At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  Culturally, Zagreb has been defined by its strategic position as a crossroads between cultures and identities. Situated at the ‘centre of the edge’ of the great European empires and multinational states: Rome and Byzantium, Habsburg and Ottoman, the USSR, Yugoslavia, and, now, the European Union, Zagreb has occupied a strategic position at the intersection of north and south, orthodox and Roman Catholicism, Slavic and Mediterranean cultures.12

  Josip Broz Tito broke relations with Stalin and the Soviet Union in 1948, but even before that Zagreb’s development reflected the Yugoslav state’s distinct urban planning trajectory. While communist Europe was generally forced into embracing Socialist Realist architecture, Zagreb remained committed to the international Modernist avant-garde, a style “untainted by associations with past imperial subjugation or politically-charged vernacular traditions”.13

  Even after the Salkinds’ original plan to construct sets in a Zagreb studio was abandoned, Welles persisted with the city for its locations. In his words, postwar Zagreb’s urban topography provided “both that rather sleazy modern, which is a part of the style of the film, and these curious decayed roots that ran right down into the dark heart of the nineteenth century”.14 In fact, only a few scenes in the final cut depict architectural remnants of the Austro-Hungarian epoch: a brief scene inside the Croatian National Theatre (which opened in 1895), outside the Zagreb Cathedral (restored in a neo-Gothic style in 1906), and K.’s forced march through the old streets towards his execution on the periphery of the city.

  Otherwise Zagreb’s Modernist topographies are emphasised. Welles’s attitude towards Modernist architecture was unwaveringly negative. It had crept into the periphery of Welles’s mise-en-scène as early as the pre-fabricated concrete shells rising above the rubble of Munich and in the arid fields surrounding the Barcelona airport in Mr. Arkadin. Welles disliked Michelangelo Antonioni – he called him a “solemn architect of empty boxes”,15 presumably in reference to the austere postwar Italian cityscapes of La Notte (1961), L’Eclisse (1962), and Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert, 1964). Later, the film-within-a-film in The Other Side of the Wind was apparently intended as a parody of Antonioni’s ponderous style. Welles screened one sequence in a rough cut at the 1975 AFI Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony: a young man (Bob Random) in pursuit of a woman (Oja Kodar) through Los Angeles’s Century City, a then still-embryonic Modernist redevelopment of the former Twentieth Century Fox backlot. Welles invented his own Modernist cityscape through reflections in glass and mirrors.16 And at the climax of Welles’s late script The Big Brass Ring, a presidential candidate murders a blind beggar in Madrid in the vicinity of “some ghastly housing scheme, new in the last days of the Generalissimo, and already fallen into the sordid decay of cheap construction… Buildings like big ugly boxes are crammed together on the barren earth where not a tree or blade of glass is growing.”17

  K. at the Croatian National Theatre and the Zagreb Cathedral

  The march to execution

  In the 1930s Zagreb’s planning authorities embraced the utopian tenets of the Congrés internationale de l’architecture moderne (CIAM), guided by a belief in the ability of Modernist architecture and town planning to transform society.18 With the postwar federation of communist Yugoslavia came Vladimir Antolić’s General Plan of Zagreb (1947). Antolić inherited the city’s pre-war regulation plans and synthesised them with other architectural influences, including Le Corbusier. He created an ambitious scheme for a socialist city centre to be built around what was temporarily called Moscow Avenue, and eventually became the Avenue of the Proletarian Brigades.19 The ideological thrust of the Antolić General Plan was to organise space for the collective, “according to a different set of spatial hierarchies from the traditional bourgeois city”.20 Due to the expense of its implementation, the Antolić General Plan was never officially accepted, only went ahead in piecemeal stages around the Avenue of the Proletarian Brigades through the postwar era, and was never finished.21

  Welles arrived to film The Trial in 1962 in the midst of this slow, ideologically guided transformation of Zagreb’s urban landscape. Despite his nuanced appreciation of Yugoslavia’s non-Soviet form of communism, Welles saw little distinction between Yugoslav and Soviet urban planning. In 1962 he described filming the “hideous blockhouse, soul-destroying buildings [of Zagreb], which are somehow typical of modernist Iron Curtain architecture”.22 It’s hardly surprising that the self-defined “man of the Middle Ages” recognised the oppressive quality of the postwar cityscape of Zagreb, despite its ostensible ideological basis in anti-bourgeois collectivist social relations. Welles lamented the loss of much older forms of social organisation.

