Michael Haneke

b. March 23, 1942, Munich, Germany

by Mattias Frey

Previously based in Berlin, Mattias Frey is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard

University (USA). His articles on German and Austrian Film have appeared in soma,
cinetext, The Unorthodox Reel and Let's Go.

A cinema of disturbance: the films of Michael Haneke in context

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down'
cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a
cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for
clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue
instead of consumption and consensus.
– Michael Haneke, “Film as Catharsis”

Michael Haneke is with good certainty both Austria's most esteemed and most
controversial active filmmaker. His feature Benny's Video (1992) shocked crowds with its
restrained, antipsychological portrait of a teenager who kills a young girl “to see how it
is”. Funny Games (1997) inspired a fierce debate on how one can interrogate violence in
film. On the whole, Haneke's polemical filmic program attempts to lay bare the coldness
of European society and challenge Hollywood's blithe treatment of violence. His
acknowledged influences include Kieslowski, Tarkovsky, Straub, Antonioni, Jon Jost,
and above all Bresson. To date his greatest commercial success has been The Piano
Teacher, which garnered three awards at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and went on to
become a hit in arthouse cinemas worldwide.

Born in 1942 in Munich, Michael Haneke grew up in the Lower Austrian city of Wiener
Neustadt. He studied psychology, philosophy and theater at the University of Vienna and
wrote film and literature reviews on the side. From 1967 to 1970 he worked as editor and
dramaturg at the southern German television station Südwestfunk. It was in 1970 that
Haneke began writing and directing films and (similar to most Austrian directors of his
generation) his initial experiences behind the camera were projects for television. Haneke
has also directed a number of stage productions (including Strindberg, Goethe, Bruckner,
and Kleist) in Berlin, Munich and Vienna. His first film intended for cinematic release,
The Seventh Continent, premiered in 1989.

Writers on filmmakers tend to plot a director's career as a teleological historical narrative

with a familiar literary pattern, in this way circumscribing his or her texts for the sake of
a neat (if contrived) principle of organisation. In the case of Haneke, however, a director's
career arrived at a caesura not only marked by a change in artistic subject and emphasis,
but also by a shift in geography, language, and source of economic support. In this sense,
we can broadly divide Haneke's career in two: (i) his initial feature films in the period
1988–1997, devastating critiques of Austrian society, funded predominantly by public
Austrian funds, and (ii) his last three efforts, investigations of broader European
problems, financed in coproductions with largely French monies, starring high-profile
French actors. What follows will treat his Austrian productions with closer scrutiny, as
his more recent films seem to represent a trend still coming into being.

This essay does not intend to generate all-inclusive generalisations or provide sweeping
interpretations about the cinema of Michael Haneke. Instead, it aims to familiarise the
reader with Haneke's works, while at the same time offering theoretical perspectives with
which one might better understand the films. These approaches, predominantly drawn
from contemporary French thought, are glimpses or clues and not grand exegeses. In this
way the essay functions like Haneke's films, furnishing fragments and provoking critical
thought, rather than presenting ready-made answers.

Welcome to surmodernité: The Seventh Continent

Not beautiful photography, not beautiful pictures, but rather necessary pictures,
necessary photography.

– Robert Bresson

In the 1989 edition of Austrian Film, the Austrian Film Commission's annual promotional
booklet on the national film crop, Haneke describes The Seventh Continent, the first film
of his “Vergletscherungs-Trilogie” (“glaciation trilogy”) (1) as follows:
The film is about the life of Georg, his wife Anna and their daughter Eva over a
period of three years:
It is the story of a successful career,
it is the story of the price of conformity,
it is the story of mental short-sightedness,
it is a family story
and
it is the story of a lived consequence.
This laconic summary is in effect an accurate translation of the sparse film which
premiered at Cannes 1989. The film takes place in a faceless and hopelessly
defamiliarised Linz, the city rendered as a wasteland of industry, Autobahn, and row
houses. The characters populating this world are similarly faceless, literally: Haneke
avoids shots including faces, instead
concentrating on close-ups of hands and objects.
There is little “story” to speak of, or rather the
film is narrated in such a clipped, disjointed, and
non-linear manner that a satisfying summary is
impossible: one is at a loss as to which elements
or details should be mentioned before others.
Father, mother, and daughter have all but stopped
talking to each other. One day the daughter claims
to be blind, although she isn't. The mother's The Seventh Continent
brother comes for dinner and begins crying for an
inexplicable reason. The father begins destroying the house and flushes piles of
banknotes down the toilet. The family commits suicide. All of this without so much as
any clue as to motive or any shred of psychological insight into the characters.
What to make of a film that reveals so little of itself? One might first turn to the director.
In interviews, Haneke has in turn emphasised his intention to leave the work of
interpretation to the spectator: “I try to make anti-psychological films with characters
who are less characters than projection surfaces for the sensibilities of the viewer; blank
spaces force the spectator to bring his own thoughts and feelings to the film. Because that
is what makes the viewer open for the sensitivity of the character” (2). Haneke, in other
words, goes to extremes in withholding information in order to compel the spectator to
“think with” and “feel with” the film, instead of simply consuming it.

Another useful source for understanding The Seventh Continent and Haneke's stark
dramaturgy is the social theorist Marc Augé. Augé investigates what form of obligation
we encounter in the anonymous “non-places” of modern urban space: hotel rooms,
supermarkets, ATM machines and various spaces of transition and passage – like the
conveyor belts that drag passengers slowly from one section of the airport to another.
Augé's argument is that although we don't 'rest' or 'reside' in these spaces but merely pass
through them as if interchangeable, we nevertheless enjoy a contractual relation with the
world and others symbolised by our train or plane ticket, bank card, email address, and
hence anonymity and identity are oddly drawn close. Augé infers from such spaces a
paradox of what he calls surmodernité, roughly translatable as “supermodernity” or
“hypermodernity. In his own words:
If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity,
then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned
with identity will be a non-place…supermodernity produces non-places, meaning
spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike
Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are
listed, classified, promoted to the status of “places of memory,” and assigned to a
circumscribed and specific position (3).
For Augé supermodernity functions as an aggregate effect of three (paradoxical)
superabundances: (i) we experience a superabundance of time and history: there are too
many events going on and too much news and information about them, and yet (or
therefore) we find ourselves semiotically overloaded and unable to make sense of the past
and experience the relation of the past to the future in terms of an eternal disappointment
(with socialism, communism, etc.), (ii) we experience an increasing sense of the vastness
of the spaces we inhabit as these spaces expand and interpenetrate each other, and yet at
the same time our urban spaces are increasingly homogenised and increasingly filled up,
and (iii) we experience a simultaneous excess and deficiency of personal identity such
that we have more and more ways of differentiating ourselves from others and identifying
ourselves (driver's license, passport, ATM card, identity cards) while at the same time
personal identities become increasingly rigidified and formally interchangeable (everyone
has same cards, same differentiators).

This is the diegetic world of The Seventh Continent: supermarket checkout counters and
credit cards, car washes and automatic garage doors; as Amos Vogel describes the film,
“anonymity, coldness, alienation amidst a surfeit of commodities and comfort” (4). The
characters wander aimlessly and seemingly without motivation between Augé's
anonymous “transit points” and “temporary abodes: espace quelconque”. The family
could be anywhere, on any seventh continent, most important (and most alienating and
destructive) is the dialectic between anonymity and identity.

From Oedipus to Narcissus: Benny's Video

The digital Narcissus replaces the triangular Oedipus…the clone will henceforth
be your guardian angel…consequently you will never be alone again.
 – Jean Baudrillard (5)

The second part of Haneke's

“glaciation trilogy” begins with a buzz
and a bang: the white noise of a
television screen snow shower and
then the bang of a pig being shot on the
subsequent home video. Benny's Video
is the most accessible film of the
trilogy, but still never departs from
Haneke's powerful concoction of brutal
images and laconic montage. Benny is
a neglected son of rich parents in
Vienna. He spends his days and nights
Benny's Video in his room lost in a cobweb of video
equipment, cameras, monitors and editing consoles. He keeps his shades drawn at all
times and experiences the outside world mediated through the camcorders he has set up
outside his windows. He obsessively reviews the farmyard killing of a pig in forward and
reverse, slow motion and freeze-frame. Intermittently, he flips through channels full of
news on neo-nazi killings, toy commercials, war films and reports on the incipient war in
Yugoslavia. One day he meets a girl at the video store and invites her back to his empty
house. He shows her the stun-gun used to kill the pig and shoots her with it. The girl's
death is shot visually out of the camera's frame although the audience is privy to
excruciating minutes of screams and whimpers. In the end, Benny foils his parents'
perversely cynical attempt to cover up the murder.

