Here’s an awesomely weird animated version of Franz Kafka’s short story Ein Landarzt (“A Country Doctor,”) by Japanese director Kōji Yamamura.
It’s worth a few minutes of your time, if you’re at all a fan of weird Japanese animation or the stories of Franz Kafka.
What we have here, is a dearth of Kafka fans, I guess.
Just a lack of time. I plan to watch it in the next 24 - 48 hours. I’ll gladly post my impression of it once I do.
It’s called a Despair of Kafka fans, like a murder of crows or clowder of cats.
I loved it - the style suits the surreal nature of the story very well. Animating Kafka is no small feat, and “The Country Doctor” in particular isn’t something I’d have expected to translate over to film well, but it did. Especially the parts which, while not being in the original, just worked - I’m thinking specifically of when the narrator was talking about wanting to die, the doctor passing his head through the moon and it transforming into a swinging noose . . .
With all that said, I have a feeling I never quite got the full meaning of the story, whatever format it’s in. The doctor seems to recognize that the patient’s wound is incurable and lethal, and that the boy is doomed, but he lies to him and escapes in the night to appease his guilt about sacrificing his servant girl? And that’s not even getting into the whole undressing sequence. I’ve heard it’s a metaphor for existentialism, but it’s never quite clicked with me the way some other stories do - any thoughts?
It’s only a despair when some are actually present, right?
That worked really well for me, too.
I think that’s intentional. So often in Kafka, the full meaning twists and slides away, just out of reach. It’s brilliant! Of course, some people hate that, but not me.
That’s the gist of it. So many ways to interpret that all, though. Its worth noting that he had no intention of sacrificing the girl, but that choice was stripped from him when he took hold of the reigns and groom yells “giddyup!” The illusion that the doctor is in control of his circumstances is stripped away.
The reality of the wound shifts as well: from nothing at all, to lethal, to “not so bad.”
All I can offer at the moment is this comment on the wiki page about the story, from Louis H. Leiter: “Lacking the human stuff necessary to create and structure situations, he permits himself to be manipulated by the groom, the family, and the horses; but he becomes, by submitting, a tool within the situations they create. Never, consciously, does he attempt through an overt act, until too late, to establish his own essence, to rise above any manipulative value he possesses for others. As doctor he is a thing, an object, a tool; as man he is nothing.”
That’s not the whole story, however (so to speak).