Kafkan Attention and Distraction in Orson Welles’s The Trial

This essay reexamines Orson Welles’s Citation1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial through the recent cognitive turn in Kafka Studies, a critical approach that explores how theories of perception, emotion, and behavior shape the aesthetic experience of Kafka’s work. I argue that Welles’s film translates Kafka’s cognitive realism to the screen by visualizing attention and distraction as interanimating forms of cognition. Moving beyond fidelity- or production-centered approaches, this reading emphasizes how Welles’s imaginative use of mobile framing and disjunctive editing generates a phenomenologically responsive mode of spectatorship. Through analyses of three mutually reinforcing threshold effects—eyeline diffusion, infinite regress, and projection-as-positionality—the essay shows how Welles scales disorientation across interpersonal, spatial, and allegorical registers. Taken together, these effects produce a cumulative cinematic experience that mirrors the reader’s engagement with Kafka’s prose, demonstrating how Welles’s adaptation both preserves and expands Kafka’s exploration of cognition under modernity’s crisis of attention.