There are a host of potential theoretical thrusts available in connection with this film,
from Debord's “Society of the Spectacle” to the media theories of Paul Virilo to
Deleuze's connection between communication and capital. I have dealt with these
approaches in depth elsewhere (6). Instead, the assertion above by Jean Baudrillard will
be the focus of a reading of the film.

Commentators on Benny's Video nearly unanimously cite Benny's murder of the nameless
girl he meets at the video store to be the key scene in the film. Like the two other panels
in Haneke's triptych (the family's suicide at the conclusion of The Seventh Continent and
when the student runs amok at the end of 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance), a
murder serves as the focal point of Benny's Video. This moment is the nexus for the
critics' respective agendas – moral/theological issues, formal concerns (Haneke's denial
of unmediated visual access to the murder), violence in film etc. As important as this
scene is, however, what this scene isn't or what this scene displaces is equally as
important.

Of the three films in the trilogy, Benny's Video is the most aesthetically and formally
conventional. Thus, for example, when Benny brings the girl back to his place after
meeting her at the video store, the spectator expects (both by conditioning via traditional
cinematic narratives as well as through the way Haneke conventionally stages the
meeting) a sexual encounter: boy meets girl, girl meets boy, boy kisses girl… Instead, in
this film, boy meets girl, boy kills girl. What should be Benny's first sexual experience
becomes a violent act that he records and ritually rehashes. A sexual act first comes after
the violent one in an auto-erotic spectacle, Benny strips naked and observes himself in
the mirror, smearing himself with the girl's blood (7).

This scene might be seen as the cinematic confirmation of the Baudrillard quotation
above: in the postmodern moment the myth of Narcissus is now the guiding
myth/trajectory/paradigm that structures experience and narrative, rather than the
Oedipus initiation story. This is sealed when Benny rearranges the girl's shirt so that she
is “properly” covered, a lack of curiosity that further distances him from normative
heterosexuality. If the Oedipal myth in its various hetero- and homoerotic forms
functions to reproduce the idea that human subjectivity is sexually realised in the bonded,
love relationship, then the Baudrillardian Narcissus myth as found in Benny's Video
instructs Benny that mediated, digitally manipulable violence is the “authentic”
experience in a “me” world without connections, so why not “see how it is”? Benny
comes of age not through sexual conquest and replacing a mother figure (8) but rather by
eliminating/killing the potential object of desire and distancing himself into the cave/care
of video equipment, over which he commands absolute control (9).

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

The question isn't “how do I show violence?” but rather “how do I show the
spectator his position vis-à-vis violence and its representation?”
– Michael Haneke

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) reads like a structuralist exegesis

straight from Roland Barthes' S/Z. The final installment of the “glaciation trilogy”
transforms the (true) story of an Austrian university student who one day runs amok into
71 discrete scenes. The project of chronicling the causes for a killing spree as well as the
preceding events in the lives of the victims would seem almost necessarily melodramatic
and pathetic. Haneke, however, renders the story refreshingly unpsychological. The
spectator is treated to snapshots like four minutes of the future “killer” playing table
tennis alone or a later victim silently watching the evening news. These 71 moments,
remarkable only in their unremarkability, form a system that implicates an entire form of
society for the crime of one. As always, Haneke's static camera captures the happenings
from an icy distance.

71 Fragments marks a departure from the longitudinal studies of a single family as seen
in the first two parts of the trilogy. The violent outburst is instead contextualised within a
cross-section of society: a lonely father, a couple in a dysfunctional relationship, a
woman who wants to adopt a child, a Romanian immigrant. The film is moreover a
preview of coming attractions, particularly in Haneke's attention to non-Austrian people
and cultures, specifically to the former Yugoslavia. This “foreigner thematic” reappears
in Code Unknown and The Time of the Wolf. 71 Fragments indicates the beginning of
Haneke's transition: he is no longer solely an Austrian director, but a European director as
well.

Funny Games: The Aesthetics of Violence, The Politics of Self-

Referentiality

I try to give back to violence that what it truly is: pain, injury to another.
– Michael Haneke

Funny Games is in a sense an epilogue to

Haneke's glaciation trilogy: this film, like
the others that precede it, conducts an
investigation of violence and spectatorship.
This time around, however, the subject is
more a confrontation with the shape of
popular film and cinematic genre, rather

Funny Games
than a statement on contemporary Austrian society.

The plot of the film is terrifyingly simple. A wealthy Austrian family of father, mother
and son (plus dog) go on vacation to their lakeside summer house. Two well-groomed
young men arrive clad in golf gear and ask to borrow some eggs. The two then proceed,
without any motive, to terrorise and then kill dog, son, father, and mother.

Funny Games turns Cape Fear on its head; it is an anti-thriller. The threat to family bliss
comes from within the upper class, rather than from a rogue element at the edge of
society. Innocent children and animals are savagely offed in the very beginning stages of
the film. The violence, moreover, is never really shown, but rather indicated in the
soundtrack or recorded in the faces of the killers or other family members. Haneke
focuses instead on the effects on the victims, revealed for example in a several minute-
long shot of the father attempting to stand up. Finally, there is no rescue sequence,
revenge scenario, or happy ending to the story – the last shots show the two killers ready
to strike the next vacation spot.

In the many interviews of Michael Haneke, perhaps the question that seems to be posed
most often is: “Do you enjoy disturbing the audience?” In Funny Games there is certainly
a surfeit of violence, enough to shake even the most jaded viewers (and which prompted
scores of spectators, including Wim Wenders, to walk out of the screening at Cannes in
1997). In addition, Haneke employs a number of self-referential devices to, as the
director once said, “rape the spectator to independence.” Halfway through the film, for
instance, one killer winks into the camera and subsequently asks the viewer, “what would
you bet that this family is dead by nine o'clock tomorrow?” The film thus plays with the
spectator just as the young men play their “funny game” with the family. The killer Paul
later explains why he can't possibly stop his abuse: “we're still under the length of a
proper feature film.” The ironic self-referentiality reaches its apex when a character
actually rewinds the film. When the mother manages to grab a gun and shoot Paul's
accomplice, Paul grabs a remote control and rewinds the scene, thus securing control
over the film's outcome.

Funny Games' denial of visual access to acts of violence bespeaks central aspects of
Michael Haneke's filmic program. Haneke's views on representing violence and his
concomitant spectatorship theory are well documented in numerous interviews as well as
his own essays (“Film als Katharsis”, “Violence and Media”, “Schrecken und Utopie der
Form: Bressons Au hasard Balthazar”). There are striking parallels in Haneke's logic in
reference to his favourite themes of violence, media and spectatorship, with
argumentation in history/memory/trauma theory. For example, Haneke's philosophy
draws on Holocaust depiction theory (such as that formulated by Claude Lanzmann) in
that he makes films about violence without showing it (i.e. Bilderverbot), or more
precisely, Haneke thematises the representation of violence in the way that he denies the
spectator his/her presumed visual access to the violence. Similar to Lanzmann, Haneke's
provocative filmic program is an attempt at corrective to Hollywood's glorified treatment
of violence (or in Lanzmann's case, the sentimentalised and psychologised version of the
Holocaust as found in the mini-series Holocaust or later in Schindler's List): Haneke
concentrates on the suffering of victims, rather than allowing the spectator to identify
with any pseudopsychological motivation of the perpetrator; he uses a slow tempo in
montage and camera to allow audience a distanced “thinking space”; he challenges the
action film's practice of selling violence as a consumer good (i.e. violence as spectacle,
dramaturgy); and again finally, Haneke resists visually depicting acts of physical
violence. In this way, Haneke attempts to discuss violence without inciting fascination or
titillation for his subject. Whether Haneke succeeds in this last crucial point has filled the
feuilleton pages of newspapers across Europe and abroad. Some have praised Haneke in
his formal daring; others have scathingly criticised him for excessive didacticism and
depicting violence in essence no differently than in action films.

A final note on Funny Games should point out the connection between the film and its
Austrian contemporaries. A wave of ironic and often self-referential “black comedies”
appeared in Austria in the late 1990s and the first few years of this century. Funny Games
should therefore also be seen in the context of films like Die totale Therapie (Christian
Frosch, 1996), Die Gottesanbeterin (Paul Harather, 2000), Komm, süßer Tod (Wolfgang
Murnberger, 2000), and Der Überfall (Florian Flicker, 2000)and their typically Austrian
mix of comedy, violence, and irony.

