Filming 'The Trial'

A record of a question-and-answer session about Orson Welles's 1962 film The Trial. On 14 November 1981 The Trial was screened at the University of Southern California and Welles answered questions from the audience afterwards. The camera filmed the session from beginning to end. Welles's plan was to turn this into an essay film; he had done the same for Othello a few years earlier. The recording was conceived as a continuation of that. Gary Graver shot it and had to change film magazines about every ten minutes, so the record has breaks at regular intervals. Welles could not carry on with the project and died in 1985. His unfinished work passed to Oja Kodar, who gave most of it to the Munich Film Museum for preservation. In the 2000s the museum assembled the raw footage into a version of roughly eighty minutes. So there is no film here that Welles completed; what exists is him talking. A valuable document for anyone who likes Welles and thinking about cinema. For someone who has not seen The Trial, the record is without context; most of what is discussed does not land without having watched it.