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There is a famous passport photograph of Kafka
taken a few months before his death.
I thought about recreating the scene:
Kafka sitting in the atelier while the picture was being taken.
I wanted to animate this photograph
and give it a continuation, develop it into a film.
I had at my disposal a catalogue from the exhibition on Kafka's Iife,
fiIIed with his photographs starting from early childhood.
The idea was to show Kafka's Iife in an animated documentary,
a one never made even though films were already made in those times.
So I used the photos of Kafka and black-and-white photos of Prague
taken at the turn of the 1 9th and 20th centuries
by Czech photographers.
I hadn,t been to Prague before making this film.
I went there after its completion to take part in the premiere of the film,
which took place in the Center for Polish Culture.
At the time the Center was located on Vaclavske namesti,
in a building where Kafka worked for an insurance company.
It was a nice coincidence.
It was of course very difficult to come up with a formula
for a 1 6-minute animated film on Kafka,s Iife,
which wouldn,t simply be a collection of photos
and which would have its dramatic tension,
all the more so because Kafka,s Iife was rather quiet and uneventful.
All the unrest was inside him.
How to show the inner anxiety of such a man?
This scene was partly inspired by his novel The Trial,
where two men appear with an incomprehensible warrant,
and partly by a dream I had in which
some people come to take me away.
There is a girl there, somehow connected with these people
and not wholly loyal to me.
This scene takes place in a room which resembles my childhood room.
There were no flashlights then, of course.
It was a drawing by Edward Gorey that inspired me to let the flashlight
build this scene in a manner not be possible in a live-action film.
So thanks to the fact that it is an animated film
and because of the technique I used,
which consists in scratching out drawings
in plaster slabs painted black,
I was able to achieve the effect I desired.
It is something close to photography,
but at the same time entering the world of imagination.
My then girlfriend, who granted her voice to this heroine,
didn,t speak German and the sentence was dictated to her by an interpreter.
This scene was called "Growing up"
by Janusz Hajdun when we were working on the music score.
He named individual sequences to which he was to write music.
This scene was inspired by the novel Amerika,
in which a teenager Karl is sent to America
as punishment for letting a maid seduce him.
According to Max Brod, the author of Kafka,s biography,
this is what actuaIIy happened to Kafka.
Therefore his sexual biography can be considered an important influence.
His awakening sexuality and self-observation will be
visible in this scene.
In this film for the first time I employed the method
of covering the image with real shadow.
It means that the shadows seen here,
and all the darkness from which the bright elements emerge,
are not only painted but also cast by me on the images.
Another innovation I introduced in this film is the multiplan:
the rain glimmering in the foreground was laid on glass
situated closer to the camera than the rest of the animation set,
which was put at the very bottom.
In the corner we can see a bench on which Kafka is sitting --
it was cut out of paper and also put on a different plane,
which is why it is a little blurry.
In a moment you'll see a dog,
which was painted on glass and again used as a separate Iayer.
With this animation technique -- scratching in plaster --
it is difficult to animate on bright background,
because after the photographing stage you are left with marks
that are very difficult to remove.
It is much easier to do it the other way round,
when something bright appears on dark background:
change of frame consists in painting it black and covering with a shadow.
Here we have a scene under the table, which is also rooted in my childhood.
I Iiked to get under the table to see a different world:
the shoes and legs of my relatives and their peculiar smeII.
I associate Kafka with this prolonged boyhood,
with observing the world from this "under-the-table" perspective --
a perspective of a man whose inhibitions allow him
to gain knowledge inaccessible to those "above the table".
This staircase was not inspired by any picture of a Prague house
nor is it an echo of the prewar house in Warsaw where I grew up.
It is a strange, fictitious staircase full of labyrinths and balustrades,
reminiscent of the places where the events of The Trial unraveled.
I'm still not sure whether it was a good idea to have this rooster here.
It's the only fantastic scene here.
A woman with a child was a recurrent image in Kafka's diaries,
echoing his never realized dream of a family.
Almost every scene and every theme in this film is actually rooted
in Kafka's diaries or letters. His works were a source too,
but it is the diaries that were my guide to his world.
September 11 .
Only recently have I noticed the uncanny coincidence of dates,
as the upcoming scenes show unidentified objects flying
over Manhattan -- a dream Kafka allegedly had.
I actually made sketches for them in Manhattan in 1990.
Situations like these, where a child peeks at Kafka writing,
are on the borderline between his work and life.
Peeking children appear in The Trial,
but they were possibly disturbing Kafka himself
when he felt he lacked privacy for work.
There is a story connected with this image of the mountains.
Initially, this film was to be something completely different.
I wanted to make a film about a vampire living in Prague
and these scenes were made for it.
The mountains were meant to resemble Transylvania from Nosferatu.
Later, when I gave up work on that film,
I used the scenes in this one.
Kafka was my challenge to make a documentary
and in this respect I certainly owe a lot to Yuri Norstein,
whom I met shortly before making this film and who said:
"These are only the beginnings of animation".
It was after I made The Freedom of a Leg
and felt I had achieved everything in this art.
When I heard these words and saw a fragment
of Norstein's still unfinished film A Greatcoat,
I realized that animation could go beyond philosophical fables
and tell the story of someone who really existed, become a documentary.
You can see two parsnips on Kafka's plate.
This is connected with the fact that at some point
Kafka stopped eating meat and fish.
The scene with the aquarium refers to the passage in Kafka's diaries
in which he describes watching fish in an aquarium and saying:
"Now I can look at you without guilt because I don't eat you".
I seated here all of Kafka's family and friends of the time:
his sister Otla, his fiancée Dora, Max Brod and the parents.
In the doorway you can see the men from the beginning of the film,
so it is a sort of reference to The Trial,
although not a direct adaptation of any fragment of his work.
A plate turning in the air heralds the end of Kafka,s earthly existence.
The scene of his turning into a dog came to me
before I started working on the film.
Initially, it was to be the opening scene,
but as I aimed more and more at a documentary
and thus removed the fantastic fragments,
it became the scene in which we part with Kafka.
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