Michael Haneke's French Films and the Future of his European

Filmmaking
That does not mean that I will never work in Austria again. But given the not
exactly rosy financial working situation in my country it is naturally comforting to
be able to fall back on foreign options.
– Michael Haneke

After the release of Funny Games,

Haneke set to work on a project called
Wolfszeit (The Time of the Wolf), a
film he had written before Benny's
Video but then shelved. The second
time around Haneke fared no better –
the financing ultimately collapsed at
the last minute and Haneke found
himself at a dead end in his career,
ironically just after scoring his then
biggest hit, Funny Games. It was at
Code Unknown that time that the “miracle” happened,
as Haneke terms it. Juliette Binoche
called him up out of the blue and asked if he would shoot a film with her in France. The
result was Code Unknown, which had its debut in competition at Cannes 2000.

In an interview with the Stuttgarter Zeitung from 8 February 2001 Haneke revealed that
if “Funny Games was the conclusion of my Civil War trilogy, Code Unknown could be
given the heading of 'World War.'” With Code Unknown, Haneke's searing vision ceased
to be confined only to Austria and concerns in the “Alpine Republic”. The film's form
takes a cue from 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance in that it offers 27 vaguely
connected scenes from the varying perspectives of an actress, an African immigrant, and
a war reporter from Bosnia. Code Unknown, however, lacks the violent teleology of 71
Fragments; there is no 'big bang' act of violence at the end. Instead Haneke concentrates
on perhaps more quotidian, but none less pressing, problems: the new waves of
immigration in Europe or the difficulty of interpersonal communication, be it between a
couple in a relationship or between cultures.

Code Unknown represents a different cinematic experience from Haneke's earlier

features. Haneke had previously used a few actors recognisable to German cinephiles, for
instance Angela Winkler or Ulrich Mühe. Still, even they were employed in rather
restrained and “anonymous” roles, in keeping with Haneke's philosophy that characters
should only be surfaces onto which the audience should project their own emotions and
thoughts. The acting firepower and pure expectations that an international superstar like
Juliette Binoche brings to Code Unknown (not to mention Isabelle Huppert to The Piano
Teacher and The Time of the Wolf) in some sense at least tempers the audience's ability to
project anything onto a figure laden with so many associations. Haneke had always
sought to position himself as the opposite of Tarantino, as the “last Modernist” whose
bare, deliberate cinema treated violence and media with a non-titillating distance without
the illusionist chicanery of Tarantino's multilayered association project. In this way,
Haneke's “French Films” appear to dilute the ferocious theoretical precision of the
“glaciation theory” at the same time that they broaden their thematic attack.

Nevertheless, Haneke's penchant for making the spectator feel uncomfortable remains
intact throughout, if by other means. In Code Unknown, for instance, one watches Juliette
Binoche become hysterically upset when a child nearly falls from a tall apartment
building. Suddenly we hear her laugh from off screen: the whole sequence was taking
place at a sound studio where Binoche was synchronising her voice for the soundtrack of
a film she had appeared in. Sequences like this keep the viewer on his/her toes and
questioning the verity of the images he or she sees.

In interviews at Cannes 2000, Haneke addressed the difficulties of transferring an

Elfriede Jelinek piece to the screen. “The hard part about The Piano Teacher,” he
foresaw, “is to make an obscene film but not a pornographic one.” The following year
Haneke returned to Cannes with the finished adaptation and left with three major awards:
the Cannes jury, at least, found not a porno flick but rather a magnum opus at hand.
Haneke brings Jelinek's story of a virtuoso piano teacher and her sadomasochistic,
voyeuristic sexuality into the present time and into the French language (although still
staged in Vienna). Typically Haneke, the protagonist's extraordinarily odd behavior (e.g.
permanently scarring her student's playing hands, seducing her own mother, genital self-
mutilation) is never explained or justified in any psychological way. Wildly explicit and
violent rape and bondage scenes are as ever rendered disturbing and not titillating.

Although not necessarily his richest

film, The Piano Teacher was the final
reminder to the unconverted that
Michael Haneke could no longer be
ignored as a major player in European
cinema, and accordingly many
channels of funding (above all in
France) became options for Haneke. In
2003 his follow-up film The Time of
the Wolf debuted out of competition at
Cannes. The Time of the Wolf
The Piano Teacher
represents the shelved Wolfszeit project
from Haneke's pre-Code Unknown days. The film is an apocalyptic Sci-fi. The point of
departure recalls Haneke's Austrian features: a family, a couple with two children, drives
to their vacation house and begins to unload the car. Once inside the house they find
another family, who apparently had been squatting in the home. Without warning or
explanation, the squatter-father shoots his counterpart and the mother and two children
find themselves alone in the wilderness. Haneke treats the viewer to the negative power
of the human will to survive. The critical appraisal of the film has been mixed. Some
(apparently including the Cannes selection committee, which placed it in the out of
competition category) have claimed it to be somewhat disappointing, that it returns to
themes that Haneke treated better before. Others have opined that it was an overlooked
masterpiece at the festival.
Whatever the reception The Time of the Wolf enjoys in its general release, Michael
Haneke is unlikely to become more accommodating or less polemical in his treatment of
contemporary society. Critics have alternately called his films both overly intellectual and
heavy as well as exploitative and unwittingly sensationalist. The schizophrenic reactions
of pundits, all seemingly annoyed with one aspect of Haneke's works or another, seem in
fact to affirm the impetus behind Michael Haneke's cinema of disturbance.

© Mattias Frey, August 2003

Endnotes:

1. The three films received the name from Haneke's assertion that they are “reports
of the progression of the emotional glaciation of my country.” See Michael
Haneke, “Film als Katharsis” in Francesco Bono (ed.), Austria (in)felix: zum
österreichischem Film der 80er Jahre, Graz, Blimp, 1992, p. 89.

2. Wolf Donner, “Das Gegenteil von Hollywood”, Tip, no. 12, 1993, p. 35.
3. Marc Augé, Non-places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,
trans. John Howe, London, Verso, 1995, pp. 77–8.
4. Amos Vogel, “Of Nonexisting Continents: The Cinema of Michael Haneke”, Film
Comment, vol. 32, no. 4, July–August 1996, p. 74.
5. Jean Baudrillard, De la seduction, Paris, Denoel-Gonthier, 1979, p. 235.
6. Mattias Frey, “Supermodernity, Capital, and Narcissus: The French Connection to
Michael Haneke's Benny's Video,” cinetext, October 2002,
http://cinetext.philo.at/magazine/frey/bennysvideo.html
7. There is a real temptation to read this scene as a very Lacanian moment. I would
be quick to interject, however, that there is not even a misrecognition in Benny's
gaze, nor any sort of recognition: Benny is so semiotically impotent/incapacitated,
he lacks even the potential of subjectivity. I see his bodily inscriptions as another
futile attempt at communication.
8. Those looking for an Oedipal trajectory here can find one: only in reverse. After
the murder, Benny and his mother are the couple in the film (especially in Egypt
and especially as Benny videotapes his mother urinating) i.e. the girl is eliminated
so that Benny's desire can be displaced to the mother who he previously showed
little care for.
9. A useful exercise might be to compare Benny to the teenager in American Beauty
(Sam Mendes, 1999), a character whose verisimilitude vis-à-vis Benny suggests
either a rather generous case of borrowing by Mendes or proves Baudrillard true
in his thoughts on the ubiquity of this situation, etc. In that film, the teenager is a
drug dealer, an obsessive voyeur who records everything on video, and lives in an
oppressive/dysfunctional family
situation. The crucial difference is that
he strives for the heterosexual coupling
he finds with the neighbour's daughter.
Benny, in contrast, kills the analogous
character.

Filmography

Isabelle Huppert, Michael Haneke &

Annie Giradot
Cinema:
The Seventh Continent (Der siebente Kontinent) (1988)

Benny's Video (1992)

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls)

(1994)

Funny Games (1997)

Code Unknown (Code Inconnu) (2000)

The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste) (2001)

The Time of the Wolf (Le Temps du loup) (2003)

Hidden (Caché) (2005)

Television:
. . .Und was kommt danach? (And what comes afterwards?) (1973)

After Liverpool (1974)

Sperrmüll (Household Rubbish) (1976)

Drei Wege zum See (Three Ways to the Sea) (1976)

Lemminge (Lemmings) (1979)

Variationen (Variations) (1983)

Wer war Edgar Allen? (Who was Edgar Allen?) (1984)

Fraulein (Miss) (1985)

Nachruf für einen Mörder (Obituary for a Murderer) (1991)

Die Rebellion (The Rebellion) (1992)

Lumière et Compagnie (1995) one episode in omnibus film

Das Schloß (The Castle) (1997) although commissioned by and debuting on the French-German
television channel Arte, Das Schloß also enjoyed a later cinematic release

Bibliography
Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe,
London, Verso, 1995.

