The Trial (Le Procès) (1962)
Directed by Orson Welles

Film Review

Few of the handful of films completed by Orson Welles have divided opinion as much as The Trial, a flamboyant but broadly faithful adaptation of Franz Kafka's best-known work, the short novel the Czech writer worked on in 1914-15 at the age of 31 but failed to complete.  This was the first time that one of Kafka's stories had been adapted for the cinema and Welles does a surprisingly good job of capturing the essential themes of the original novel and making these relevant to a 1960s audience.  On its original release in France in 1963, under the title Le Procès, critical opinion was fairly unequivocal amongst the French reviewers that this was another Wellesian masterpiece, a worthy successor to the director's earlier cinematic achievements from Citizen Kane (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958).

The critics in Welles' native America and the UK were not nearly as impressed and for many years The Trial was considered a lesser work, easily faulted for its perceived misappropriation of Kafka's ideas.  It was even considered a failure by its lead actor Anthony Perkins, who disagreed profoundly with the director's conception of the main character, seeing scant resemblance to the character in Kafka's novel.  Almost four decades on from Orson Welles' death, the film has grown considerably in stature and now rates as one of the director's most inspired, most coherent masterworks.  Not only is it an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, replete with the stylistic tropes and mise-en-scène flourishes that define Welles' cinematic oeuvre, it is also a highly imaginative and deeply personal interpretation of a crucial piece of 20th century literature.  Welles' The Trial may not be one for the Kafka purists but it is a remarkable piece of existentialist cinema, highly revelatory of the complex individual who wrote and directed it.

Genesis of a nightmare

Orson Welles made The Trial two years after the semi-failure of Touch of Evil, a gritty crime drama which he had hoped would be his passport back to Hollywood after the multiple let-downs of the 1940s.  Embittered by the way in which Universal Pictures had wrested control of the film from him and turned it into a fairly routine B-movie, Welles redirected his attention to his pet project, a screen version of Don Quixote that he would labour on for two decades between professional engagements without ever finishing.  In 1960, whilst holidaying in Austria with his family, he was visited by Michael Salkind (a producer on Greta Garbo's debut film Die freudlose Gasse) and his son Alexander (the future producer of the hit Superman movies), with an invitation to adapt Gogol's famous short story Taras Bulba.  Welles readily agreed, on the understanding that he would have complete artistic control over the making of the film, including the editing.

Work had barely started on the screenplay before it was discovered that another screen adaptation of the story was in production (with Yul Bryner in the lead role), so the Salkinds put a second proposition to Welles - to adapt one in a list of 82 possible titles.  The title that appealed most to the director was Franz Kafka's The Trial, a book he had recently read and admired, so this is the one he selected.  The film was to be a fairy lavish co-production with French, Italian and West German backers, having a predominantly French crew and a cast comprising mostly French, Italian and German actors.  The French side of the supporting cast was particularly impressive, including such distinguished actors as Maurice Teynac, Fernand Ledoux, Madeleine Robinson, Suzanne Flon and Michael Lonsdale.  Jeanne Moreau and Romy Schneider were cast in the leading female roles, at the time when they had acquired international fame - Moreau through her work with Louis Malle and François Truffaut, Schneider through her intimate relationship with the French screen icon Alain Delon.

At the time, Kafka's corpus of work was only just beginning to gain an international readership and it would not be for another two decades before the obscure Czech author would come to be seen as a visionary and literary giant.  In his lifetime, Franz Kafka published only a handful of short stories and failed to complete any of the three full-length novels he attempted in his short but brilliant writing career.  His second novel, The Trial, was first published under the title Der Prozess in 1925, a year after its author's death from tuberculosis, in defiance of his instructions to his friend and executor Max Brad to destroy all of his unpublished work.  With its compelling account of a seemingly innocent man ensnared in an impenetrable legal procedure from which escape is impossible, Kafka's The Trial (inspired by Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment) is considered the most prophetic work of the 20th century.  In the eyes of many who read it, the book anticipates the horrors of the Nazi holocaust (in which Kafka's three younger sisters and beloved friend Milena Jesenská died) and the appalling mass subjugation of Stalin's USSR.  Real-world counterparts of the kind of oppressive rule-bound regime envisaged by Kafka have become appallingly commonplace in the century following his death, and even in countries that pride themselves on respect for the individual traces of Kafkaesque suppression and persecution are not too hard to come by.

