One of the most intriguing phenomena of post-Soviet cinema is a group of screen adaptations of Franz Kafka's works.


The humble Prague lawyer, a profoundly influential figure in modernist literature -- despite the fact that when he died at age 40 he had published only a few manuscripts -- would no doubt be intrigued by these filmed interpretations.


Kafka, whose lonely, perplexed and threatened characters chafe at the ambiguities and inconsistencies of their lives, was a favorite among the intelligentsia in the stagnation era, who saw in those dilemmas a mirror of Soviet society.


During those gloomy years, theatrical and other artistic interpretations of Kafka's writings were seen as dissident. They displayed a bittersweet quality, with wide use of political metaphor -- in a code echoing the prevailing "Aesopian language" of the time used to discuss sensitive issues behind the Iron Curtain.


Against the new capitalist reality in Russia, the typically Kafkaesque conditions of absurdity and paradox, aimlessness, futility and faint hope are viewed from a different perspective.


Artists and scholars who offered earlier interpretations of Kafka are contemplating the high price paid for freedom and charting what is left in the wake of change: unfamiliar, peculiar combinations of the ridiculous and the sad, the weak and the powerful and other juxtapositions.


Therefore, it is not by coincidence that four film versions of Kafka's novels (including even animated cartoons) have come to the screens in Moscow and St. Petersburg as well as in Georgia and Ukraine.


"The Castle" ("Zamok"), the winner of the Special Prize of the Russian Film Clubs' Federation at the Kinotavr '94 film festival, is the first notable screen version of a Kafka novel filmed in a country immersed for 70 years in its own version of fearful Kafkaesque uncertainty and menacing suppression. It was made by St. Petersburg filmmaker Alexei Balabanov, a graduate of the Auteur Cinema workshop founded by the renowned film master Alexei Gherman ("My Friend Ivan Lapshin").


Balabanov made his directorial debut with an adequate representation of Samuel Beckett's shrewd intellectual irony and sense of the absurd in his directorial debut "The Happy Days."


In "The Castle" Balabanov indulges in a number of digressions from the original novel.


The film tells a sophisticated and ambiguous parable of an individual desperately struggling to regain his identity in a battle with sinister and invisible bureaucrats from the castle which seemingly rules the village.


This strange world which becomes stranger the more realistically, the more intricately, it is revealed.


The well-structured script and dynamic narration give the film the quality of events from the not-so-distant past: the trials and tribulations of Soviet dissidents.


A young, robust land surveyor who is a good-looking, friendly lad (brilliantly played by Nikolai Stotsky) is called to the castle but is unable to gain admittance.


The rocky road of compromise soon beckons, and he gradually gives up under the burden of hostile relations with the locals. Even his passionate love for Freida (played in a promising debut by Svetlana Pismichenko) begins to make him feel sick and desperate.


Allusions to the socialist totalitarian past are offered by the grotesque images of a couple of the land surveyor's assistants, who seem to be informants and behave like sleazy clowns, endlessly giggling. The specter of totalitarianism also appears in the monstrous, motionless figure of Klamm, the Castle apparatchik, played by Alexei Gherman, who is glimpsed through a keyhole in a red dressing gown.


Somewhere in between a literal interpretation of the Kafka story and an updated dissident saga, Balabanov's film constantly moves from exquisite, artistic cinematography, which lovingly lingers over Breughel-like interiors of village inns and old houses, to experimental dream sequences of the castle and the protagonist sinking into molten lava.


But the filmmaker puts an optimistic ending on the story -- left unfinished by Kafka -- and gives it an anti-totalitarian message: When the degraded protagonist is forced to accept someone's else identity and the loss of self, giving up his land surveyor's ego, he is recognized by a little boy he once met, and in the child's bright smile is a glimmer of hope.


The other noteworthy film interpretation of Kafka is a Ukrainian production, "Josephine the Singer and the Mice People," where painstaking realism is just the other side of pure fantasy, a dream-like parable.


The film, written and directed by young Ukrainian director Sergei Masloboischikov, weaves several of the writer's short stories -- "Josephine the Singer," "Investigations of a Dog," "The Hunger Artist" and others -- into an allegory about humanity facing the mystery of death.


The film was financed through the fund-raising efforts of Alexander Rodnyansky, a young documentary director from Kiev who lives now in Germany and has started a career as a producer.


Masloboischikov calls his genre "a documentary from an imaginary world."


In this imaginary reality, the entire world exists within a giant theater, which at the same time is something else. Without any rational motivation, the building becomes the gathering place for a collection of adults and children who create an atmosphere of instinctive and perpetual restlessness.


This weird kaleidoscope of locals -- peculiar Mice People -- and wild nomads, who have set up their camp in the foreground of the theater, centers around four bizarre types -- the opera diva Josephine, the young handsome Joseph, the philosophizing pedant Jeremiah and the cynical Isaiah. Their four destinies are linked to each other by some "unfathomable secret," and they are united by an obstinate strangeness, which is an expression of the ambiguity of everything.


The film is a deliberate merry-go-round, with the dialogues drowning in the crowd's babble and the protagonists spinning around chaotically. All of this provokes an almost physical feeling of claustrophobia.


Masloboischikov shows everything realistically and ambiguously at the same time, and the more visually exact he succeeds in making things, the more questionable they become -- which is very close to Kafka's style.


The film is "circular" -- it has no ending, reflecting something Kafka himself once said: "There's an end, but no way; what we call the way is shilly-shallying."