Jean Baudrillard, De la seduction, Paris, Denoel-Gonthier, 1979.

Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, St. Louis, Telos, 1981.

Peter Canning, “The Imagination of Immanence: An Ethics of Cinema” in Gregory Flaxman (ed.),
The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Minneapolis, University of
Minneapolis Press, 2000, pp. 327–362.

Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hebberjam, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Norman K. Denzin, The Cinematic Society: The Voyeur's Gaze, London, Sage, 1995.

Norman K. Denzin, Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema,
London, Sage, 1991.

Wolf Donner, “Das Gegenteil von Hollywood”, Tip, no. 12, 1993, pp. 35–39.

Richard Falcon, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”, Sight and Sound, May 1998, pp. 10–
12.

Michael Haneke, “Film als Katharsis” in Francesco Bono(ed.), Austria (in)felix: zum
österreichischem Film der 80er Jahre, Graz, Blimp, 1992, p. 89.

Michael Haneke, “Violence and Media” in Gerhard Larchner, Franz Grabner, and Christian
Wessely (eds), Visible Violence: sichtbare und verschleierte Gewalt im Film, Münster, Lit, 1998,
pp. 93–98.

Alexander Horwath, (ed.) Michael Haneke und seine Filme, Vienna, Europaverlag, 1991.

Alexander Horwath and Giovanni Spagnoletti (eds), Michael Haneke, Turin, Lindau, 1998.

Herbert Hrachovec, “Heimelektronik und Heimnachteil: Michael Hanekes Benny's Video” in

Gottfried Schlemmer (ed.), Der neue österreichische Film, Vienna, Wespennest, 1996, pp. 286–
299.

Frank Pillip, “Michael Haneke's Film Funny Games and the Hollywood Tradition of Self-
Referentiality”, Modern Austrian Literature, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 353–363.

Karl Suppan, “Die Ästhetik der Gewalt in Hanekes Bennys Video” in Gerhard Larchner, Franz
Grabner, and Christian Wessely (eds), Visible Violence: sichtbare und verschleierte Gewalt im
Film, Münster, Lit, 1998, pp. 85–92.

Karl Suppan, “Der wahre Horror liegt im Blick: Michael Hanekes Ästhetik der Gewalt” in Franz
Grabner, Gerhard Larcher, Christian Wessely (eds), Utopie und Fragment: Michael Hanekes
Filmwerk, Thaur, Kulturverlag, 1996, pp. 81–98.

Amos Vogel, “Of Nonexisting Continents: The Cinema of Michael Haneke”, Film Comment, vol.
32, no. 4, July–August 1996, pp. 73–75.

Christian Wessely, “Virtualität und Realität” in Franz Grabner, Gerhard Larcher, Christian
Wessely (eds), Utopie und Fragment: Michael Hanekes Filmwerk, Thaur, Kulturverlag, 1996, pp.
99–124.

Do the Right Thing:

the Films of
Michael Haneke
by Maximilian Le Cain

Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker and cinephile living in Cork City, Ireland.

The Piano Teacher (2001) marks a departure for Austrian director Michael Haneke. This
powerful piece of chamber cinema is first and foremost a virtuoso display piece for
actors, a psychological inquiry that ruthlessly yet compassionately illuminates the savage
process by which extremes of suppressed emotion wrenchingly mutate through de-
sublimation and transposition from the realms of sordid fantasy into the bruising arena of
the interpersonal. Previously Haneke's personal dramas served as often anxiously
freefloating perspectives into a broader societal malaise characterised by alienation and
moral disorientation. Erika (Isabelle Huppert), the heroine of The Piano Teacher, is in
many ways the opposite of a typical Haneke character, or at least her story is approached
from the opposite of the director's usual perspective. While she is indubitably alienated,
her angst stems not from being adrift in the depersonalised void of the modern urban
environment, but from being imprisoned in a world of her own creation, governed by her
own neurotic sensibility. Other Haneke characters, notably the families in The Seventh
Continent (1989) and Benny's Video (1992) have in their own ways attempted withdrawal
from or evasion of reality, but the outer world was constantly present as a palpable void,
an immanent, unfathomable other as hostile in its indifference and as potentially fatal as
outer space in a science fiction thriller.

In The Piano Teacher this void is for the first time absent; Erika's control over her
environment and the extent to which it is shaken and invaded by her much younger,
infatuated student comprise the whole of the film's more conventionally closed world.
For the first time, the emotional intensity of relationships is allowed to prevail over the
more detachedly analytical question of man's disconnectedness from his everyday reality.
This shift in emphasis marks the apparent termination of a fascinatingly coherent spatial
and thematic development that can be followed through each of Haneke's films to have
been released in this part of the world – that is, all of his theatrical features except for his
adaptation of Kafka's The Castle (1997) which I have not seen.

From the outset it is apparent that The Piano Teacher's design and mise en scène were
created to highlight the human melodrama at its centre. The Seventh Continent, Haneke's
first theatrical feature after a long career in television, commences its bleakly enigmatic
allegory from an opposite viewpoint, that of objects. It could be described as a sort of war
film, the chronicle of an occupation in which the world of men has been invaded and
overrun by the objects that it has created – household objects, cars, cash registers, all that
is considered desirable in today's consumerist culture. For the first minutes of the film,
the audience is barely permitted a look at the central family's faces: they are hands
handling objects, feet moving across the sterile surfaces that theoretically amount to a
home. An impressive example of Haneke's rigorously detached images is a breakfast
scene in which the camera remains fixed throughout on the bowls of cereal being
consumed, while the family talks and eats. This obsessive framing is not an arbitrary
exercise in objectivity. Rather, it recreates the point of view of the 'enemy,' of the objects
of consumerist middle class living. Hence the enigmatic distance constantly maintained
from the actors and the fragmented form of the film: the 'object-consciousness' Haneke
films out of is incapable of understanding the motivations behind the actions performed
by the characters or empathising with their emotions. Human contact is experienced not
as human interaction- the face – but as human contact with objects, the hand touching a
surface. The incommunicability that afflicts the family seems the result of an attempt to
impose conformism upon the mechanistic logic of appliances, reducing people to societal
functions – mother, father, husband, wife, daughter – which somehow stifle feelings
which might interfere with the expected behavioural patterns required by each situation.

In the first of the film's three clearly signalled chapters, two

incidents militate against the regime of objects: the first is the
young daughter's feigned blindness and the second is a dinner
scene during which a recently bereaved relative is stricken
with uncontrollable attacks of grief. The daughter's pretence of
The Seventh Continent sightlessness is handled with little sympathy in her school; the
inexplicability of her rebellious will to defectiveness is treated
as inadmissible. Yet this enigmatic cry for help is as uncomfortably revealing in its
perhaps inadvertent extremity of conformism as it is in its insolence. The averted gaze of
the camera, the claustrophobic avoidance of the face and hence also of emotional
empathy are the defining characteristics of the world around the little girl, a world of
people unable to look at themselves or others, reduced to a series of manual interactions
with objects. It is telling that one of the film's first human close-ups is an eye caged in an
eye-testing device at an optician, a gaze captured by and subjected to the dictates of a
machine.

Yet the genuinely loving family is also endowed with a longing to reach out to each
other. It is as if the glacial bleakness of this post-human society has somehow
mysteriously frozen the forms of affection, rendering them ineffectual against the
background of immanent object-domination. According to Antonioni, when he made Red
Desert (1964), machines functioned perfectly, it was the human psyche that was
incapable of catching up with the world technology had created and this was perceived as
a crisis. By the time of The Seventh Continent, Haneke seems to tell us, this crisis has
become a social order, with man's material creations dominating his space as a matter of
course; emotional and mental space as well as physical.

The dinner is a fine example of Haneke's formidable mastery at creating memorably

powerful scenes of emotional distress and violence. The apologetic relative's failure to
suppress his grief alienates him from the falsely jovial atmosphere surrounding him and
makes the rest of the family uncomfortable for highlighting the festering, perhaps
wilfully undefined malaise undercutting their own existence. When the family finally
rebels, it is with a stunningly apocalyptic implosion that is as apparently inexplicable as
the anxiety that causes it, a tenderly nihilistic solution born of the film's one optimistic
shift: an increase in unspoken understanding and communication between husband and
wife that avoids playing into the logic of objects by sidestepping the inherent
functionalism of definition. Silent accord escapes the radars of object-consciousness and
it is through his use of this means that Haneke, having so carefully placed us in the
position of non-comprehending matter, appeals to the spectator to transcend this
viewpoint by using our own sensitivity to understand the hidden realisations that the
heroes undergo – in short, to reclaim our own humanity. In this way, rather than lazily
identifying with the family, we are called upon to experience their expansion of
awareness for ourselves. However bleak his cinema initially appears, Haneke seldom
resorts to fatalistic wallowing – most of his films propose a method of reversal to the
negative state of things that they outline, solutions that are often as difficult and profound
as they are apparently invisible on the surface of the narrative. Rather than just
illustrating problems, these films are concerned with subtly attacking them, healing as
well as diagnosing. Their originality and urgency lies in the fact that the location of the
'healing' is the viewer's intelligence rather than the characters' situations.