In The Trial, Franz Kafka wasn't only writing about his own experience of belonging to an oppressed minority as a German-speaking Jew in a predominantly Czech enclave of the Austro-Hungarian empire, he also drew on his own deeply neurotic guilt complex, the result of a pathologically troubled relationship with his overbearing authoritarian father.  The extent to which Kafka's incredibly sensitive psychology was warped by harmful paternal influence is apparent in the letter he wrote to his father in 1919, a gushing torrent of alienation, resentment, self-reproach and guilt that is almost too painful to read.  The central character of The Trial, Josef K., is arguably the most authentic and revealing of the distinct self-portraits Kafka offered in his three novels - a dutiful bank employee who, through no fault of his own, becomes caught up in a convoluted legal process that sends him into a dizzying maze of deception and obfuscation from which death is the only escape.

Orson Welles as Josef K.

In view of the endless struggles against the establishment that blighted his career right from his start in Hollywood, it all too easy to see Orson Welles as a kind of Josef K. figure - a marked man prevented from fulfilling his life's ambitions through the malign workings of some unfathomable cosmic conspiracy.  At the time of starting work on The Trial, Welles had every reason to see himself as a victim of the System, since he never knew the precise reason why Touch of Evil, a film he had lavished so much care on, had been taken away from him by the studio and subjected to a drastic re-edit that vastly diminished it.  It was an almost exact replay of what had happened on his earlier tour de force, The Magnificent Ambersons, where the executives at RKO had insisted on massive cuts without Welles' approval after a preview had shown it to be too depressing in its original form.  Welles stated that The Trial was his most autobiographical film, and in its protagonist's spirited but doomed attempts to disentangle himself from a tangled web of lies and bureaucratic nonsense it is not hard to perceive the director's heaving exasperation with an over-regulated, over-cautious industry that appeared to delight in thwarting his attempts at free artistic expression.

The Trial can also be seen as Welles' personal tongue-in-cheek response to McCarthysm, the wave of anti-Communist paranoia that swept American society in the late 1940s, early 1950s, resulting in a climate of fear and mistrust in which numerous Hollywood reputations were violently trashed.  Living in Europe for most of this period (mainly because of his disenchantment with America in general), Welles managed to dodge the persecution experienced by many of his contemporaries, but being a staunch Democrat and political radical with strong socialist leanings he could easily have fallen foul of Senator McCarthy's jackals had he stayed in the US.  (Welles always claimed that his willingness to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities gave him an immunity from prosecution - an assertion that was never put to the test.)

By casting Anthony Perkins in the lead role (a casting choice which has since proven to be highly contentious), Welles may also have intended The Trial as an attack on another, more insidious kind of persecution: homophobia.  Even in the early 1960s, anti-gay sentiment was rife in America, particularly in Hollywood where public image counted for everything, and Perkins was himself victimised by his own bosses at Paramount Studios for pursuing overt homosexual relationships.  The actor's obvious unease with female intimacy is cannily exploited by Welles in the scenes where K. is repeatedly fondled by the seductive sirens who are irresistibly drawn to him on account of his being under arrest.  Another reason for casting Perkins in the role may have been his sympathetic portrayal of the killer Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), the part that made him an international star.

In Hitchcock's justly celebrated thriller, Perkins comes across as the personification of guilt, constantly twitchy and suspicious-looking, but in a likeably Forest Gumpish manner.  By requesting his lead actor to turn in a similar kind of performance as Josef K., but with a pushier, less amiable persona, Welles takes a significant departure from Kafka's novel, never leaving any doubt that K. is, in his words, 'as guilty as Hell'.  There is scarcely a scene in The Trial in which Perkins does not resemble a man failing desperately to conceal a secret of the most incriminating kind.  You can't even imagine him tying up his shoelaces without looking like someone who has just broken at least three of the Ten Commandments.  In the original story, K.'s guilt is not so explicitly spelled out, and the notion that he is the victim of a more powerful entity is even less certain.  Indeed, on multiple readings of the novel it becomes apparent that the central character is as much to blame for his predicament as the system in which he becomes ensnared.  One of the most fascinating and disturbing aspects of Kafka's The Trial is the extent to which Josef K. appears to be complicit in his oppression and destruction.  Much of this multi-faceted complexity and ambiguity is lacking from Welles' film, which portrays K. as a much more combative and emotionally driven figure, guilt-ridden to his core but fiercely adamant in his refusal to be judged.  We see K. pretty much as Welles saw himself, as the unfairly condemned free spirit.

