Class Relations

Applying their keen visual sense and excessively cerebral style to Kafka's classic unfinished novel Amerika, structuralists Straub and Huillet have created a frighteningly cold and distancing film that is as emotionally taxing as it is intellectually rewarding. Kafka wrote the posthumously published novel about America without ever having been there, relying upon his insight to draw a portrait of an individual traveling to a land of symbolic freedom only to discover illusory dreams in a place of strange people, manners, and landscapes. Heinisch plays a member of the German middle class forced to flee his country after a damaging scandal. He travels to Americ...