Josef K wakes up in the morning and finds the police in his room. They inform him he is on trial, without exposing the reasons behind it. In order to find out more and protest his innocence, the man starts to look behind the facade of the judicial system. His efforts, however, seem to lead nowhere. A dizzyingly expressionist take on Franz Kafka’s novel, Orson Welles casts Anthony Perkins as a bewildered office drone who is plunged into a disorienting bureaucratic labyrinth of guilt, corruption, and paranoia.

To mark the momentous occasion of the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death, we reflect the significant impact of Kafka’s work on a wide variety of major film-makers, from Orson Welles to Terry Gilliam, David Lynch to Michael Haneke. Kafka On Film begins with one of the first, and probably best known, adaptation of a Kafka novel.

Introduction by Professor Carolin Duttlinger, Professor of German Literature and Culture, Wadham College, University of Oxford and Guardian Film Critic Peter Bradshaw.

100 years after Franz Kafka’s untimely death in 1924, the AHRC-funded research project ‘Kafkas’s Transformative Communities‘ is celebrating Kafka’s huge enduring legacy in different artforms and communities. Working in partnership with leading artists and cultural institutions, we are co-sponsoring five new artistic responses to Kafka in different media (prose fiction, music, dance, drama and visual art) while also introducing his works to a new generation of readers. The project also includes a free public exhibition at the Weston Library Oxford, Kafka: Making of an Icon, which opens on 30 May.