Kafka Goes to the Movies

France 2002, 52 min. A Movimento Production by Hanns Zischler

One evening in 1908, instead of going for a drink or to the Bordello, a man goes to see a film and turns into a movie buff overnight. The man in

question is Franz Kafka. "Went to the movies. Wept." Franz Kafka had a desire to «seize» fleeting cinematographic images. Hanns Zischler dealt

with Kafka’s nocturnal adventures in his book «Kafka goes to the movies». Here, using contemporary footage (Paris, train journeys, crossing Berlin

etc.), he reveals and recreates the aesthetic context of early film, layer by layer, rendering audible and visible in the present what is past and lost,

by taking it out of the darkrooms of the early 20th century and bringing it to the surface with digital film.

Locarno (comp.)