The family's course of action is to isolate themselves completely from the outside world,
systematically destroy all their possessions and then commit suicide. To purge
themselves utterly of matter. Yet there is nothing cathartic in this self-sacrifice. Haneke
does not suggest that in destroying their bodies they release their suppressed spirits or
affirm their long-ignored individual identities. It is too late for these outcomes – were it
not, death would probably not be the ideal solution. What this deconstruction of their
material identity and every attendant preconception accomplishes is a desperate and
resounding affirmation of the existence of the state of dehumanisation that Haneke views
as synonymous with middle class consumerism. The unspoken and apparently
inexplicable are the final refuges of the human spirit.

If The Seventh Continent proposed an object-consciousness against which initially

colluding characters ultimately rebel, Benny's Video handles the same themes with the
addition of the perfect metaphor for object-consciousness: the camcorder-eye, which
enables a human being to simultaneously experience and embody both human- and
object-consciousness. The fixedly claustrophobic, object-dominated spatiality of the
earlier film is replaced by a highly sophisticated process of spatial alienation and ultimate
virtualisation that effectively represents the uncomfortable depths of denial lurking
beneath the polished, metallic surface of bourgeois normality. Once again the focus of the
film is the middle class family. Young teenager Benny impulsively murders a girl he has
brought home and videos the killing. His father destroys the body and sends him on
holiday with his mother. When he returns, life carries on as normal until Benny turns
them all in to the police.

When Benny's father asks him why he killed the girl, he replies that he did it to see what
it felt like. Benny is not a monster; on the contrary, he remains constantly sympathetic.
His crime is the result of his background's failure to provide him with the tools of
emotional empathy, even as it privileges him in terms of material well-being. His
bewildered detachment is represented by his obsessive attachment to his camcorder. His
encounter with the girl is marked by the sort of emotional curiosity that would lead one to
expect some kind of sexual encounter. When he impulsively shoots her on a dare, it is her
pain, her screaming, her expression of extreme emotion that Benny is unable to handle
and that causes him to finish her off. He shoots her repeatedly simply to shut her up. The
murder is seen entirely in one long take on a TV monitor which Benny's camcorder is
plugged into. This indirect view of the film's key event steals the act from Benny, so to
speak. It objectifies it, denying the youth the opportunity to form a fully rounded
emotional response to his actions even as they occur. It is the beginning of a subtle
disintegration of reality, which, suddenly lacking the anchor of any moral centre, will
begin to drift into a ghostly virtual shadow of itself, like space when passed through
Benny's video images. This enforced objectification continues with his father's calmly
pragmatic handling of the crisis during which he decides to destroy the corpse and bury
the incident. Not only is Benny unpunished, but denial becomes the centre not only of his
existence, but of his mother's also. During the father's long speech after the killing in
which he calmly weighs up the situation, she has difficulty suppressing outbursts of
hysterical laughter for which her husband snaps at her. Later, having taken Benny on
holiday to Egypt in order to forget his crime, she suddenly breaks down while lying on a
hotel room bed with her son. Benny's reaction to this is disturbed bemusement. As usual
with Haneke, the characters' feelings are not spelt out for us, but it is very possible that
his internal dilemma consists of matching actions to emotions.

Benny's parents appear to act out of love, out of the parental instinct to protect their child.
Yet this love has been reduced to the functions of love – at its heart is the denial of an
evil act that allows for no process of dealing with and overcoming its trauma and also
stifles the possibility of all but the most superficial communication between those
involved. A love that denies human compassion; love itself become part of a materialist
schematism. A love that is truly, as Fassbinder would say, colder than death. The
mother's outburst is perhaps the film's only expression of true love manifest as healthy
horror at the monstrousness of the situation, an outburst that goes against the severe
rationalism that dictates every other aspect of the characters' behaviour save, of course,
for Benny's. In this respect it echoes the crime by confronting Benny with the same,
perhaps unbearable, spectacle of a woman's uncontrollable distress, the only clue he has
about the nature of the feelings he has become disconnected from.

Visually, Benny's Video can be divided into

three distinct types of images. The first is
the clinical, distanced space of Haneke's
35mm images of Benny's flat, his city
haunts and certain portions of the holiday.
These can be taken as a concrete
representation of his affluently frigid reality.
Then there are the warm, mysterious and
sometimes startlingly beautiful handicam
video images taken by Benny, which start to
dominate during the holiday. Thirdly, and Benny's Video
less prevalently, there are images of the city
at night that appear during the first half of the film, apparently unconnected with either
the objective view of Benny's existence or his subjective camera-eye. Rather, these
disturbingly independent images – negative versions of the contemplative groups of
establishing shots that punctuate Ozu's films – interrupt the narrative in order to evoke an
outer world consisting of a frighteningly impersonal, inhuman void, an uncaringly
inscrutable universe incapable of proposing answers to the problem at hand.

The camcorder footage in the film's first half is limited in amount, most notably being
used to objectify the murder, to present its emotional immediacy as completely
incompatible with the orderliness that surrounds it, to allow the environment to absorb
and digest the event. Yet even this is still an image on a monitor rather than video directly
intercut with film. Visually, the coldness of the first half is sharply contrasted with the
warm colours of the holiday. In fleeing the scene of his crime, Benny is embraced for the
first time by visual beauty, the reflection of which he captures on video. To further
heighten this unexpected atmosphere with inflections of the sublime, these images are
often accompanied by choral music that is later contextualised as being sung by a choir
Benny is part of. The unreal atmosphere of this part of the film initially seems designed
simply to highlight the contrast between Austria and Egypt or rather a visitor's vision of
Egypt. But, as Haneke lavishes more and more time on these scenes, it becomes apparent
that a full-scale crisis in reality is underway. If these holiday images are suffused with the
dreamy alienation of a distant land remembered, the dominance of video footage in
family scenes after his return to Austria indicates that in fleeing from their dark secret
they have rendered up their whole existence to the same ethereal transience that is
experienced visiting an alien environment. In short, their lives have become a holiday
from the reality of their situation. Benny's decision to denounce his entire family to the
police can thus be seen as an attempt to salvage reality, to escape the extended golden
twilight of his Egyptian reverie and grapple head on with the oppressive grays of reality.
In other words, he reintroduces the weight of a moral centre to their lives, which were in
the process of floating from pure surface materialism into hallucinatory shadow.

Yet the film's final shot suggests that Benny's redemption of his family is about to be
compromised by a fourth system of images, one potentially more sinister than any that
preceded it. As Benny's parents are brought in to the police station and meet him being
taken out presumably to a cell, Haneke cuts to the impersonal video image of a security
camera recording this encounter. In one cut the characters are moved from being the
vehicles of shades of ethical movement and choice making to the embodiment of the
simple fact of their crime. This fact finally imprisons them thanks to the coldly
judgmental camera-gaze that they are finally caught in, a gaze that denies the possibility
of varying degrees of guilt and blame, a black and white image in every sense. After an
hour and a half of moral exploration and debate carried out through comparative visual
strategies that remain constantly sensitive to the characters, the instant brutalisation of the
security camera image is deeply chilling.

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) again tackles a system of images that

has become an integral part of society, this time television news coverage instead of
home video. This masterpiece is without doubt the most intelligent and powerful study
yet by cinema of television. It does not confront the television industry as such in the
manner of, say, Lumet's Network (1976); rather, it deconstructs the process by which
people pass from their own realities into media-related facts. In this way it can be seen as
an extension and full-scale investigation of the perceptual transformation of Benny's
Video's closing shot. As usual with Haneke, he does not preach or spell out his messages.
Instead, he puts them into practice through the formal devices that he employs and places
a sadly uncommon trust in the viewer's intelligent engagement with his troubling
material.