  Figs 1-3: Frames from the tracking shot from Madame Grubach’s boarding house to the Avenue of the Proletarian Brigades; Fig. 4: K. stands at the edge of the Avenue

  In The Trial Welles consistently uses Modernist spaces as the context of alienation. One comic scene of miscommunication was filmed in a tracking shot that follows K. and Miss Pittl across an urban wasteland at dusk. The characters move from the concrete slab where Madame Grubach runs her boarding house to the Avenue of the Proletarian Brigades, the principal thoroughfare and tram route of the socialist city plan.23

  Welles was particularly happy to be able to film inside a cavernous exhibition hall at the Zagreb Trade Fair because it provided a filming space on a scale unavailable in France or England.24 These halls, on the other side of the Sava River, were built in the late 1950s and became a rare trade crossroads for the antagonists of the Cold War, the only trade fair to host the innovations of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the developing world.25

  Zagreb Trade Fair interior sequence in The Trial

  Inside the hall Welles filmed hundreds of typists working at rowed desks. K. apparently lords over this surreal factory of typing minions, dehumanised and regulated by a clock. And yet even with the material shot within this open-plan interior, Welles’s editing blatantly ignores the true layout of the space. In one sequence K. finds the storeroom where his investigators are being flogged as a result of his complaints. The storeroom is located under a staircase. K. escapes the room, crosses the floor of typists, and sits with his uncle in his unpartitioned office. But when the typists depart en masse, K. marches further away from the staircase; yet somehow he quickly finds himself right back there.

  * * *

  Welles combined Zagreb locations with material shot in other cities. A bold use of the patchwork technique comes in a sequence following K.’s panic attack in the law court offices. Welles lines up successive shots from different locations. Despite no evident spatial connection between these locations, the scene is given continuity by the movements and continuing dialogue between K. and his niece Irmie.

  K. encounters Irmie outside Rome’s Palace of Justice (fig. 5); Irmie follows K. across the wide landing of a stone staircase clearly not in the same vicinity (fig. 6). As K. turns back to speak face to face with Irmie, Welles cuts to a long shot that positions the pair no longer on the staircase, but instead in front of a complex of office buildings (fig. 7), possibly filmed in Rome’s Esposizione Universale Romana district, originally a Mussolini-era project (Welles had location scouted there as far back as 1952 for a mooted Julius Caesar; Antonioni had only recently used the area in parts of L’Eclisse26). K. continues to walk alone towards what is supposed to be his office building (fig. 8). Welles did not use the trade fair for the exteriors but instead used the Zagreb Workers’ University on the north side of the river, two kilometres west of K.’s lodgings further along the Avenue of the Proletarian Brigades. The counter-shot of Irmie places her in front of yet another steel and glass edifice of an unknown location (fig. 9). A contemporary photograph of the Zagreb Workers’ University shows this building is not in the vicinity of the university’s front staircase.

  The low-ceilinged interiors of Mme Grubach’s boarding house, where investigators transgress into K.’s private room and arrest him as he wakes, were buil
t inside the Studios Boulogne in Paris. The first scenes for the film were shot here from 26 March 1962.27 Welles remembered having to pay the English actress Madeleine Robinson himself to prevent her walking off the set, indicating the shaky state of the Salkinds’ finances from the beginning of production.28

  The film was only finished due to its director’s magnificent ability to “preside over accidents”. Welles had designed additional sets with the assistance of art director Jean Mandaroux intended to be constructed in Zagreb, presumably at Jadran Film Studios. Welles explained at the time of the film’s release:

  I had planned a completely different film that was based on the absence of sets. The production, as I had sketched it, comprised sets that gradually disappeared. The number of realistic elements were to become fewer and fewer and the public would become aware of it, to the point where the scene would be reduced to free space as if everything had dissolved.29

  That concept had to be abandoned. In later years Welles often told an anecdote about how he solved a budget crisis that forced him to abandon the sets and threatened the picture’s very continuation. A creative epiphany emerged from an almost hallucinatory urban misperception in Paris. The epiphany led him to shoot large portions of The Trial inside the Gare d’Orsay.

