Kafkaesque Cinema

Angelos Koutsourakis is Professor in Film and Cultural Studies at the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds. He is the author of Kafkaesque Cinema (2024), Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema (2018), Politics as Form in Lars von Trier (2013) and the co-editor of Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (2020), and The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (2015).

In times when references to the Kafkaesque have become inflationary, Angelos Koutsourakis provides a much-needed re-examination of this term. The scope of his study, which covers global cinema from the 1920s to the present day, is hugely impressive, but crucially, this is not a straightforward reception history. By widening the definition of the Kafkaesque to include Kafka’s cinematic precursors as well as his successors, he deftly shows how this concept can be mobilised in a critical capacity, highlighting film’s pivotal role at the intersections of aesthetics, politics and history.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsNotes on the TextIntroductionThe Kafkaesque Beyond Kafka What we Know: Literature on Kafka and the Kafkaesque in Film StudiesKafkaesque Cinema and the Crisis of Liberalism in its Longue DuréePart I: ‘Modernity’s Objective Spirit’Chapter 1: Anxious Humour and Alienating LabourPrelude: The Chaplinesque and the KafkaesqueAlienating Labour: Шинель (The Overcoat, 1926) and Modern Times (1936)Bullshit Jobs: Il Posto (The Job, 1961)Chapter 2: Bureaucracy Prelude: Bureaucracy and ViolenceStalinist Depoliticisation: Postava k podpírání (Joseph Kilián, 1963)Post-Revolutionary Contradictions: La muerte de un burócrata (Death of a Bureaucrat, 1966)‘The New Class of Administrators’: Mandabi (The Money Order, 1968)Chapter 3: Social AlienationPrelude: Modernism’s Reaction to Liberal IndividualismPost-War Repression: Jonas (1957)Memories from the Repressed PastKōbō Abe: Between literature and the Audiovisual Arts 他人の顔 (The Face of Another, 1966): Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Adaptation of Abe’s Homonymous Text Chapter 4: The Work of Art as Alienating Labour: Barton Fink (1991) and the End of Jewish Modernity Jewish Modernity: Some Introductory RemarksBarton Fink (1991): Clifford Odets and the Estranged Artist‘Assimilation’? Part II: Fascism and its LegaciesChapter 5: Fernando Arrabal and the Persistence of the Spanish Civil WarPrelude: The Spanish Civil War and the Crisis of Anti-fascismBaal Babylonia’s (Baal Babylon, 1959) Visual Dramaturgy and its Transposition to Film: Viva La Muerte (Long Live Death, 1971)Cruelty as Protest: L’arbre de Guernica (The Tree of Guernica, 1975)Chapter 6: Memories from the Holocaust in Central EuropePrelude: Central/Eastern Europe and the HolocaustTragicomedy in Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street, 1965)Some Notes on Bruno Schulz, the Polish KafkaTheatre of Death: Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (The Hourglass Sanatorium, 1973)Chapter 7: Parables of UnderdevelopmentPrelude: Kafkaesque Cinema and Enforced UnderdevelopmentA City under Siege: Invasión (1969)Invasión’s AfterlivesNeocolonial Conditions of Existence: Raúl Ruiz’s La colonia penal (The Penal Colony, 1970)Part III: Stalinist Terror Chapter 8: Memories from the Rákosi EraPrelude: The Minor and the KafkaesqueSelf-Renunciations: Hannibál tanár úr (Professor Hannibal, 1956)Laughing at the Rákosi Era: A tanú (The Witness, 1969)Chapter 9: Politicising the AbsurdPrelude: Beyond the Existentialist Understanding of the AbsurdLate Modernist Language Scepticism: O slavnosti a hostech (A Report on the Party and the Guests, 1966)Surveillance Anxieties: Ucho (The Ear, 1970) Chapter 10: Jewish PurgesPrelude: Jewish Purges in the Soviet Bloc Kafkaesque Realism: Artur London’s TestimonySuspended Time: L’aveu (The Confession, 1970)The Doctor’s Plot: Хрусталёв, машину (Khrustalyov, My Car!, 1998)Part IV: Late Capitalist Contradictions Chapter 11: Behaviourist SurveillanceIntroduction: Surveillance as a Feature of Modernity The Prison Industrial Complex: Ghosts … of the Civil Dead (1988)Surveillance Capitalism: Some Key DefinitionsConsumer Behaviourism: Paranoia 1.0 (2004)Chapter 12: Post-FascismPrelude: Counter-Enlightenment in Contemporary Liberal SocietiesThe Curves of Time: La Jetée (1962)Belated Style in Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000)Transit (2018): Anna Seghers’s Anti-Fascism RevisitedChapter 13: The Anthropocene CrisisOn the Anthropocene The Multiple Temporalities of Colonial Modernity: Die Parallelstraße (The Parallel Street, 1962)‘What if Spring did not Come?’ La Cinquième Saison (The Fifth Season, 2012)EpilogueBibliographyIndex