For the first time Haneke moves beyond the confines

of a single family to contrast a series of
simultaneously unfolding stories that come together
in one single tragedy that also gives rise to one single
news report. As the title suggests, fragmentation is the
key device employed in creating this snapshot of
contemporary life. The film is broken down into
precise, isolated scenes, often of only one shot. The
71 Fragments of a ultimately interconnecting dramas represent
Chronology of Chance
contrasting strata of modern urban existence, each
with their own anxieties and ethical problems to confront, from the illegal immigrant boy
to the angst-ridden security guard to the middle-class couple trying to adopt a child and
the gun-dealing student who finally brings about the unifying crisis. 71 Fragments
unfolds like a mosaic being pieced together tessera by tessera before our eyes, with the
logic of the finished picture remaining mysterious until finally completed. Society,
Haneke suggests, is fragmented and each fragment cuts off the characters it contains,
prevents them from communicating with others. Even when an attempt is made to bridge
this gap, as in the couple's decision to adopt the streetwise and independent immigrant
boy instead of a mentally disturbed little girl, it is fraught with personal motives
understandable only to one person or group involved. Sometimes it unwittingly gives rise
to potentially damaging consequences, such as the rejection of the girl. Interaction
between the little girl, the couple and the boy occurs at constant cross-purposes with no
real understanding of the emotional reasoning behind the other characters' actions – for
example, the social guilt that inspires the couple to take in the boy, or the little girl's
apparent inability to communicate hiding what is possibly an even more pressing need
than the boy's for an environment of familial comfort. This would suggest a pessimism
about the possibility of any wider communication, an extension of Haneke's earlier
studies of incommunicability across the whole spectrum of society instead of within the
microcosm of family.

The inability of family members to find a satisfactory method of expressing their love for
each other is again dealt with explicitly in the security guard's story. Perhaps the most
wrenchingly powerful scene Haneke has yet put to film details a dinner the guard and his
wife share, filmed in a single-take medium shot and punctuated with agonising silences.
Shyly, almost painfully, he tells her that he loves her. She first asks if he is drunk and
then, aggressively suspicious, demands to know what he is really after. Hurt at her
reaction to his obviously very uncommon attempt at intimacy, he slaps her before
despairingly withdrawing into himself. Now understanding, his wife reaches out and
touches him sympathetically. The scene is so starkly eloquent in its depiction of true
feeling desperately seeking a means of expression that it could stand up as a brilliant
short film in its own right.

The structure of multiple narratives running parallel and occasionally connecting within a
given urban setting is hardly original – in '90s cinema both Kieslowski and Wong were
also doing great and unique work in this field. Yet these directors created vibrantly poetic
states of subjectivity around their characters, who are often searching for some
communication, some form of spiritual contact or completion. Haneke's characters, on the
other hand, often seem to feel besieged by reality. Rather than searching the city, they are
fighting it off. Visually, Haneke's severe, claustrophobically formal framings in 71
Fragments are as objective and distancing as Christopher Doyle's freewheeling camera is
emotive and empathetic in Wong's films. The rigorous visual structure of Haneke's film
works to place all his characters on the same level; although trapped by the frame within
their own fragment of reality, the unchanging similarity of these fragments suggests that
everyone is in the same predicament and that these visual fragments are derived from the
same whole.

The fragmentation is also importantly analogous to the way in which information is

conveyed in short clips on television news programmes. The film opens with a series of
current news stories that specifically locate the film in the moment of its creation,
creating a sense of present tense urgency that Haneke maintains throughout. The frequent
presence of television images is a constant throughout Haneke's films as a very
contemporary element of the problems of communication and interpretation of reality
that he incessantly treats of, but nowhere is this presence more important than here.
Television footage crops up on monitors in scenes during the main body of the film, but it
is in the closing scene that its importance is revealed. After the student has cracked up in
a bank and gone on a killing spree that ends in his suicide, an incident which involves
most of the film's characters, the film switches to a simulated news report of the killing in
which witnesses express their horror and incomprehension. Haneke then boldly moves on
to real news stories such as the war in Sarajevo and Michael Jackson's alleged child
abuse. Perhaps the most obvious interpretation of this device would be a pessimistic one
– that real lives and real people so easily become just another news story in a parade of
media images, the actual state of their lives becoming lost as they- like the family at the
end of Benny's Video – become subject to an uncomprehendingly impersonal image
system. That, in a world already saturated with images, they become just another image.

Yet the miracle of 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, its 'healing' aspect, is that
this conclusion also has the opposite effect: it re-humanises the other non-fictional news
stories, makes the predicaments they bear witness to suddenly seem very close and real.
As the film progresses, the viewer becomes emotionally engaged with one individual
story after another from one different part of society after another: the smallest units of
the narrative. In the bank massacre these small units cohere into one large unit. Having
trained the viewer to engage with small units and brought him or her to understand their
ultimate agglomeration, by inserting the large unit into the context of the news
programme he is making it a smaller unit and beginning the process once again with the
news programme as the new large, encompassing narrative unit. In this way we come to
perceive the woman interviewed on the streets of Sarajevo or, for that matter, Michael
Jackson with the same intimacy as the fictional characters we have come to know and
care about. Haneke has succeeded in reaffirming the common humanity of the subjects
behind the images that assail us each day, counteracting the desensitisation brought about
by media overkill. Just as we thought that his mosaic was completed, he revealed that it
was in fact endless, capable of expanding in all directions, encompassing all the narrative
fragments that make up all the lives in the world. If the subject matter of 71 Fragments
appears to be a bleak wallow in urban alienation, the form it takes makes it, with Code
Inconnu (2000) perhaps the most resounding, compassionate and utterly unsentimental
affirmation of human brotherhood in modern cinema, a film that reveals people's often
unrecognised and unacknowledged closeness even if only to point out that we're all in the
same sinking boat.

In 1995 Haneke contributed by far the best episode to the very uneven portmanteau film
Lumiere and Company, which consisted of a series of one-minute films shot on an
original Lumiere Brothers camera to mark cinema's centenary. Although a few of the
participating filmmakers, such as David Lynch, made the most of this potentially
fascinating assignment, many seemed to have approached it quite flippantly. Haneke
turned Lumiere's camera on the screen of a television and filmed a news broadcast: the
first moving picture camera (at least symbolically) beheld its contemporary offspring and
the disposable day-to-day television image achieved silence and timelessness. Haneke
closed the circuit of the first hundred years of moving images.

Funny Games (1997) stands as the one truly bad film on Haneke's otherwise consistently
excellent filmography. Its clumsiness, when compared to the subtlety and sophistication
of his other family dramas, The Seventh Continent and Benny's Video, is truly
remarkable. Funny Games puts a naive faith
in the confrontational power of the
spectacle of sadistic violence, which
Tarantino had already definitively tamed
and thus undermined in his first two films.
By the time Haneke adopted it, it was a
redundant gimmick. While his intentions
were doubtlessly honourably moralistic, too
many less scrupulous filmmakers had used
the frisson of ultra-violence for pure Funny Games
entertainment and some great ones –
Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Stone in Natural Born Killers (1994) – had
managed to harness and successfully explore the disturbingly gleeful rush of cinematic
violence in a context of deepest seriousness. Compared to these, Haneke's schematically
protracted tortures are unpleasantly laboured and suffer from overconfidence in their own
visceral power. This overconfidence results in a fatal error: Haneke sees no need to
characterise his heroes and villains beyond their actions. In this respect, far from being
cutting edge, Funny Games is among the most conservative films of the '90s. We are
back in the territory of Griffithian melodrama: the heroic, beleaguered family battling for
their lives and property against an unspeakable, child-killing other. If the film works at
all, it is as a touching portrait of family loyalty in the face of all odds. Compared to such
great more-or-less contemporary films as Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991), Chabrol's La
Cérémonie (1995) or Peckinpah's much earlier Straw Dogs (1971), all of which somehow
suggest that the family's inner demons brought their destruction upon themselves from
within, Funny Games is positively comforting in its lack of moral doubt. And, ironically,
it was Haneke himself who created the most disturbing film in this cycle with The
Seventh Continent, in which the family doesn't even need the catalyst of an invader to
descend the path of self-annihilation.

