The Films of Michael Haneke

Transcription

The
films
of
Michael
haneke
EditEd by William bEard
PublishEd by mEtro CinEma
in assoCiation With thE Wirth institutE
Metro Cinema Publications is an occasional series of short booklets, published by Metro Cinema
Society, usually to accompany a specific series of screenings. We welcome proposals for future
publications.
The Films of Michael Haneke was published in March 2009, to accompany a complete retrospective of the feature films of Michael Haneke at Metro Cinema. Both the book and the retrospective
were presented in association with the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies.
Metro Cinema Society
6-32 Stanley Milner Library
7 Sir Winston Churchill Square
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T5J 2V5
Telephone: 780.425.9212
Fax: 780.428.3509
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.metrocinema.org
Wirth Institute
for Austrian and Central European Studies
Suite 300, Arts Building
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6G 2E6
Tel: (780) 492-1444
Fax: (780) 492-4340
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.arts.ualberta.ca/wi
Metro Cinema operates with the support of our funders: Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta
Foundation for the Arts, the Edmonton Arts Council, and the City of Edmonton.
The
Films
of
Michael
Haneke
Edited by William Beard
Published by Metro Cinema, in association with the Wirth Institute
AcKno LedGEment
s
W
Principal thanks must go to the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies at the University
of Alberta for its generous sponsorship of both the retrospective and the present publication. I would like
to express particular gratitude to the Wirth Institute’s
director, Dr. Franz A.J. Szabo, for his ready support for
this project.
Thanks to the contributors for their prompt and willing
efforts. Thanks also to the Board of Metro Cinema, and
particularly to Metro executive staff members Marsh
Murphy, Leslea Kroll and Jill Watamaniuk for their
hard and careful work in bringing this publication to
fruition. And very special thanks to Vikki Wiercinski,
who did all the design creation and layout work.
William Beard
(University of Alberta)
5
PrEfAcE
William Beard, EDITOR
T
his booklet accompanies a complete retrospective of
the theatrical feature films of Michael Haneke, presented
at Metro Cinema in Edmonton, Canada during March and
April of 2009. It contains short essays on all of the films
screened, together with a more complete filmography of
Michael Haneke’s feature-film work.
The contributors
come from a variety of different environments, ranging from
the academic world, to the more popular cinephile press, to
student or post-student movie-watching life. I’m pleased
that the publication consequently shows a variety of approaches and idioms.
As editor, I would strongly caution readers to
refrain from reading any of these essays until after
they have seen the film in question.
Haneke’s films depend so much on the unfolding revelations of what is to be their trajectory that the viewing experience is materially harmed if spectators know what is coming. As with Hitchcock’s Psycho, it’s important to each of
these films that every viewer should see it for the first time
once. Jerry White’s essay on 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance has tried to avoid spoilers, and consequently
his contribution is harmless in this respect, but the other
contributors have not restricted themselves in this way – an
entirely understandable decision which, however, means
that crucial story developments are given away. The ideal
viewer, willing to find or make the time, would (1) watch the
film, (2) read the essay, and (3) watch the film again.
6
THe Films of Michael Haneke
7
cOnteNTs
THE FILMS OF MICHAEL HANEKE
Introduction
William Beard
Suicidal effects: Michael Haneke’s
The Seventh Continent
8
14
Lisa Coulthard
On Benny’s Video:
What’s it like, the real?
19
Garry Watson
2 Shots in 71 Fragments
Jerry White
Adapting Alienation: Haneke’s
Vision of Kafka’s The Castle
(Das Schloss)
32
35
Carrie Smith-Prei
Game Theory x 2: Michael Haneke’s
Never-Ending Cycle of Torture
Paul Matwychuk
Code Unknown : Reading Through
Reverberation
40
48
Amy Fung
From a Whisper to a Scream: The
Dynamics of Passion in La Pianiste
Joel Maendel
“a little bit of the end of the
world”: Thoughts on Time of
the Wolf
54
60
Tish strands
Caché
Steven Shaviro
Filmography
Compiled by Dave Gross
Schedule of Events
Schedule of Events Schedule
of Events Schedule of Events
64
70
74
inTrOduCtiON
A
WILLIAM BEARD
ustrian filmmaker Michael Haneke was born in
1942. His first ambition was to be a concert pianist, but he gave that up when his
stepfather told him that he would never be good enough. Haneke has commented
on that: “I’m grateful to my stepfather for his honesty. There’s nothing worse than
a moderately talented musician.” It’s an interesting remark to bear in mind while
watching his movie The Piano Teacher, where musical talent and almost deranged
levels of artistic honesty and dedication are among the forces swirling through what
is a typical Haneke emotional holocaust. But in a general way it also reveals, offhandedly, a temperament thirsting for the highest degree of artistic ambition. In
any event, Haneke turned instead to film and theatre, working as a critic, a stage
director, and then as an editor and director for West German and finally Austrian
television. He directed altogether ten features for television in the 1970s and 1980s,
tantalizingly unavailable anywhere at the moment.
