with Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth, Stewart Granger, Chief Thundercloud, and other stars of the past on screen.
But that is not my subject here; I am concerned with the other man who races up in a Volkswagen at the beginning of
Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit)
, when Bruno is shaving in the open air, and drives it intentionally (so much is instantly obvious) into the river by which Bruno has parked overnight. Bruno is not a little surprised. For a long moment, the Beetle soars through the air as if it had learned to fly. To this day I remember the sight. As far as I recollect, Robert Lander, the man at the wheel who rises from the ground in this spectacular manner, like his near namesake who was carried away by an umbrella, is a pediatrician or a psychologist, and after this unusual opening, which Wenders presents in matter-of-fact style, they travel together through the more remote regions of their native land having various adventures, of which I remember most clearly a motorbike ride along an empty road, a very beautiful and almost weightless sequence. Bruno is riding the bike, if I remember correctly;and Robert sits in the sidecar wearing the kind of sunglasses one used to have to put on when being X-rayed. But to come to the real point: it is this Robert (the actor’s real name is Hanns Zischler), shown in the film relishing the speed of the ride and the ever changing patterns of light and shade, who has just published a book about Franz Kafka and what can be discovered or conjectured about his interest in the art of the cinema, still very new in his time. *
No author has had more written about him than Kafka. Thousands of books and articles about his character and work have accumulated within the comparatively short space of half a century. Anyone with even an approximate idea of the extent and parasitic nature of this proliferation of words may be forgiven for wondering whether any further additions to this already excessively long list of titles are needed. However,
Kafka Goes to the Movies
is in a category of its own. Unlike the general run of German critics, whose plodding studies regularly become a travesty of scholarship, and unlike the manufacturers of literary theory applying their astute minds to the difficulty of Kafka, Hanns Zischler confines himself to a restrained commentary which never tries to go beyond its particular subject. It is this restraint, keeping to the facts alone and refusing to indulge in attempts at elucidation, that we can now see, looking back, distinguishes the best of Kafka scholars. Today, ifyou pick up one of the many Kafka studies to have appeared since the 1950s, it is almost incredible to observe how much dust and mold have already accumulated on these secondary works, inspired as they are by the theories of existentialism, theology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, reception aesthetics, or system criticism, and how unrewarding is the redundant verbiage on every page. Now and then, of course, you do find something different, for the conscientious and patient work of editors and factual commentators is in marked contrast to the chaff ground out in the mills of academia. To me at least—and I cannot claim to be entirely innocent of the fatal inclination to speculate about meanings—it seems increasingly that Malcolm Pasley, Klaus Wagenbach, Hartmut Binder, Walter Müller-Seidel, Christoph Stölzl, Anthony Northey, and Ritchie Robertson, all of whom have concentrated mainly on reconstructing a portrait of the author in his own time, have made a greater contribution to elucidating the texts than those exegetes who dig around in them unscrupulously and often shamelessly. And among the faithful advocates we may now count Zischler, who was working on a television film about Kafka in 1978 when he first came upon the notes on the cinema scattered through the diaries and books, some of them, as Zischler says, very curt and cryptic. He was then surprised to find how
But that is not my subject here; I am concerned with the other man who races up in a Volkswagen at the beginning of
Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit)
, when Bruno is shaving in the open air, and drives it intentionally (so much is instantly obvious) into the river by which Bruno has parked overnight. Bruno is not a little surprised. For a long moment, the Beetle soars through the air as if it had learned to fly. To this day I remember the sight. As far as I recollect, Robert Lander, the man at the wheel who rises from the ground in this spectacular manner, like his near namesake who was carried away by an umbrella, is a pediatrician or a psychologist, and after this unusual opening, which Wenders presents in matter-of-fact style, they travel together through the more remote regions of their native land having various adventures, of which I remember most clearly a motorbike ride along an empty road, a very beautiful and almost weightless sequence. Bruno is riding the bike, if I remember correctly;and Robert sits in the sidecar wearing the kind of sunglasses one used to have to put on when being X-rayed. But to come to the real point: it is this Robert (the actor’s real name is Hanns Zischler), shown in the film relishing the speed of the ride and the ever changing patterns of light and shade, who has just published a book about Franz Kafka and what can be discovered or conjectured about his interest in the art of the cinema, still very new in his time. *
No author has had more written about him than Kafka. Thousands of books and articles about his character and work have accumulated within the comparatively short space of half a century. Anyone with even an approximate idea of the extent and parasitic nature of this proliferation of words may be forgiven for wondering whether any further additions to this already excessively long list of titles are needed. However,
Kafka Goes to the Movies
is in a category of its own. Unlike the general run of German critics, whose plodding studies regularly become a travesty of scholarship, and unlike the manufacturers of literary theory applying their astute minds to the difficulty of Kafka, Hanns Zischler confines himself to a restrained commentary which never tries to go beyond its particular subject. It is this restraint, keeping to the facts alone and refusing to indulge in attempts at elucidation, that we can now see, looking back, distinguishes the best of Kafka scholars. Today, ifyou pick up one of the many Kafka studies to have appeared since the 1950s, it is almost incredible to observe how much dust and mold have already accumulated on these secondary works, inspired as they are by the theories of existentialism, theology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, reception aesthetics, or system criticism, and how unrewarding is the redundant verbiage on every page. Now and then, of course, you do find something different, for the conscientious and patient work of editors and factual commentators is in marked contrast to the chaff ground out in the mills of academia. To me at least—and I cannot claim to be entirely innocent of the fatal inclination to speculate about meanings—it seems increasingly that Malcolm Pasley, Klaus Wagenbach, Hartmut Binder, Walter Müller-Seidel, Christoph Stölzl, Anthony Northey, and Ritchie Robertson, all of whom have concentrated mainly on reconstructing a portrait of the author in his own time, have made a greater contribution to elucidating the texts than those exegetes who dig around in them unscrupulously and often shamelessly. And among the faithful advocates we may now count Zischler, who was working on a television film about Kafka in 1978 when he first came upon the notes on the cinema scattered through the diaries and books, some of them, as Zischler says, very curt and cryptic. He was then surprised to find how
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