Whoops Apocalypse

There are several other notable differences between Kafka's novel and Welles' interpretation, although the film's author retains most of the plot and succeeds in recreating the oppressive dreamlike texture of the original work.  The film opens with Welles narrating, in his familiar mesmerising tones, Kafka's Before the Law fable, which is recounted in the cathedral scene towards the end of the novel.  Illustrated by some striking pin-screen images meticulously crafted by the Russian artist Alexandre Alexeieff, this hauntingly enigmatic prologue prepares us for the nightmarish vision that follows, leaving no doubt that there can be no happy ending for a man who is unfortunate enough to be caught up in the processes of the law.  When the sequence is partly replayed in the cathedral scene later in the film the same stark images are projected onto a wall as mere flecks of light and dark, as insubstantial and bogusly portentous as the illusion of justice that has torn K.'s life apart.

The most noticeable and most controversial departure from the novel concerns the denouement in which K. is led to a remote quarry and executed for his still unspecified crime.  In Kafka's book, the protagonist meekly accepts the verdict of guilt and allows himself to be pierced through the heart 'like a dog', with the knowledge that his shame will endure after his death.  (Kafka wrote this final unpolished instalment immediately after the first chapter.  Being an obsessive perfectionist, it seems unlikely he would have retained it in the final draft - particularly as he discarded a similarly facile ending for his next novel The Castle.)  Mindful of the Holocaust, Welles found this masochistic conclusion distasteful and far too pessimistic, so in his version he has K. refusing to submit and defying the verdict with bellowed taunts and raucous laughter right up until the end.  He is silenced not by cold steel but in a far more operatic way (of the Looney Tunes variety) - blown to smithereens by an explosive thrown at him from a distance.  In this way, Welles makes K. out to be more of a hero than a victim - he literally gets the last laugh and renders absurd not only his cowardly executioners but the entire judicial process that has led to his pointless annihilation.  Symbolically, it's Welles' two-fingered salute to the world that failed to forgive him his genius.

This ending has always been problematic, even for those with a high regard for the film.  The difficulty is that the final shot of the mushroom cloud caused by the blast immediately imposes on the film a glib apocalyptic subtext which it neither warrants nor needs.  Welles hated this shot, did his best to get round it, but ultimately he accepted it as the best of all the bad options available to him.  Anthony Perkins' over-neurotic, over-mannered portrayal of K. and the unsatisfactory ending are frequently cited as the principal flaws of The Trial, flaws that Welles freely acknowledged whilst maintaining it is still one of his finest achievements.  When the film first came out, the director was adamant that he had never made a better film - although he said precisely the same (with perhaps greater justification) for his next great work, the sublime Chimes at Midnight (1966).

Location, Location, Location

Where The Trial is unequivocally successful is in its panoply of jaw-dropping visuals.  Not only are the film's stunning images evocative of the indefinably odd dreamlike nature of Kafka's novel, they are also monstrously effective in conveying the abject smallness and lack of autonomy of those living in K.'s nightmare reality.  The insignificance of K.'s plight is cruelly emphasised by situating him in fantastically cavernous sets, often seen from a distance in long-shot totally dwarfed by his soulless surroundings.  K.'s office (in reality the interior of a large exposition hall located near Zagreb) is the size of a modern hypermarket, with a thousand secretaries seated neatly in unending parallel rows at separate desks, bashing away at their typewriters like robots, each the tiniest cog in an enormous corporate engine.  In this location alone The Trial gives us one of cinema's starkest and most depressing representations of modern life, the office as a place in which the human spirit is totally subjugated for the needs of machine efficiency.  A later scene with a powerful computer (a device that Welles both loathed and feared) makes the same point, in a way that now seems eerily prescient.

