I didn't plan to watch this film. When I went to watch Scorsese's After Hours I had expected to watch just that film. However, before they played After Hours, they played this film. To be fair, it wasn't out of nowhere - the showing of After Hours was apart of the cinema's "Kafkaesque Classics" bloc of films and since K is itself an adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis it helped to set the stage for the Kafkaesque After Hours. Before both films were shown, a man came out to give background to both films - to explain there place within the larger bloc, and placed much more of an emphasis on talking about this film. It was very interesting to learn more about the director, and this film's place in broader artistic movements and the movements that came after it - I really want to try to learn more about film history, and art history more generally so I can hopefully get a better understanding of the art I encounter in the future.

[Light Spoilers Start]

I honestly didn't know what to expect going into a film from such a long time ago. Aside from older Disney films, I don't think I've genuinely watched a film from the 1950s or prior. Coming into the movie I was really interested in how - without CGI - they were going to portray Gregor Samsa as a bug. That of course is the key plot point of the original book after all. Interestingly enough however - while yes they do get to the bug part and I'll get to that in a bit - they spend much of the film focusing on Gregor Samsa the salesperson as opposed to Gregor Samsa the bug. Many of the scenes portray the monotony of Gregor's life, being routinely ignored, side-lined, and generally feeling alienated from the world around him. He does crazy things, like dance on rooftops and to me it represents a detachment from the world at large. Gregor is not respected as a person when he was one - and the switch from human to bug is one that carries the sense that not much has really changed. This already is a present theme in the original Metamorphosis, but comes into much closer focus within K, as the primary theming of the text.

Visually, the bug version of Gregor is still human. Of course he is, it's a low budget student film from the 50s! This works in the films favour though- it helps to lessen the distance between his previous and current life and helps to bring into focus their similarities. To emphasise his bug-like qualities, he scurries around on all fours, he moves animalistically, he is draped in a white cloth - much like a patient in a hospital (perhaps signifying illness?) - and we get many shots of his view from first person, and we get the true scale to which he sees the world. In general I find the camerawork to be really interesting here. With a film this old and underbudgeted, we don't have the abstractions afforded by modern CGI or editing. The wall between narrative and created work felt thin, and I was constantly faced with the fact that it was, indeed, a work of art. The alienation clear in other films I have seen didn't exist here. I saw the film through the lens of the camera. I could appreciate the film as a constructed entity - built to provide a certain experience. I had times even where I had to take a (metaphorical) step back and really reckon with wondering how exactly they got a certain shot, and wonder why they chose to do it this way. For example when Gregor is handing from the chain of a crane, or dancing on rooftops. I couldn't abstract away like I did with other films. In all, I really felt like I could appreciate this film more as a piece of art than others and it's made me interested more in learning about the craft behind film-making!

[Light Spoilers End]

As mentioned above, I had gone to see After Hours as it was showing in a local cinema as a part of their Kafkaesque classics. It was on the suggestion from a friend who came with me, who - like me - knew of the clout held by Scorsese and wanted to watch the film based on learning more about the director's creative output. I've personally become much more invested in watching classic and influential pieces of media in genres I like, in order to get a better view of the context through which other works emerge so I was down to watch this film. I hadn't known of the Kafkaesque elements of the film - though it was explained to me beforehand by a man who came to speak to the cinema before the films were shown.

[Light Spoilers Start]

While ostensibly After Hours is a black comedy, I find reducing it down to this label to be a lossy reduction. When the film ended I found myself gasping for air for a breath I didn't even realise I was holding. A tension that brewed without me noticing. The plot of the film is a series of escalations. One problem leads to another and the solving of one seems to nonetheless bring our lead two steps back. The web of trouble spun around the main character by the end gets so dense that it seems near inescapable. It's no wonder then that we see internal tensions rise over the course of the film as he gets into deeper shit but what I found insane was that I never realised this was happening. The film is funny! And that funniness helps to distract from the rising tension. The web spinning seems to be a piling on of absurdity on the surface which Scorsese skilfully uses to mask the underlying thriller aspects of the plot. For me, it was the catharsis I felt at the end of the film that made me realise just how good the film was on the whole - and made me think "damn, I need to watch more Scorsese!"

[Heavy Spoilers for American Psycho]

An aside worth noting - the world in the film is a bizarre one. Logic doesn't seem to flow in the way it ought to and it almost feels like a cosmic force is keeping our main character trapped in Soho. While watching the film I simply took it to be that the world of Soho within the film has the literal property of absurdity - and that what unfurled is what is occurring in the reality of the film's world. However, it later occurred to me that it's an equally possible reading to view the narration as being unreliable, and that the absurd state of the world could instead be a reflection of the mental state of our main character. It's interesting to me that I didn't think to entertain this idea until much later (and when making reference to American Psycho which does utilise an unreliable narrator). I do feel like it's harder in film to do justice to unreliable narration. You're always fixed to the third person perspective of the camera. Even if the camera were to be a first person view, and the narration were of the person itself - we put so much epistemic weight on the information given to us visually that instinctually I feel like we are adverse to assigning unreliability to pictures. Hence I feel as if films that operate on such a narrative structure find themselves on the backfoot, having to fight against our natural tendency to trust the visual - and perhaps those that successfully do so are unnerving to us, as it undermines our faith in our perception. American Psycho achieves this by blatantly ramping up the absurd after an otherwise somewhat believable plot. As if to test your ability to really believe what you're seeing. It contradicts itself more and more as if to point out directly to you - the viewer - to please question what you're being fed by the narrative perspective. It does feel somewhat ham-fisted, though arguably justified for the artistic intention in provoking that response which is merited by a unreliable perspective. If Scorsese meant to invoke that perspective, perhaps he would have done better taking some cues from American Psycho.