His first three theatrical features (The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video and 71
Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) appeared between 1979 and 1984, and attracted favourable attention at festivals, though not widespread subsequent distribution. But when Funny Games arrived at Cannes in 1987, Haneke’s international
status took a giant leap – so much so that French production companies hastened
to get him working in Paris. His next four films were made there (Code Unknown,
The Piano Teacher, The Time of the Wolf and Caché) between 2000 and 2005. It is
a measure of his stature that this completely uncompromising filmmaker, this filmmaker who almost gives a new definition to “uncompromising,” was invited to Hollywood to remake a film, and the result was 2007’s Funny Games U.S., a movie that
starred Naomi Watts and Tim Roth and sneaked into the margins of mainstream
distribution before its audience quite understood what was awaiting it. Currently,
Haneke is back in Austria nearing completion of a period film entitled Das weisse Band.
INTRODUCTION
9
In a New York Times piece to accompany the Museum of Modern Art’s complete
Haneke retrospective in 2007, John Wray calls him “one of contemporary cinema’s
most reviled and revered figures.” Why reviled? Because Haneke is making war
on mainstream movies and mainstream moviegoers. And he’s not doing it in a fragmented or superdemanding avant-garde fashion: his films have stories and characters, they feature well known actors, they are handsome and even coolly beautiful to
look at, and they certainly have enough violence and sensation in them to avoid any
kind of hair-shirt documentary minimalism or grunge aesthetic. They could certainly be argued to have a political content; but in contrast to a lot of art-house movies
that call explicit attention to social injustice or the disparities of wealth and power
in the world, Haneke’s films have, in general, solidly middle-class European central
characters and highly recognizable bourgeois social environments – recognizable,
that is, to their “quality” or independent-cinema viewers. In other words, they present a world not so far away from their audience’s, and story materials that share certain vital components with more mainstream movies, such as a degree of spectator
identification and the audience hooks of suspense and violence. But, having drawn
viewers into his world, Haneke proceeds to subject them to a kind of treatment that
they don’t usually receive, not even in overtly art-house or progressive-politics movies that try to provoke feelings of moral outrage.
For one thing, the mechanisms of audience involvement with the characters and
stories of Haneke’s movies are accompanied by equal or stronger forces of estrangement. His first three theatrical features, the so-called “glaciation trilogy” of The
Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video and 71 Fragments, all have middle-class central characters who engage in acts of shocking violence. The basic story events
of each of these films have a basis in newspaper stories of actual occurrences, but
the events themselves are so extraordinary that the viewer is left desperately seeking for reasons. But while the characters’ actions in these films are observed in
meticulous detail, explanations are harder to find. As Bruno Tracq says in his 2006
feature-length documentary about the trilogy, Michael Haneke: Filmer l’iceberg, in
these films there are, overtly, no causes and no explanations, there is no psychology,
only actions. This procedure is very much in contrast to more conventional movies,
which are careful to delineate causes and explanations, both material and psychological, for why their characters behave as they do; and the more extraordinary or
violent their behaviour is, the more clear causes and explanations are required. But
these explanations, almost invariably rooted in private experience and rendered in
ways that create a clear and ultimately comfortable moral picture for viewers, are
very much the enemy for Haneke. Most movies try to send their audiences out feeling uplifted or morally gratified in some way – this is just as much true of Fahrenheit
911 and Syriana as it is of Iron Man or (to use one of Haneke’s own examples) Air
10
Force One. For Haneke all such operations must fail to bring any kind of true illumination. Only a radical alienation from this familiar emotional pattern can begin
a new kind of looking at the world. We are inured to violence and suffering in the
fictional worlds of movies, we accept them, even demand them, as part of an essentially entertaining experience. In Haneke’s films, all the elements are present –
closely observed characters, provocative plot situations, violence – but the audience
is barred from experiencing them in the same old way, instead it is forced to try to
think about them in a quite different context. The question “Why?” is more insistent
in Haneke’s cinema than it is in almost any other kind of film, it’s just that answers
to that question have to be approached by quite another route than the ones we are
used to travelling.