  Welles gave contradictory explanations for the budget crisis. In some versions he blamed the financial problems of the Salkinds: they either had no money for set construction, or else had been blacklisted by the Yugoslavian industry because they still hadn’t paid off their debts for Austerlitz.30 But years later, Welles blamed corruption within the state film industry. He explained that Yugoslavian producers, “like all people who have lived under occupation for a long time – the Yugoslavs had lived for four hundred years under the Turks – […] [they] learn, as an act of honour, to steal from strangers.”

  In this version the Yugoslavians played a “trick” they’d “played on hundreds of Italian co-producers”. They waited until shooting was imminent to announce they had “miscalculated” the cost of building the sets, and hence demanded more money – or else partial ownership of the film. The Salkinds “didn’t even have the money to pay our hotel bill in Zagreb”, let alone pay the additional demands; so Welles put the entire cast and crew on a night train out of the country.31 Welles later acknowledged that the Salkinds ran out on the company’s bill at the Hotel Esplanade in Zagreb. He also recalled a narrow escape a few years later from the Zagreb hotel manager, who tried to apprehend Welles while he was shooting Denys de La Patellière and Raoul Lévy’s Marco the Magnificent in Belgrade, four hundred kilometres away. A Yugoslavian snowstorm prevented the manager’s arrival.32

  Whatever the cause of the cancellation of set construction for The Trial, Welles’s solution was inspired. Drinking with actress Jeanne Moreau in the early hours of the morning at the Hôtel Meurice on the Rue de Rivoli, Welles gazed out of his window and saw a puzzling image in the sky of Paris: two moons. Moreau pointed out he was really looking at the twin clock faces of the Gare d’Orsay across the Tuileries and the Seine. They crossed the river to the empty train station, where Welles said he

  discovered the world of Kafka. The offices of the advocate, the law court offices, the corridors – a kind of Jules Verne modernism that seems to me quite in the taste of Kafka. There it all was, and by eight in the morning I was able to announce that we could shoot for seven weeks there.33

  The Gare d’Orsay had been built in 1900 in the French Beaux Arts style. By 1962 it was largely out of use. Welles was conscious of its historical resonance:

  If you look at many of the scenes in the movie that were shot there, you will notice that not only is it a very beautiful location, but it is full of sorrow, the kind of sorrow that only accumulates in a railway station where people wait. I know this sounds terribly mystical, but really a railway station is a haunted place. And the story is all about people waiting, waiting, waiting for their papers to be filled. It is full of the hopelessness of the struggle against bureaucracy. Waiting for a paper to be filled is like waiting for a train, and it’s also a place of refugees. People were sent to Nazi prisons from there, Algerians were gathered there, so it’s a place of great sorrow. Of course, my film has a lot of sorrow too, so the location infused a lot of realism into the film.34

  The Gare d’Orsay, Paris, circa 1900

  The interiors of the Gare introduced another distinct architectural element to Zagreb’s Modernism and its Austro-Hungarian monumentality. Welles later explained, “I wanted a nineteenth-century look to a great deal of what would be in fact expressionistic”.35 Because of the Gare’s glass ceiling, the scenes had to be shot at night.36 The near-abandoned station provided a variety of useful spaces. Here Welles created the advocate’s office, various waiting rooms, and the interior of the cathedral. Welles dressed these settings with bureaucratic detritus – files, papers, old books, even the wet washing of the accused.

  Welles freely combined shots filmed inside the Gare with footage from the streets of Zagreb, even within the same scene. Immediately following his brief attendance of a concert inside the Croatian National Theatre, K. is led by the investigator out of the concert hall to meet his future executioners. On the way he passes from the concert hall’s lobby into a labyrinthine passageway filmed inside the Gare. The executioners wait for K. inside one of the Gare’s dark and claustrophobic industrial rooms. In the reverse angle, however, K. appears standing in an open street. The spatial relations of the characters are maintained by their positions and the prop of the hanging lamp above K.’s head.

