The Castle

Noelte’s adaptation of Kafka’s novel "The Castle" was unlucky to have been nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in a year when the festival was cancelled half way through due to student protests (the same could be said of the submissions from three of his fellow contenders, Czech filmmakers Forman, Němec and Menzel). The film features Maximilian Schell as the land surveyor K., who arrives to take up a post in a small village, yet everyone claims he was hired by mistake. Thanks also to Schell’s superb performance, Noelte succeeded in crafting a haunting cinematic vision of the terrifying dimension of power, applied through the agency of bureaucracy and hierarchical order. Noelte also added layers of the comic and tragically grotesque, elements so fundamental to Kafka’s world. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)