Another important factor is the way his films act on the spectator like machines.
Once you work out the mechanism they embody, everything in them seems logical
and even inevitable, and they develop an impressive formal power that is exercised
upon the viewer like an instrument. Indeed, the machine that is a Haneke movie
seems pretty close to the one in Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” that inscribes
the transgressions of the malefactor with sharp knives into his skin in words of
blood. The idea behind Kafka’s machine is to inflict a punishment that is exquisitely
and in fact beautifully just, even as it is terrifyingly cruel and violent. Similarly, the
logics of Haneke’s punishments are also accompanied by a sense of their exquisite
appropriateness, and the beauty of his films is intimately connected with their cleareyed remorselessness and detachment in the execution of their plan. In a very Kafkaesque way, Haneke’s viewers are made to suffer the punishments for crimes they
didn’t know they had committed but finally come to recognize their guilt for. Or not.
It is viewers who are unconvinced of their complicity in the crimes the films reveal,
and who resent being subjected to a treatment they did nothing to deserve, who are
chief among Haneke’s revilers.
The crimes that Haneke is fundamentally trying to reveal are not those of overt
violence, though there is plenty of that in his films, and it is repeatedly used as a
way of getting the viewer’s serious attention. Rather, what he especially loathes is
the social and psychological environment that calls forth these acts of violence: an
environment of numbness, moral laziness, ethical cowardice, thoughtless and selfserving collusion with the vast edifice of vacuous materialist comfort, an environment so deeply alienated that almost anything else is preferable. One of Haneke’s
central projects is to épater le bourgeois, but his purist zeal is closer to Robespierre
than to Baudelaire. Recently I ran across a phrase of the radical French philosopher
Alain Badiou that seems to apply to this aspect of Haneke’s work: “mieux vaut un
désastre qu’un désêtre,” better a disaster than a lack of being. So in Benny’s Video it
INTRODUCTION
11
Haneke
is making
war on
mainstream
movies and
mainstream
moviegoers.
is not the murder that calls forth Haneke’s deepest
revulsion, but the whole society’s wilful avoidance
of reality in favour of comfort and the willingness
of respectable middle-class people to sweep even
the most horrifying things under the carpet to reestablish their morally empty cocoon. Likewise in
71 Fragments it is not so much the murderer’s crime
that interests the filmmaker as the social and personal conditions that drove him to it. Similarly in
The Piano Teacher it is Isabelle Huppert’s nut-case
sadomasochist whose values the film most admires.
And in Caché the message is that it doesn’t matter how long in the past the sin of the comfortable
bourgeois is or how young he was when he committed it, it is somehow of a single piece with his
honoured, respected, and satisfied social position
and lifestyle, and he deserves everything that’s
coming to him. Even in the Funny Gameses, which
are nominally about audience complicity in tortureporn and other extreme action narratives and the
necessity for viewers really to understand what violence and suffering are instead of consuming it like
popcorn, there is the strong hint that the victims are
guilty of their upper-middle-class status.
In some ways my favourite Haneke film is his first
theatrical feature, The Seventh Continent, simply
because it is – as with Werner Herzog’s first feature,
Signs of Life – the simplest, most lucid and least
encumbered expression of the filmmaker’s philosophy and his method. There, more straightforwardly
than in any of his subsequent films, it is bourgeois
life itself that is the intolerable crime (and there,
too, his formal purity, his ability to cast an idea into
a clear structure, is most limpidly evident). The
steel-trap-like nature of many of these narratives is
not such a strong feature of all of Haneke’s films,
however. Some of them, like Code Unknown or The
Time of the Wolf and also 71 Fragments, set out a
wider nexus of events, a greater number of dispa-
12
rate participants, a bigger picture altogether (often encompassing non-Western-European participants), and their narrative machines are less single-minded and more
puzzle-like. These films, I think, are not as likely as the others to provoke extremes
either of reverence or revilement. His fine, faithful adaptation of Kafka’s novel The
Castle, meanwhile, comes almost as a relief from the rest of Haneke’s cinema. It
is sobering to think of Kafka’s world as a kinder and gentler place than Haneke’s.