The office scenes and exteriors (all imbued with a bleak otherworldly strangeness) were the only parts of the film that Welles was able to complete in Yugoslavia, the intended location for the entire shoot.  The rest of the film was to have been shot on meticulously constructed sets (designed by Welles himself) at a film studio, but just as filming was due to commence Welles was notified that the studio hadn't received payment for the planned shoot.  With no money available to proceed with filming within a studio, Welles suddenly had the bright idea of shooting the remainder of the film at the then disused railway station, the Gare d'Orsay (later to be renovated as the Musée d'Orsay, home to the world's finest collection of impressionist art).  With minimal dressing, the former station was miraculously transformed into a series of bizarrely shaped sets - the court offices, the Advocate's chambers, the cathedral interior - that each possessed the quality of a nightmare, tumbling into one another as part of the geometrically impossible labyrinth in which K. appears to have become trapped forever.  Most memorable is the stand-out courtroom scene, in which K. makes his first protest against his unwarranted arrest, scarcely heard above the deafening chatter and jeers of an assembled throng that takes up just about every inch of the colossal set.

Such stuff as dreams are made on

By this stage in his career, despite his reputation as a die-hard technophobe, Orson Welles had attained a mastery of the use of the camera that was virtually unrivalled in his profession.  One of the most essential parts of his art was his use of deep focus photography, which brought an extraordinarily stark and vivid quality to his style of cinema.  Lens technology had progressed so far since the early 1940s that the director no longer had to fall back on clever trickery (such as the use of split-screens, as he did on Citizen Kane) to give a greater depth of field.  For The Trial, the sets have such a clear impression of depth that they seem to stretch off to infinity, adding to the sense that K. is forever trapped in an endless maze from which escape is always a forlorn hope.  The vastness of the space that surrounds K. and his sense of imprisonment are further stressed by Welles' penchant for intricately staged long takes and the use of camera motion within such takes to obviate the need for cutting.

The story opens with a subtly executed long take set in K.'s apartment, the effect being to immediately make the protagonist appear a prisoner, a man with nowhere to run.  In the film's longer takes, the camera is rarely at rest.  It glides around the set like a malignant spirit, encircling the protagonist in a way that makes him resemble a puppet being yanked by invisible strings.  The entire film gradually acquires the character of a diabolically constructed Escher staircase, with K. seemingly expending a great deal of energy to get precisely nowhere.  He goes round and round in circles in a futile attempt to get to the truth of his predicament, never knowing why he has been arrested or how he is to go about clearing his name.  The most frantically surreal phase of K.'s weird descent into Hell sees him running blindly down a long stretch of corridor, with long streaks of light piercing the walls creating a dazzling kaleidoscope effect.  In this, The Trial's trippiest sequence, Welles hurls us into the most abject of nightmare experiences - a manic flight from an unknown terror in which we surrender totally to our most primal instincts.

At the start of the film, the narrator (Welles) comments that what follows has the logic of a dream or nightmare.  Throughout, the creepily oneiric character of the film is underpinned by Welles' characteristic use of high-contrast expressionistic lighting, large mirrors and skewed camera angles.  In this respect, there are some striking similarities with Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), which was released around the time Welles was making The Trial.  In their visual impact and tacit rejection of the conventional narrative form, these two films are steeped in the crisp 'nouveau cinema' look of the early 1960s that would come to define the French New Wave.  Watching the two films back-to-back, you can hardly fail to be struck by how similar they are, particularly the eerie sense of timelessness that is achieved through the liberal use of camera movement within seemingly unbounded interior spaces.

'Baroque' is the term that most readily describes the glacial, ethereal style of Resnais's meditative masterpiece on the interdependency of time and memory - and it applies just as well to Welles' The Trial, most noticeably in the imposing expressionistic sets but also in the principal theme for the score.  Whereas Marienbad employs an entirely original composition (by Francis Seyrig) that feels like a sinister pastiche of 18th century organ music, Welles appropriated a much more sentimental neo-baroque piece commonly known as Albinoni's Adagio in G minor, although it was in fact the creation of a 20th century musicologist named Remo Giazotto.  At the time, Giazotto's confected Adagio was virtually unknown but it became a worldwide hit after The Trial, the first time it had been used on a motion picture.  Peter Weir later applied it to great effect on his impactful wartime drama Gallipoli (1981) and it was used recurrently in a popular BBC television sitcom, Butterflies, in the late 1970s.  Giazotto's intensely melancholic theme has been used so often since that it has become almost a stock cliché for maudlin sentimentality of the worst kind.  As a consequence of this, its endless repetition in The Trial serves to heighten the twisted irony and dark humour of the film, in ways that Welles could never have anticipated.  It is also worth mentioning en passant Jean Ledrut's sprightly jazz score which seems to be constantly at odds with the baroque feel of the film, adding to the curious sense of disconnectedness that runs all the way through it - the odd feeling of heightened unreality you get when experiencing a lucid dream.

