When I read that Criterion Collection was releasing a new Blu-Ray edition of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film Woman in the Dunes, I tracked down and read the 1962 novel by Kōbō Abe on which it is based. I thought I might write about the Criterion release, and I knew that if I did, I’d want…
International novelist Haruki Murakami’s first novel, Hear the Wind Sing(1979) was an immediate success, and since then, he has developed a fanatic worldwide following that eagerly anticipates each new release. Other critical and commercial bestsellers include Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-1995), Kafka on the Shore (2002),…
I think the chief accomplishment of Orson Welles’s The Trial is that it so fully traps us in its nightmare world. The movie is an adaptation of Kafka’s novel about a man named Josef K who wakes up one morning to find that he is being persecuted for some unknown offense. K stumbles from one…
One could reasonably expect that if a Criminal Element blogger were going to single out a Roman Polanski film for appreciation, the chosen title would be Chinatown (1974). But at the risk of committing sacrilege in the eyes of my fellow cinephiles and while I certainly appreciate the brilliance of Polanski’s classic work of film…
The poet W.H. Auden once called Franz Kafka the voice of the 20th Century. What Auden saw in Kafka’s twisted tales was not simply their influence on other writers, but the way they captured the unease bubbling beneath society’s surface as we stumbled into the bloodiest century in recorded history. Though he died in 1924,…