The French-language Code Inconnu is perhaps

Haneke's greatest film. It develops the themes of
71 Fragments but without the encompassing
formal analogy of television. Like the earlier film,
it tells several sometimes interconnecting stories,
all of them posing ethical problems. But whereas
the earlier film contained each story in its own
Code Inconnu
narrative fragment right up to the end, this time
interaction and coexistence are highlighted throughout. The result is an atmosphere less
of creeping dread and more of pressing urgency, the urgency of assuming or abdicating
responsibility in constantly arising situations. The urgency of ethical choice – if Spike
Lee hadn't got there first, Do the Right Thing would be an ideal title for Haneke's film.
Formally it breaks with the rigid claustrophobia of 71 Fragments. The long takes are
more pronounced than ever, but the framing is looser and, most importantly, it
incorporates horizontal movement, which becomes the film's defining formal strategy.
Code Inconnu is as visually anti-fragmentation as the earlier films were defined by it.
The several sweeping lateral tracking shots that unite characters and stories in space
inflect the rest of the film's static shots with the constant potential of offscreen space.
Actors are no longer prisoners held in place by rigid frames, but rather people anxiously
adrift in a world of constant horizontal flux – movement from one country to another,
from one social background to another, from war to peace, from the country to the city,
from comparative affluence at home to mendicancy abroad, from fiction to reality. The
bravura lateral tracking shot that kick-starts the movie seems to contain it all in
microcosm: an actress, played by Juliette Binoche, leaves her flat in a hurry. She is going
to a rehearsal. The younger brother of her war correspondent-boyfriend who is out of the
country accosts her. He tried to enter her flat, but the door code had been changed. As
they walk, he tells her that he has run away from his farm-home in the country, which his
father wants him to take over. She tells him he can stay that night, but not for long. She
gives him the keys to her flat and says they will talk that night. He starts walking back
towards the flat, eating some food. He sees an immigrant beggar woman sitting in a
doorway and throws the wrapper from his food into her lap. A young black man seizes
him and demands that he apologise. They scuffle. Binoche returns and tries to break it up.
The police arrive. When the black man tries to make a complaint they take him and the
beggar away. The actual offender gets away with it.

All this is captured in one shot containing two horizontal movements over the same
stretch of street, one right and one left. That this simple stretch of time and space contains
such a bustling density of stories, problems, social and racial diversity, chance, choices,
perceptions, misconceptions and prejudices and are all captured with the same impartial
interest is indicative of the film's dizzying, uniquely inclusive vision of today's decentred
world. Code Inconnu has the immediacy of a sketch or a snapshot of our times. Nothing
is tied up; no neat conclusions are drawn. Some choices are made, some are not. The city
is an unending test, a constant barrage of decisions about how to interact or not, whether
to intervene or not. Binoche plays an actress, but it seems everyone is trying to change his
or her role, like the young farmer who wants to move to the city or the Rumanian woman,
respected and financially comfortable at home, who makes a living by illegally entering
France to work and beg. Uncertainty is omnipresent and it is perhaps an end to this
uncertainty that Haneke's characters are seeking, the unknown code of the title. And it is
this uncertainty that unites us: whatever our social status or race, we are all scared.

Michael Haneke is more than a great director. Like Godard in France/Switzerland,

Kiarostami in Iran and Harmony Korine in the United States, he is a necessary director,
one whose absence would severely damage the world's cinematic ecology. One whose
work is an essential corrective to the unthinking dictates of dominant, Hollywood-centred
filmmaking. Haneke's films are important because they address society; because they
diagnose the latest often technology-inflected forms of spiritual and emotional paralysis
that are frequently ignored or treated only indirectly, at least by the cinema. They are
important because they treat of modern man, his problems, his fears and his environment
– they try to perceive the world as it is now and show 'now' to be more than a question of
fashion. Rather than pontificating about these themes from a soapbox for which cinema is
merely an excuse, he creates a specifically appropriate filmic form with every movie, one
that always leaves sufficient ambiguity to allow the audience to draw their own
conclusions. In fact, no director living displays more faith in the intelligence of his
viewer. In this respect, Haneke's cinema can never be accused of pessimism – in its
relationship with the spectator, it represents human communication in action and, as such,
it counteracts the symptoms of incommunicability that it so urgently diagnoses.

© Maximilian Le Cain, May 2003

The Seventh Continent

by Christopher Sharrett
C
hristopher Sharrett is Professor of Communication and Film Studies at Seton Hall
University, USA. His work has appeared in Cineaste, Cinema Journal, Kinoeye, Film
International, and elsewhere. He has written a book on the '50s TV western The
Rifleman, forthcoming from Wayne State University Press.

The Seventh Continent/Der Siebente Kontinent (1989 Austria 104 mins)

Source: Bavaria Films Prod Co: Wega Film Prod: Veit Heiduschka Dir, Scr: Michael
Haneke Phot: Anton Peschke Ed: Marie Homolkova Art Dir: Christoph Kanter

Cast: Dieter Berner, Udo Samel, Leni Tanzer, Silvia Fenz, Robert Dietl, Birgit Doll
Michael Haneke's masterful first film The Seventh Continent/Der Siebente Kontinent
introduced concerns basic to the director's art, principal among them the notion that the
“death of affect”, a key fixation of postmodernity, should not be a subject of cynical
concelebration (as it seems to be for many artists of the moment). Rather, Haneke views
the end of affect, which is to say the acceptance of alienation as an inevitable and rather
“hip” state of being, as a profound sickness that serious art no longer interrogates, the
standard postmodern view being that its study is a naïve and dated preoccupation. As a
consequence, Haneke is often associated with cinema's great modernists, with Antonioni
frequently cited as the kinsman of closest sensibility. The association seems reasonable,
with the provision that Haneke “updates” Antonioni's project, applying to the current
world a vision appropriate to late capitalist, media-saturated culture, and that evokes early
modernism, with its concern for some sense of continuity between classicism and
modernity. From Antonioni, Haneke derives elements of his vision of the modern urban
setting. People spend endless, wordless, wasted moments in car washes and
supermarkets, and work in buildings composed of machine-packed substructures
recalling Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926) as well as Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni,
1964), while vast, low-ceilinged office spaces of endless, uniformly spaced desks,
suggest Welles' vision of The Trial (1961) as much as L'eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni,
1963).

The Seventh Continent seems postmodern in one element of its narrative, viz., its “ripped
from today's headlines” story of a family that opts for collective suicide rather than
continue to “live” within the constricting, anti-humane monstrousness of everyday
bourgeois society. The film is derived from a newspaper story concerning a family whose
collective death struck survivors as so implausible that they demanded a police
investigation, which to this day remains open. The investigation seemed very
unwarranted, since the father of the family authenticated the suicide pact in a detailed
note explaining the planned deaths and rejection of the current world. No forensic
evidence indicated foul play.

Haneke makes the story eminently plausible by focusing on the stultifying aspects of
everyday life taken for granted by the current bourgeois order of things. The rote actions
of the day – from turning off an alarm clock to tying shoelaces to eating a bowl of cereal
– are invested with a chilling aspect recalling Warhol's presentation of the consumer
landscape. In his compositions Haneke employs a kind of television aesthetic, that is, an
insistence on the tight shot, usually to emphasise the plasticity of commodities, although
without television's insistence on rapid cutting. To the contrary, with this first film
Haneke introduces his belief that the spectator must today become reacquainted with
older ways of seeing (1). The stasis of The Seventh Continent and his subsequent films
emphasise this notion; the media landscape, dominated by the ambitions of advertising, is
pure montage, concealing the fact that such phenomena as the “action” film of corporate
cinema deprives us of a view of real experience in the hyperactivity of its alienated
“speech”.

Contrary to the opinion of some critics on this film, The Seventh Continent is no Fight
Club (David Fincher, 1999). It has nothing to do with excess or the immersion of the
male ego in the luxury of false needs as a compensation for impotence, sexual or
otherwise. Nothing about the family of The Seventh Continent indicates excess or
indulgence; on the contrary, their lives are comfortable but not unrestrained. The
somewhat spartan nature of their world is reinforced by Haneke's long takes, his
unrelenting close shots of the family's breakfast table, their hands at work, and above all
of their faces (which are always on the brink of spilling out emotions alien to the tortured
machismo of films like Fight Club).
The understanding of emotion is indeed what gives The Seventh Continent its most
unique aspect, precisely due to the film's confrontation with notions of affect. George
(Dieter Berner) and Anna (Birgit Doll) are no longer able to connect with each other, nor,
most tragically, with their young daughter Eva (Leni Tanzer). Affection is expressed,
particularly in the film's apocalyptic final half hour, but there is the sense that affection is
residual, the remains of an eroded consciousness destroyed by the vagaries of postmodern
existence. At an especially harrowing moment as the family obliterate all of their
possessions – smashing furniture, destroying phonograph records, tearing up clothes one
item at a time, flushing currency down the toilet (a wonderful moment) – the father
smashes their fish tank, causing Eva to scream. As the fish expire on the apartment floor,
Anna consoles Eva, the moment emphasising that the authentic sensibility can find
consolation only in death. In a moment evoking Red Desert, Eva feigns blindness to her
schoolteacher. When Anna interrogates Eva about her fakery, promising not to punish her
daughter if she tells the truth, she cannot help but slap Eva when she confesses. Anna,
whose emotional life is at the limit, cannot understand this most basic outcry of a child,
replicated in a later scene when Eva scratches herself as she sits at her grammar school
desk, her teacher insisting that she stop since “it's all in [her] mind” (precisely). Yet Anna
is perhaps the most sympathetic character after Eva. Her fragility is evident in one of the
car wash scenes, when she begins suddenly to break down, her husband only just able to
console her. George and Anna are the archetypal bourgeois couple; while their choice of
death is mutual (or so says the note George writes to his parents), Anna is essentially a
spectator to events, assisting in the destruction of their apartment in the monstrous final
sequence once George has initiated the action.

