That´s what we see in every story Franz Kafka wrote: Prague through the eyes of the tormented artist. His Prague. His relationship with the city. It was the only enduring relationship in his life of disastrous liaisons and broken engagements. All Kafka´s attempts to form relationships with women failed embarrassingly. His one true mistress was his city, his home, the setting of his stories and his dreams. But Prague proved to be an overwhelming mistress.
Renée Vincent´s "Conversation with Kafka" is a cinema graphic interpretation of one of Kafka´s earliest prose pieces, "Conversation with the Supplicant." The story reads like a waking dream. A young man awaits a beautiful young woman each day in church. She goes there to pray; he shows up to worship her. Unable to speak to her, he merely gapes, paralyzed by his adoration of her beauty.
No conflict, no problem, except that there is another worshipper in the church, a mysterious supplicant who distracts the young man, and even worse, the young woman, with his inappropriate prostrations and moans.
When the narrator musters up the courage to confront the supplicant, the dreamer enters the vertiginous and surreal world of blended identities. The narrator becomes many-layered, fragmented and lost. In their first Kafkaesque encounters, most readers lose their footing. But art interprets art. The visual retelling of the story through film creates a shadow-ridden but clearly negotiable trail through Kafka´s dream.
Vincent´s film illustrates through subtle visual and aural imagery the multi-dimensional psychology of the narrator surrounded by ghostly supporting characters: whispering voices of statues on the Charles Bridge; reflections of faces on the surface of a baptismal font; swirling ringing clock towers under cloudy moonlight; gold-leafed Madonnas juxtaposed with black lace; St. Vitas cathedral rising from the castle to Gregorian chants- all combine to recreate the imagination of Franz Kafka as he captures the most wondrous mystery of all, Prague, the representation of his self imprisonment, the mistress he feared but could not leave.
Prague becomes his would-be mistress in black who taunts him, draws him into an encounter with his innermost psyche. Never has a struggle between multiple personalities been so lusciously portrayed. Just like Kafka, the film "Conversation with Kafka" adds another layer and allows us another means of understanding Kafka´s stories.
Paula K. Kamenish
Associate Professor of English
University of North Carolina at Wilmington
