Directed by:
Steven SoderberghCinematography:
Walt LloydCast:
Jeremy Irons, Theresa Russell, Ian Holm, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Joel Grey, Jeroen Krabbé, Alec GuinnessPlots(1)
To mark the release of a DVD box set in 2021, Steven Soderbergh decided to give some of his earlier films a new lease of life. One of them was Kafka, which “morphed” into Mr. Kneff, a story set in Prague in 1919 about a writer, whose miserable job provided him with literary inspiration. The new cut is twenty minutes shorter and Soderbergh also rearranged the narrative structure and coloured certain scenes to make a clearer distinction between reality and the protagonist’s imagination. The dialogues were replaced by subtitles; the music was also altered, incorporating, among others, the instrumental version of Metallica’s song “Enter Sandman”. Mr. Kneff, arguably a film about Kafka, but now without Kafka, in comparison with the original is thus noticeably estranged and more surreal. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)
(more)Reviews (2)
An inconsistent cinematic chimera that combines a noirish atmosphere and nice black-and-white compositions of old Prague with sometimes terribly chosen music and color subtitles in a “comic book” font. Though these make it easier to find one’s bearings in the dialogue, they don’t add to the seriousness of the work. I understand the absence of audible dialogue in the interest of preserving the literary patina of Kafka’s work, but no film can benefit from not seeing (or hearing) Jeremy Irons acting with his own voice. [Karlovy Vary International Film Festival]
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Steven Soderbergh is sitting in the editing room, remastering his old film Kafka, when he suddenly asks himself, since he directed the actors so expressively, what it would be like if he muted the dialogue tracks in the soundtrack. And that does have its charm, especially with the additional music and intensified foley effects. The result of this anecdote is one of the freshest and freest approaches to the concept of the director’s cut. Instead of a fixed, obsessive vision (Scott) or fooling around with technological excesses in the interest of viewer immersion (Lucas) or particular aesthetic preferences (Cameron), Soderbergh offers up a bizarrely imaginative experiment. At the same time, Mr. Kneff is like a Reader’s Digest abridged version of the original work, as well as a playful variation on it that is equally obstinately conceptual, caustically derisive and surprisingly stimulating. On top of that, it enables viewers who have seen the original film to experience it again in a somewhat different interpretation.
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