Despite what Bruno Tracq says, then, there are causes and explanations in Haneke’s
films. It’s just that they exist, as it were, outside the characters and the action, they
exist at the level of the mathematical term that the equation of the film is solving
for. “Why?” is the question, and the answer usually is that our society is miserably
and even disgustingly unworthy. There’s a burning purity in the moral standards
Haneke illustrates with his characters and which he imposes on his viewers. His
ethical bar is very high, and no one is allowed to duck under it. There is no patience
for pragmatic solutions or the compromises almost everyone feels it necessary to
make in order to get through life. There is nothing worse than a moderately talented musician, unless it is a moderately committed filmmaker.
This purity that he demands he also practices, as clearly in the beautiful austerity of
his visual style as in the almost abstract nature of his storytelling. In both message
and form, the filmmaker that he most recalls is Robert Bresson, one of the handful
of greatest artists in cinema history – and particularly the later, more extreme and
sometimes even bordering-on-crankiness Bresson. Bresson manifests arguably the
most fanatical control and detachment in shot disposition and editing of any filmmaker ever, and Haneke does not really quite approach him in this arena. But there
are echoes in his work of a Bressonian uncompromising grip over his material, an
almost frightening calmness and asceticism in the dramatization and visual rendering of powerful events, a kind of spirituality that is at a godlike remove from what it
depicts and sees its characters with a godlike grasp of fundamental values. Haneke
does precisely control every shot – its framing, its duration, its juxtaposition with the
preceding and following shots – and his both his camera and his editing are always
quiet and cool no matter how incendiary the events they are depicting become. His
tightly managed, minimalist, and even arbitrary-seeming manipulation of narrative
elements is equally insistent on a kind of detachment amidst morally explosive materials, and demands that viewers recognize and submit themselves to the author’s
disciplinary machine. Bresson, like Haneke, applies the very highest standards to
human action, and often it seems that the world he presents, and most of the people
in it, fall comprehensively short. They are the standards of a saint, or of a Savonarola.
Bresson enforces upon his viewers an almost hermit-like process of mortification
and purification, and presents a spectacle full of pain which can only be redeemed
INTRODUCTION
13
(if at all) in some higher realm of apprehension than most of us are ever capable of
attaining. And both filmmakers are capable of performing the miracle of making
the viewer’s painful experience into something beautiful and probing. Merely to put
Haneke into a category with Bresson is to emphasize his significance.
As viewers become conscious of the formal structures and procedures of the films
they are watching, they become to a degree detached from the characters and action. But in Haneke, this detachment is countered by the enormous provocation of
the events themselves – a thing that obliterates detachment – and so viewers are
always being held in suspension between these two points. This combination of
formidable detachment and terrible events might seem to indicate that Haneke’s
presiding emotion is a cold rage. But the filmmaker’s own feelings are very hard
to read from his work (that’s why it is so tempting to go to his interviews and comments – which, however, while fascinating, are also controlled and unyielding). Is
there also a mortal anguish in Haneke, underneath the glaciated detachment, and
beyond the cold anger? The machine of “In the Penal Colony” that is designed to
punish criminals is at last submitted to by the officer who is its commander and most
enthusiastic devotee, but when it begins to operate it malfunctions in the most hideous way: as Kafka’s narrator says, “this was no exquisite torture such as the officer
desired, this was plain murder.” The control that is so compelling and beautiful in
Haneke’s work may, after all, be a screen behind which there is somebody truly in
despair at all the human damage his films portray, somebody murmuring “the horror, the horror.” Certainly all the reflexivity in these movies – that is, all the instances of staging, acting, directing, and other kinds of representation – may be aimed
not only at the mainstream media, but at the movies themselves. In any event it is
far from certain that what Haneke has started out to design in any given film is what
has been accomplished by its realization. Ultimately most of the films escape from
the grasp of their formal control, their inflammatory content sets fire to the building
in spite of all its fireproofing glaciation, and viewers are left with a situation that not
even Michael Haneke can help them with.
William Beard is a Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English and Film Studies at the
University of Alberta. He has written books on Clint Eastwood and David Cronenberg, and has
recently completed a book on the cinema of Guy Maddin.