Although Haneke has remarked that he has no interest in creating bogus competition
between classical culture and the pop culture of the postwar world, The Seventh
Continent introduces this sort of dialectic, with its sense that classical culture, especially
music, has some marginal salvific function, occasionally supplemented by the more
humanist features of the culture industry. During what may be called the prelude to the
family suicide, George sells the family car as young Eva watches. The car lot in which
the transaction occurs might be more properly called a junk yard, suggesting the decay of
bourgeois life, iconographically. As Eva spots a boat leaving the nearby harbor, Alban
Berg's doleful string composition, “To the Memory of an Angel”, appears, unobtrusively,
on the soundtrack. Written in memory of Alma Mahler, the piece, both extraordinarily
poignant and consciously disjointed, is a modernist variation of a fragment of a Bach
chorale that recurs in the film, described by Haneke as the film's refrain (2). The Berg
piece briefly accompanies Eva's observation of the boat. Like a recurring image of an ad
for Australian tourism that becomes the film's emblem, the Berg/passing boat moment
suggests the impossibility of utopia, or of the construction of an alternative society under
the current order of things.

The Berg piece is, in a sense, counterposed to music videos playing on the TV as the
family sits amid the rubble of their smashed apartment, just before the deaths of the two
parents and their child. A rather plangent and moving rendering of the song “The Power
of Love”, captures the poignancy of this exceptionally bleak moment, but ultimately
underscores the essential point: love doesn't conquer all, and is of little utility, especially
as rendered by the world of pop, to the suffocating world of western bourgeois capitalist
civilisation. It is noteworthy that the death scene is accompanied by only a small touch of
the Bach refrain; one gets the sense, with an understanding of Haneke's sensibility
(especially as developed in his masterpiece La Pianiste, 2001), that the classics, while an
infinitely greater consolation than pop, are largely irrelevant to the current human society
that has so thoroughly marginalised them.
The Seventh Continent is the work of a developing artist (keeping in mind, of course,
Haneke's years in theatre and television), but the film dates extraordinarily well. Its major
themes find more focused exposition in the extraordinary La Pianiste, a work adapted
from another source but unmistakably Haneke's in its major concerns. Like the
devastating news account from which the film is drawn, The Seventh Continent is a
horrendous announcement of the demise of a civilisation.

© Christopher Sharrett, February 2005

The Time of the Wolf

by Bill Blick
B
ill Blick is a native New Yorker and holds a B.A. in Media Studies and an MA in
English Literature from Queens College. He has published several short stories,
poetry, and film criticisms, online and in print. He currently teaches English
Literature at a small Long Island college.

The Time of the Wolf/Le Temps du loup (2003 France/Austria/Germany 110 mins)

Source: Bavaria Films

Prod Co: ARTE/Bavaria Films/CNC/Eurimages/France 3 Cinéma/Le Studio Canal+/Les
Films du Losange/Wega Film Prod: Veit Heiduschka, Margaret Ménégoz Dir, Scr:
Michael Haneke Phot: Jürgen Jürges Ed: Nadine Muse, Monika Willi
Prod Des: Christoph Kanter

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Maurice Bénichou, Lucas Biscombe, Patrice Chéreau, Béatrice
Dalle, Anaïs Demoustier, Rona Hartner, Olivier Gourmet

A post-apocalyptic world is never good for anyone, as cinema from the past has taught
us. Whether having to fight for gasoline, as Mad Max did in a highly successful trilogy of
films, or battling mutant bugs like Jan-Michael Vincent and George Peppard did in the Z-
grade, Damnation Alley (1977) – in a post-apocalyptic world, it's every person for
themselves it seems. The Time of the Wolf, a film by Michael Haneke, is no exception.
However, you will not find mutant bugs or hordes of chain-wielding bikers in this film.
Instead, The Time of the Wolf is a quietly disturbing, minimalist representation of a world
gone wrong as a result of an ecological disaster.

Haneke is adept at creating quietly disturbing situations as he demonstrates in his earlier

films like Benny's Video (1992) and Funny Games (1997). These earlier efforts could
seem “sophomorically confrontational” to some critics, as the films attempted to puncture
the “bourgeoisie bubble” with startling violence and cruelty (1). Both Funny Games and
The Time of the Wolf begin with quaint depictions of domestic situations that go horribly
awry. The Time of the Wolf is much more melancholy but not as nihilistic as Haneke's
previous films and demonstrates his increased maturity as a filmmaker. The film, though
quieter and more introspective than these earlier works, still aims to assault the viewer's
comfort zone.
The Time of the Wolf tells the story of a woman and her two children travelling around a
nightmarish apocalyptic world after the murder of her husband by panic-stricken
survivors. Little details are given about the nature of the ecological disaster that has
befallen the world. For example, we do know that it has poisoned the water, which is the
resource in highest demand. Uncontaminated water, the precious life-preserving resource
that was previously taken for granted, becomes a commodity to be traded and controlled
by whoever is lucky enough to come across it. Using this as a basis for conflict, The Time
of the Wolf creates a microcosm and sets out to explore different social systems and
political principles. For example, one group of survivors bands together and shares their
water and supplies with everyone equally and does not impose conditions, while another
makes anyone who desires the commodity contribute in some fashion to the group. The
evocations of communism, socialism, and capitalism become obvious, but are
nevertheless effective and as a result ask some timeless questions about human nature.

Some may find The Time of the Wolf unrelentingly bleak. A.O. Scott of The New York
Times wrote that the movie is “rigorously harsh and its view of human nature as dark as
the cinematography, which forces you to discern human features in twilight, deep fog,
and utter darkness” (2). The film deals with horrific situations, reinforced by its darkly
beautiful cinematography. The use of darkness as a motif, narrative device, and as a
means of encouraging meditation illustrates the film's dynamic aesthetic and reflects the
work of a skilled filmmaker.

Haneke resists sentimentality or sensationalism, as A.O. Scott suggests, and sometimes

this cold approach may become unpalatable for the audience (3). The stark settings and
minimalist dialogue allow the viewer to more fully experience the feeling of loss and
desperation, and remind us of the difficulty of articulating emotion after the kind of tragic
losses the characters endure.

The most visceral and unforgettable sequence in The Time of the Wolf focuses on a boy's
attempt to throw himself into a bonfire for the overriding benefit of the group. The boy's
desperation and his act of courage are astounding, and Haneke's skilful creation of images
and sounds really makes an impact on the viewer. The crackling sounds of a bonfire score
the silent blanket of night, and the darkness and shadows play over the harshly contrasted
orange flames. This results in a perfectly constructed mise en scène that allows the viewer
to meditate on the significance of the boy's gesture. A man who witnesses the suicide
attempt saves the boy, moved by his courage. He offers words of consolation that seem to
ring out in the darkness. This exchange ends the film and acts as a final comment on
human nature suggesting that in humanity's darkest hour there may still be hope. A still
image from the sequence has been used appropriately for the film's publicity.

The Time of the Wolf toys with a sort of phenomenological approach to knowing the
unknown, as the characters struggle to understand their new identities that are forged by
something horrible. Viewers are provoked to keep asking questions throughout the film;
the main characters serving as primary catalysts for the provision of answers. At one
point, a character asks of the group, “You mean you really don't know what's going on?”
The answer is that they and we don't really gauge the magnitude of what has happened.

Ultimately, The Time of the Wolf is a meditation on human nature under the direst of
circumstances. Filled with dark, earthy imagery fleshed out by precise, measured
cinematography, the film cuts close to the bone. Also, and despite the grim tone, an
element of hope is offered at the end of the film that seems to be absent in Haneke's
previous efforts. The Time of the Wolf is a deeply unsettling, strikingly beautiful film that
challenges viewers' complacency.
© Bill Blick, January 2005

Endnotes
1. Scott Anderson, “Time of the Wolf”, Newsday.com, 25 June 2004.

2. A.O. Scott, “Time of the Wolf”, New York Times.com, 6 January 2005.
3. A.O. Scott.