Poets & Writers Theater

"What makes something 'Kafkaesque?'... It's not the absurdity of bureaucracy alone." This TED-Ed animated short film, created by educator Noah Tavlin and narrated by Addison Anderson, explains the combination of external circumstances and human tendencies that characterize a situation as truly "Kafkaesque."

In this video, a sculpture by Czech artist David Černý depicting the head of Franz Kafka spins and twists back into form. Installed in a Prague shopping center in 2014, the moving figure honoring the author of The Metamorphosis weighs over forty tons, and is comprised of forty-two independently-rotating steel layers.

This clip is taken from the opening sequence of Orson Welles's 1962 film adaptation of Franz Kafka's 1925 novel, The Trial. The scene, narrated by Welles and animated by Alexandre Alexeieff, depicts the book's opening parable, "Before the Law." 

Check out award-winning Japanese animator Koji Yamamura's adaptation of Franz Kafka's tale "A Country Doctor," written in Prague during the winter of 1916.

Director Simon Ennis's film Up in Cottage Country, an official selection of this year's Toronto International Film Festival, tells the tale of a man who finds himself in an alternate universe that turns out to be the basis of the story his wife is reading: Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony."

For fans of mash-ups such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Killer comes The Meowmorphosis by Frank Kafka and Coleridge Cook, published this week by Quirk Books.

In this clip by Seth Weiner, a robot re-enacts the typing of a love letter from Franz Kafka to Felize Bauer, who Kafka met on August 13, 1912. In the letter, which can be found in Letters to Felice (Schocken, 1987), Kafka "makes reference to typing the letter on a typewriter and expresses the impact the new writing device has on his train of thought."