welles' Le procès is an adaptation of Franz Kafka's unfinished 1914/15 novel Der Prozess. The manuscript, guarded from Kafka by his friend #MaxBrod in an attempt to keep the self-doubting author from destroying his work, was against K's wishes posthumously (re)assembled by Brod without the latter knowing the intended sequence of the loose pages nor what chapters were finished.

“All these fancy electronics, they're all right in their place, but not for anything practical.”

– Uncle Max

The story holds up in its vagueness thanks to the quirks of #Kafka's Brotberuf; Franz K. was a trained lawyer, working as an insurance agent in an impossible artifice world of reports and precise wording. Within its extended logic, a man can get perplexedly lost, either within the walls of his #office or one's bed.