  Welles’s imagined city is nightmarish yet palpable. Brimming with cinematic invention, The Trial has remained underrated within Welles’s body of work.

  NOTES

  1 Welles presented his version of these events in an audience question-and-answer session following a screening of The Trial at the University of Southern California on 14 November 1981. Welles’s cinematographer Gary Graver shot the session for a mooted documentary that was never made. The unfinished material was restored in 2001 by the Filmmuseum München as Filming ‘The Trial’. Viewed 17 June 2013 at the Filmmuseum München, Germany.

  2 Gerald Peary, ‘Hollywood in Yugoslavia’, in Graham Petrie and Ruth Dwyer (eds), Before the Wall Came Down: Soviet and East European Filmmakers Working in the West (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990), 172.

  3 Anile, Orson Welles in Italy, 284.

  4 Franz Kafka (translated by Willa and Edwin Muir), The Trial (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 251.

  5 Filming ‘The Trial’.

  6 Kafka, The Trial.

  7 Rolf J. Goebel, ‘The Exploration of the Modern City in The Trial’, in Julian Preece (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kafka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 42–4 (quote: 42).

  8 Quoted in Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 239.

  9 See Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 245.

  10 Monitor (1962).

  11 Eve Blau, ‘City as Open Work’, in Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik (eds), Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice (Barcelona; New York: Actar, 2007), 14–15.

  12 Uncredited, ‘Mapping Project Zagreb’, in Blau and Rupnik (eds), Project Zagreb, 26.

  13 Blau, ‘City as Open Work’, 16.

  14 Monitor.

  15 Orson Welles, ‘But Where Are We Going?’, Look, 3 November 1970, reprinted at http://www.wellesnet.com/orson-welles-but-where-are-we-going (accessed 1 September 2015).

  16 Unfinished material compiled as Scenes from the Other Side of the Wind by the Filmmuseum München. Viewed 17 June 2013 at the Filmmuseum München, Germany; Karp, Orson Welles’s Last Movie, 74–5.

  17 Orson Welles with Oja Kodar, The Big Brass Ring: An Original Screenplay (Santa Barbara: Santa Teresa Press, 1987), 131.

  18 Blau and Rupnik (eds), Project Zagreb, 163.

  19 Uncredited, ‘Case Study 11: The 1947 General Plan: The Communist Functional City’, in Blau and Rupnik (eds), Project Zagreb,
176.

  20 Uncredited, ‘Case Study 11’, 180.

  21 Uncredited, ‘Case Study 11’, 176.

  22 Welles quoted in Uncredited, ‘Prodigal Revived’, Time, Vol. 79, No. 26, 29 June 1962, reprinted at www.wellesnet.com/pacific-film-archive-to-present-an-orson-welles-retro-spective-march-7-april-13-2008/ (accessed 16 August 2015).

  23 The buildings survive at the intersection of what are now Avenija Marina Drzicá and Grada Vukovara (the former Avenue of the Proletarian Brigades).

  24 Monitor.

  25 Uncredited, ‘Case Study 12: The Zagreb Fair: Urban Laboratory’, in Blau and Rupnik (eds), Project Zagreb, 216.

  26 In any case, Welles shot at least some of The Trial in the EUR district. See Anile, Orson Welles in Italy, 284.

  27 Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 428.

  28 Filming ‘The Trial’.

  29 Monitor.

  30 Welles quoted in 1964 in Cobos, Rubio, and Pruneda, ‘A Trip to Quixoteland’, 98.

  31 Filming ‘The Trial’; a similar situation seems to have occurred in Budapest in 1967, leading Welles to abandon shooting of The Heroine after one day. See Drössler, ‘Oja as a Gift’, 42–3.

  32 Biskind (ed.), My Lunches with Orson, 91.

  33 Monitor. For Jeanne Moreau’s participation, see her comments in ‘Jeanne Moreau on Orson Welles’s The Trial’, Wellesnet, 31 March 2010, at http://www.wellesnet.com/jeanne-moreau-on-orson-welless-the-trial (accessed 16 August 2015); the Salkinds seem to have ran out on their Paris debts, too. Welles admitted in the early 1980s, “To this day I can never go to the Meurice.” See Biskind (ed.), My Lunches with Orson, 91.