Labyrinth

This unclassifiable oddity is not a movie about Franz Kafka, how his Jewish-Czech heritage (pogroms, the ghetto, the Golem) worked on his imagination, or how the bureaucracy of irrational persecution which he postulated surfaced monstrously in the real world after his death. Instead, it's about a director (Schell) who aspires to make a movie which explores all those things, but who is unable to find a suitable cinematic form, and finally abandons the project. Thus, it's a scrapbook of random observations, a series of tentative drafts, a movie about its own inadequacies, a 90-min admission of failure. Ruefully aware of Kafka's dim view of the cinema's potential, the film-makers' inability to treat the material properly has a mortifying appropriateness.