Can you tell the difference between the FISA court and Kafka’s court in his story The Trial?
When Edward Snowden first went public, he did it by leaking a 4-page order from a secret court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court. Founded in 1978 after the Watergate scandal and investigations by the Church Committee, the FISA court was supposed to be a bulwark against secret government surveillance. In 2006, it authorized the NSA call records program – the single largest domestic surveillance program in American history.
“The court” in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial is a shadowy tribunal that tries (and executes) Josef K., the story’s protagonist, without informing him of the crime he’s charged with, the witnesses against him, or how he can defend himself.
SYNOPSIS: The film, based on Franz Kafka’s posthumously published novel The Trial (1924) is about a man, Josef K, who is arrested and put on trial, but never explained why. Kafka was an attorney, and the story reflects his experience with the criminal justice system in his home city of Prague (now in the Czech Republic).
The film opens with an allegory from the novel, which encapsulates the novel’s central point: a man goes to a city containing the “law”, but a guard at the gate warns him not to enter. The man obeys, but spends his entire life persuading the guard to let him in. Just before the man dies, the guard says that this door was made just for him, but now he must close it.
The story itself begins with Josef awakened at 6:15 AM by two inspectors who inform him that he’s arrested and suspiciously scrutinizes all of his words. Although under arrest, he is not taken into custody and the inspectors interrogate him intermittently during his daily routine. As he goes through his normal activities, everyone he talks to speaks to him as though he is guilty of something, just as the inspectors do, and he continually attempts to defend himself. At the end of the film, two inspectors throw Josef into a pit, toss in dynamite, and Josef dies in the explosion.
Filmed first in Yugoslavia, and later in Paris when finances dried up, many of the sets were constructed in a large and empty Paris railway station. The film and Anthony Perkins’s performance were ridiculed when the movie was first released in 1963. Orson Welles is reported to have said, “Say what you will, but 'The Trial' is the finest film I have ever made.” In 2000, the original negative of the film was discovered and it was again theatrically released. Subsequent responses to both the film and Perkins have been more favorable.