Sex and comedy

It is the dark comedic underbelly of The Trial that makes it such a powerfully resonant and rewarding work.  From the outset, Welles conceived the film as a black comedy, although it takes several viewings (at least three) before the abundance of dark humour within it becomes apparent.  Some of the jokes are easy to pick up on - such as K.'s observation that the Examining Magistrate has dirty books on his table - books not only covered in dirt on the outside, but containing some pretty racy artwork within.  During his initial arrest, K. can't help making Freudian slips, at one point referring to his record player as a pornograph.  The funniest sequence is the one in which K. tries to engage a crippled old woman in conversation as she pointlessly drags a ridiculously large trunk across a deserted urban landscape at night, the Pinter-esque dialogue punctuated by the hydraulic wheezing of an artificial leg.  Cheekily mocking K.'s own ordeal - a variation on Albert Camus's existential parable The Myth of Sisyphus - the scene could easily fit into Samuel Beckett's play En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) (1948) - either that or a Monty Python sketch.

Welles embraces not only the abundant dark humour of Kafka's novel but also its seedy and occasionally highly perverse eroticism, and in doing so he delivers some of the most unsettling images in his entire oeuvre.  Most shocking is the infamous sequence in which K. slips into a tiny storeroom and witnesses two of his male colleagues being forced to strip and subject themselves to a fierce whipping by one of the minions of the court.  It is a scene that is both outrageously funny and unbearably horrific, and the ridiculous smallness of the set carries both of these reactions to the limits of absurdity.  Mercifully brief though it is, this weird digression into extreme S&M comic nastiness is so steeped in full-on homoeroticism and kinky perversion that you wonder how it ever got past the censor, yet it is one of the crucial scenes in the film.  As in the original novel, we are uncertain whether what we are seeing is real - part of the insanely oppressive world in which the story takes place - or merely a figment of K.'s crazed imagination, an hallucination indicative of the inner turmoil that is driving him to distraction.

This scene is one of many in which K.'s troubled sexuality manifests itself through intimate encounters with members of both sexes.  Not long after his arrest at the start of the film, K. has an awkward tête-à-tête with the most desirable female who crosses his path, his neighbour Miss Bürstner.  Played by Jeanne Moreau with the seductive qualities that made her one of the most sought-after actresses of her generation, this super-sultry nightclub dancer is clearly K.'s conception of the perfect woman, and yet whilst she is obviously attracted to him he appears totally incapable of moving their relationship beyond the merely hypothetical.  The next sensual lovely who tries to seduce him is Leni, the live-in, web-fingered nurse of the advocate he is obliged to consult by his well-meaning uncle.  How anyone can fail to succumb immediately to the nymph-like seductive charms of Romy Schneider, sexily adorned in a tight-fitting white nurse's uniform, is a mystery, but K. somehow manages it, and emerges from this relentless female assault with his virginity and galloping neuroses still totally intact.

Elsa Martinelli provides the hyper-repressed bachelor with his third and most promising opportunity for carnal indulgence - Hilda's status as a sex slave for the law officers surely has some use to K. in his attempt to gain influence over the court?  K. has no difficulty attracting the most alluring of females to him but repeatedly nothing comes of these close encounters.  Oddly, his most profitable one-on-one situation is with the pitiful fellow client Bloch (a stand-out turn from Welles' faithful regular Akim Tamiroff).  This is the one moment in the film in which K. genuinely appears to connect with another human being, and the homoerotic undercurrents are unmistakeable - as they are throughout the entire sequence with Titorelli, played by William Chappell with all the sinister undertones of a classic Pinter role.

K.'s horror of physical contact with the opposite sex is most powerfully felt in the dizzying sequence where, under a barrage of Freudian symbolism, he is pursued up a narrow winding staircase by a hoard of screaming teenage girls.  Even when he reaches the sanctuary of Titorelli's attic bedroom-cum-studio K. is not safe - countless eyes continue leering at him through the infinitude of gaps between the wooden slats that make up the walls of the makeshift abode.  There is more than a faint echo of the grisly climax to Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), in which a similar looking gay man is pursued and then ripped to pieces in a cannibalistic orgy by the same young boys he had bought for sex.  The difference is that K. is innocent in deed but guilty in thought - his guilt presumably arising from his inability to deal with the most primitive of human urges, the procreative impulse.  Plausibly, it is K.'s unwillingness to embrace his sexuality that is the source of all his woes, keeping him trapped in the wildly bizarre maze his subconscious has constructed for him.  Time and again, opportunities for release are presented to him in the form of nubile objects of desire, but repeatedly his disgust for his own lust blocks his way and he just keeps running around in circles.  Like the man in the introductory parable, he is shown the door he seeks but he cannot allow himself to pass through it.

