Nothing more fitting than celebrating Kafka in his home country – in a year marking the centenary of his death, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival dedicated its main retrospective this year to the Czech author. Under the name of The Wish to Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema, the retrospective brought together some more or less direct adaptations of Kafka and his life, as well as various shorts and features that are tributary to a Kafkaesque spirit.

A bit of everything: from Straub-Huillet’s Class Relations (1984), based on Amerika, to Scorsese’s After Hours, Orson Welles’ more obvious The Trial (1964), or a silly little short directed by none other than Peter Capaldi, Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1993), a Kafka Christmas tale starring Richard E. Grant as the author himself, despairing at his neighbours and the pet cockroach of an unwelcome visitor. Neo-Kafkaesque man on duty David Lynch could not have been absent from this, KVIFF marrying his short The Grandmother (1970) with episode 3 from the 3rd season of Twin Peaks (2017), where, wouldn’t you guess, a huge portrait of Kafka is there to greet us FBI agent Gordon Cole’s (Lynch himself) office.

Some delightfully surprising choices in Ousmane Sembène’s Money Order (1964) or Masao Adachi’s shocking and anarchist Artist of Fasting (2015) – but the retrospective might have stretched the definition of Kafkaesque a bit too far in some places; despite checking off keywords “bureaucrats” and “metamorphosis”, a cyberpunk movie like Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man wouldn’t necessarily be my first choice for a retrospective bearing the writer’s name.

Even closer to Kafka’s home, i.e. on the streets of Prague, was Steven Soderbergh, featured at Karlovy Vary with his conspicuously titled Kafka (1991) and with Mr. Kneff (2024*), a delirious new cut of the same film. The catalogue lists the latter as from 2024, but I can’t tell if KVIFF’s Mr. Kneff is any new version or if it’s actually the same cut that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival back in 2021, when Soderbergh also gave a so-called new life to some other of his previous (less successful) films. What I do know, however, is that Mr. Kneff is an uproarious rescue of one of Soderbergh’s most tedious films, putting the director’s experimental side to use in a kind of mega-video essay from which all spoken dialogue has been removed.

Filmed on location in a Prague just nine months after the Revolution and thus a city by default confused, volatile and anxious, Kafka is more readily a production curiosity than a narrative one. According to the director, the movie should be the very last film ever produced under the country’s state cinema system. While it has to be said it’s a bit of a gem on the side of production design, coming right after his highly successful 1989 Palme d’Or winner Sex, Lies and Videotape, this second film by Soderbergh was very poorly received upon its release and generally forgotten by the wider cinephile community. The period narrative follows a loose reimagining of The Castle, starring Jeremy Irons as a highly fictionalised version of Kafka himself, here portrayed as a writer far too modest with regards to his genius and as an insurance company.

Bureaucratic efficiency and alienation, as well as the mysterious, abusive, and possibly criminal authoritarian structures of a Castle – in the film most specifically the Prague Castle – lay out a self-explanatory setting, but beyond this matter, it’s not exactly easy to make out what’s happening in the film. On the one hand, the script itself is convoluted and there are just a few too many plots: Kafka is drawn into investigating some murders disguised as suicides, then flirts with what appears to be the Resistance in a hyper-authoritarian regime, but we hardy ever understand whether by accident or not. Conspiracies, a love story here and there, human experiments, bombs, detectives; Kafka shuffles through all of them so quickly that by the end of the film it’s uncertain how they all connect and what or whom Kafka is actually fighting against.

On the other hand, as reckons the director himself, aside from the inherent obscurity of dialogues about secret and evil societies, it’s simply hard to make out what exactly the characters are saying. Soderbergh is personally unhappy that the many accents featured in the film are not coherent and create confusion. Quite the diverse cast, however – there’s an Alec McGuinness to note, but did you know, out of all things, that Ion Caramitru appeared in a Steven Soderbergh movie? Nonetheless, playing the role of a, I quote, solemn anarchist.

Owning up to these flaws, the recut Mr. Kneff primarily aimed to clarify and make the narrative more accessible. Soderbergh shortened the film by about 15 minutes, changed the main character from Kafka to Kneff, reordered sequences, and eliminated all spoken dialogue, using in its stead some brightly coloured subtitles that make it very easy to tell who’s saying what. Extremely self-ironic in its coarseness, the result is a silent film, artificially sepia-toned, whose soundscape is populated only by diegetic noises and… contemporary instrumental music. Soderbergh has really figured out what a great Kafka adaptation needs: an all-strings cover of Metallica’s Enter Sandman that could easily fall into the “royalty-free crap music heard in restaurants” category, playing in the foreground as the protagonist fights a human monster in a beautiful interwar elevator.

Mr. Kneff turns a period film set in 1919 almost into an experimental weed comedy, defusing the gratuitous seriousness of the original by bringing out the camp that was there from the start in those instances where it took itself too seriously. Sure, you might understand the narrative better, but that’s quite irrelevant now; what matters more is the frivolous entertainment born out of the superb incongruities created by the soundtrack and the Comic-Sans reminiscent flashy subtitles. Soderbergh knows how to treat his original film for exactly what it is – a perfect 90s artefact, clunky, far-too-gothic, and overachieving, that wasn’t a hit at the time and has aged even worse.

After the quite frankly frustrating boredom instilled by the 1991 Kafka, nothing could have prepared me for the sublime that erupted out of nowhere: when Caramitru’s anarchist incites to the siege of the Castle, the background music features a delightfully Kafkaesque use of – let me check my notes – bossa nova. Ah, cinema!

Recycling a very pretentious Kafka adaptation to elevator music brings Soderbergh curiously close to the practice of contemporary videography and experimental cinema, but there’s something incredibly down-to-earth about his willingness to laugh at himself. Maybe you’d expect it from the kind of versatile filmmaker that he is, having directed everything from Cannes and Berlinale films to Ocean’s Eleven and two Magic Mike movies. Still, there’s some interesting form of modesty discreetly at work in the background – as was evident in the masterclass Soderbergh was present for at Karlovy Vary. To the mention that the name Mary Ann Bernard is his pseudonym as an editor, and that Ben Andrews is his go-to name when he’s the director of photography, Soderbergh remarked that he’s not interested in seeing his name in the credits more than once, preferably only where it says “directed by”.

No reason to hide that Mr. Kneff was my favourite moment at this year’s Karlovy Vary, lifting me up from the oppressive – thematically, of course – atmosphere of the rest of the retrospective. After the quite frankly frustrating boredom instilled by the 1991 Kafka, nothing could have prepared me for the sublime that erupted out of nowhere: when Caramitru’s anarchist incites to the siege of the Castle, the background music features a delightfully Kafkaesque use of – let me check my notes – bossa nova. Ah, cinema!

Dora Leu

Graduated with a BA in film directing and a MA in film studies from UNATC; she's also studied history of art. Also collaborates with the Acoperisul de Sticla film magazine and is a former coordinator of FILM MENU. She's dedicated herself to '60-'70s Japanese cinema and Irish post-punk music bands. Still keeps a picture of Leslie Cheung in her wallet.