Analysis of Space: Das Schloss, 1996
Michael Haneke: The Village, Context & Reconstruction
- Set design: Christoph Kanter
- Cinematography: Jirí Stibr
The 1996 TV-Film by Michael Haneke is an adaptation of Kafka’s novel, Das Schloss (The Castle). The ‘Off- Stimme’ called voice narration or voice-over together with the black-outs and the calm flow of time make the film close to the mood of Kafka. The impotence within the social structure is thematized, handling the village as an emotionally unescapable place for its characters. The film consists of fragments as in the unfinished novel. The black-picture between the individual scenes strengthens this effect. 10 The fragments show themselves in the narrative as well as in the shots of details like in the opening scene. There is no music except the ambient music coming from the radio. According to Haneke „Kafka with music is unimaginable“. 11
The Opening Scene
The First Inn.K. is the land surveyor who comes to the village to work for the castle. The film begins with K. entering the inn. The camera shows us the space with some detail shots, we see some hats and coats hanging, a hand that closes the radio and a table with half-empty beer mugs on it. (Fig.3.1)
The host behind the bar looks at K. wondering. K.’s request for a room is followed by the voice-over overlapped with the answer of the inn-keeper. He did not have a room but K. could sleep on a straw bag. K. enters a dark room next to the bar in order to take the straw bag. There is barely something that is seen in the room but K. taking out of the bag. (Fig.3.2) The film is illuminated with these proportions of light and shadows.
The Castle
Throughout the film, K. is obsessively searching for a connection to the castle that reportedly ordered him to the village as a land-surveyor. But the castle in the film is never shown except on an indistinct detail in a landscape-etching fastened to the back of the entrance door at the inn. (Fig.3.3) This makes the existence of the castle even more doubtful than in the novel where K. sees the castle a few times from a distance. In the novel, he describes the towers and the ramshackle buildings similar to the ones in his hometown. In the film, the connections to the castle are more depersonalized by avoiding all mention of Count Westwest by name, and so on. In the film, there is no mention of the village as a property of the castle as it is described in the novel. Thus the focus shifts from the castle to the village. As the castle is never shown, the land surveyor K. never proves any knowledge of land-surveying either. In a way, the film alludes the absence of the facts. Even if the castle is physically missing, at the same time it is always in question. The telephone which we see in the corner of the inn, for instance, is an object strongly related to the castle. (Fig. 3.4) The corner where it stands is illuminated yellowish which is different from the rest of the bluish-grey illumination of the film. 12
The Village
As the telephone represents the castle, in the same way, the radio with its folksy music stands symbolically for the villagers. The telephone has control over the radio, every time it rings the radio is silent. (Figs.3.5, 3.6) In the scene of the Inn while K. is sleeping on the straw bag, behind empty chairs and tables the villagers are crowd together around a table at the other side of the room. (Fig.3.7) The lighting of the telephone interferes the villagers’ space. K. is never truly integrated into the life of the village and there is an obvious tension between him and the villagers. The mise-en-scène, the sound, and the lighting suggest the opposition between K., the villagers and the castle. 13 (Fig.3.8)
In Kafka’s novel, the radio does not exist. In the village, there are few things that belong to the modern world. In the film as well as in the novel the story takes place in an almost timeless era. The transportation, the telephone, the radio and the use of the horse-carriages give us some hints that we are not in the present time. (Although it can be said that in some nowadays villages horse- carriages are still in use.) 14
The interiors in the film are dark and rich in contrast. The illumination becomes a stylistic element for the film. Without stressing the shadows it is illuminated in the way that you rather guess what behind the actors is happening.15 The houses of the villagers are strongholds, protective but at the same time captivating. (Fig.3.9) They are in contrast to the stormy, dangerous exteriors. The entrances of the houses are usually covered with snow. The exteriors are anonymous and there are very little orientation points, like some walls and a few panels. Every time K. tries to find the castle a continuous snowstorm makes him lose the orientation. He is forced to find refuge in the houses of the village which is represented as an inescapable place with diffuse peripheral borders. (Fig.3.10)
The Inn: Im Herrenhof
The men of the castle at times work, stay overnight and celebrate in the hall-like inn, Wirtshaus im Herrenhof. It is a room with wooden angle braced wooden pillars, looking like a stable. (Figs.3.11) It has a door to a courtyard. Behind the bar counter, where Frida pours beer, there is a door with a hole through which is allegedly possible to see in the room of Klamm, who is an official of the castle. K. is able to see through the hole but we never know what he sees. (Figs.3.12, 3.13)
Cinematography
The two main camera movements are codes that are structured around two quite different spatial arrangements. They are often used alternately: deep-focus-shot and tracking shot. The deep- focus is set completely indoors with differentiation in color-code; yellow light for the castle and blue for the village. It is used to narrate the opposition of K. and the castle. As Haneke uses very little camera movements, the ones that he uses tracking K. stand out. The outdoor tracking shots often come after a meeting which gives K. hope.
„K. trudges along a single plane between an empty snowy foreground and bleak wall or woods on the outskirts of the village. It is as if K. Is trapped between oppressive walls or the expanse of the trees and the hostile coldness offscreen in the foreground and bleak wall or the woods on the outskirts of the village.“ 16 (Fig.3.14)
Haneke encodes the camera movements in the mind of the viewer, for instance with the asymmetry of the tracking shots. If the camera moves from left to right while tracking K. the viewer is given the sign that K. is going to meet some representatives of the castle or the villagers. If the camera movement is from right to left, which is more common in the film they usually show the exteriors in the night with blowing wind and snow and K. moving through the pathless snow. In one scene we hear the narrator telling us: “The road didn’t lead to the Castle, it only made towards it, then turned aside as if deliberately, and though it didn’t lead away from the Castle, it got no nearer to it either.”, which explains the impossibility of reaching the castle. In the final shot, K. and Gerstäcker go out, the camera tracking them in the stormy night while the final paragraph of the novel is being read by the voice narrator. It ends with the unfinished sentence from the end of the novel, saying:
„She held out her trembling hand to K.“ Kafka writes, he continues „And had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, but what she said… „
Sources:
10 Cieutat, Michel and Rouyer, Philippe (2013), ‚Haneke über Haneke’, Alexander Verlag Berlin, Köln 2013, p. 14111 Cieutat, p. 146
11 Cieutat, p. 146
12 McCann Ben and Sorfa David (editors), The Cinema of Michael Haneke Europe Utopia’, Wallflower Press, 2012; p. 131; Article:
Riemer Willy, Tracing K: Michael Haneke’s Film Adaptation of Kafka’s Das Schloss, 1997, The Journal of the Kafka Society of America
13 Ibidem.
14 Cieutat, Michel and Rouyer, Philippe (2013), ‚Haneke über Haneke’, Alexander Verlag Berlin, Köln 2013, p. 146
15 Cieutat, p. 145
16 McCann Ben and Sorfa David (editors), The Cinema of Michael Haneke Europe Utopia’, Wallflower Press, 2012; p. 136; Article:
Riemer Willy, Tracing K: Michael Haneke’s Film Adaptation of Kafka’s Das Schloss, 1997, The Journal of the Kafka Society of America
Making of the film