Beware the Machine

The grotesque absurdity of a legal system that serves not the interests of the individual but some monstrously bloated administrative engine is brought home by K.'s futile encounters with the supposedly bed-ridden advocate Hastler played by Welles himself.  Ponderous and obfuscatory to a fault, with more than a hint of Mephistophelean menace, the Advocate is the physical embodiment of a system of law that exists only for its own benefit, its sole raison d'être being the prolongation of trivial lawsuits in which the question of guilt or innocence is a complete irrelevance.  All that matters is the continual turning of the judicial wheels, keeping the accused man in a perpetual state of oppression - to prevent him from taking action against the system that oppresses him.  This is in essence the central terrifying idea of Kafka's novel, and never has a literary idea been so powerfully resonant for the century that followed its original conception.

Orson Welles' version of The Trial is not without flaws but it deserves to be recognised for what it is - an inspired and courageous attempt at a serious cinematic re-imagining of Kafka's frustratingly nebulous tale of guilt and persecution.  When he was criticised for taking liberties with the original novel, Welles insisted he was merely exercising a director's right to interpret the book as he wanted, and he was surely right to do so.  In making his film of The Trial, Welles delivered a thoughtful and personal statement of how he saw the modern world was heading, whilst remaining true to the spirit of Kafka's concept.  There's no doubt that it is a work of amazing artistry, stuffed with powerful images that have such an immense impact that they cannot help remaining lodged in your head forever.

The film is also a work of profound humanity, perhaps as rich in metaphysical, socio-political and psychological meaning as Franz Kafka's landmark novel.  Through Welles' The Trial it is all too easy to see in Josef K.'s horrible predicament the kind of world that humanity is building for itself in its obsessive striving for ever-greater security and efficiency - a world devoid of human feeling in which, robbed of our basic freedoms and urges, we all ultimately become helpless slaves to The System.  The Trial gives us a terrifying glimpse of the sterile future towards which we are being ineluctably drawn - not so much a living Hell as an eternal purgatory of unopposed conformity.

Film Synopsis

Josef K. is awoken one morning to find an unknown man in his bedroom.  The stranger, an official of some kind, is joined by two other men and K. is informed that he is under arrest.  The nature of the crime that has been committed is not disclosed and K. remains at liberty to continue his routine existence whilst he awaits his trial.  After intimate conversations with his landlady Mrs Grubach and next-door neighbour Miss Bürstner, a nightclub dancer he has fond feelings for, he heads off to the modern office complex where he works as an assistant deputy manager.  That evening, after a visit to the opera, K. is picked up by a police inspector and escorted to a vast crowded courtroom.  The presiding magistrate is not impressed by K.'s blatant disregard for court procedure and when the young man leaves the courtroom he is still none the wiser as to the nature of his crime.

Taking the advice of his well-meaning Uncle Max, Josef consults a respected advocate, Hastler, but is surprised to find he is a lazy, sick old man who appears to have neither the time nor the inclination to advance the cases of the innumerable clients who depend on him.  Hastler shares his cluttered quarters with Leni, a nymphomaniac, web-fingered nurse, and a dishevelled old man named Block, a client who appears to be being kept as a household pet.  K. soon realises that the Advocate will be of no use to him and so, prompted by Leni, he calls on an artist named Titorelli, one of the few people who can influence the judges through his work as a portrait painter.  Titorelli's revelation that K. has no chance of a definite acquittal comes as a shock and the young man takes no comfort from the two alternatives offered by the law, which merely extend the process of the trial indefinitely.  Seeing that every offer of help is leading him nowhere, K. decides to pursue the trial on his own terms.  This proves to be just another blind alley and he ends up in a cathedral where a prison chaplain convinces him of his guilt.  It seems that Josef K.'s ordeal is nearing its awful end...