14
The Seventh Continent | 1989 | 104 min | Austria
Suicidal
effects:
Michael Haneke’s
H
Lisa Coulthard
aving worked in television and film for over three decades,
director Michael Haneke first gained renown as a controversially violent filmmaker with Funny Games (1997) and has more recently garnered mainstream
critical and popular acclaim with recent films such as La Pianiste (2001) and Caché
(2005). Foregrounding a visually precise style paired with narrational complexity,
Haneke’s films challenge viewers with provocative documents of disaffection,
alienation and abuse that resist easy consumption. Examining effects rather than
revealing causes, his films emphasize ambivalence and ambiguity – a feature
readily evident in his early cinematic works such as his so-called “Glaciation Trilogy” of The Seventh Continent (1989), Benny’s Video (1992) and 71 Fragments of
a Chronology of Chance (1994). Referencing what Haneke considers a freezing of
emotions in capitalist culture, these films all address the eruptions of violence that
occur in the face of such alienation and all do so through fractured, detached and
difficult narrational stylistic modes. By encouraging active thought and engagement through minimalism and fragmented narration, Haneke approaches stories
of trauma and violence in a way that formally confronts the viewer with the very
problematics of alienation and impossible communication that the films address
inside their stories. Framed and tied to larger social, political and ethical issues
15
of the estrangement and failures of Western bourgeois capitalism, Haneke’s concentration on violence (including self violence) is not merely an instance of shock
aesthetics or spectatorial excitation. Pushing the parameters of offscreen space
and the long take, his films are thus not explicitly violent so much as they are confrontational or even cruel to the audience in that they explore and disturb rather
than offer the audience easy answers to the violence presented.
This strategy of provocative stylistic precision in the service of a narrative of extreme
trauma is perhaps most evident in Haneke’s first feature film and one that many critics and scholars still consider his strongest – Der Siebente Kontinent (The Seventh
Continent). Made when Haneke was in his forties and had been working in theatre
and television for well over a decade, The Seventh Continent is an aesthetically
and ethically explosive work that makes immediately palpable and powerful those
elements that have come to be associated with Haneke’s unique vision and style: a
visually precise and clearly framed mise en scène; a pronounced use of repetition or
replaying; an eschewal of facial close-ups; a soundscape characterized by sparse dialogue, a lack of non-diegetic background music and a pronounced focus on noise;
an ambiguous ending that stops midstream; and a focus on emotional alienation,
disconnection and the failures of communication. Perhaps still the most articulate,
precise and pointed expression of Haneke’s signature minimalism, The Seventh
Continent takes as its inspiration the true story of an Austrian family’s seemingly
inexplicable decision to kill themselves (including their child) and approaches this
material with all of the objective scrutiny, detail and lack of affect of a forensic report. Although focusing on the three years leading up to the deaths of parents
Georg and Anna and their daughter Eva (common character names throughout
Haneke’s oeuvre), Haneke does not offer causal explanations for the suicides so
much as he reveals a suffocating accumulation of the trivial, dehumanizing and
meaningless details that constitute daily life.
Divided into three parts marked by dates, the film foregrounds its parallel structure
in order to emphasize the routinisation, isolation and affective emptiness that characterise the quotidian existence of bourgeois family life. Each segment is demarcated by an extended blackout and a title card (Part 1: 1987; Part 2: 1988; Part 3: 1989)
and interspersed throughout the film are shot inserts of a travel poster for Australia,
the false destination referenced by the family in their preparations for suicide and,
on one level at least, the titular seventh continent. The poster, simultaneously static
and kinetic, is suggestive of its own non-existence (its unnatural landscape and impossible tidal movements) and indicates the isolation, false idealization and dehumanized existence of the family. Combined with the isolated repeated fragments
of daily life across the three years (waking to alarm clocks, making morning coffee,
getting dressed), the shots of the poster suggest a kind of oppressive sameness, an
16
unchanging existence marked by false imaginings (a
new start, an impossible landscape) that are ultimately as repetitive and static as the daily routine itself.
His films are
not explicitly
violent so much
as they are
confrontational
or even
cruel to the
audience…
In the end, it is clear that not only do these segmented
fragments of daily life not add up to any causal narration or explanation for the suicides, they provocatively obliterate any sense of a cause whatsoever. In
this way, the film quite radically denies a climactic
or decisive moment: there is no one instant that we
can look to as a turning point and there is no sense of
increasing malaise, disaffection or distance – in fact,
what progression does exist suggests the opposite,
as it points towards increasing prosperity, upward
social mobility and stability. Indeed, by minimizing
narration and thwarting audience identification (the
sparseness of facial close-ups, dialogue, character engagement), the film’s style works against any attempt
to understand why Georg and Anna kill themselves
and their child. Instead, through the emphasising of
habitual and mundane similarity, the move towards
suicide appears to be driven by the routine itself rather than by a climactic or traumatic deviation.
This foregrounding of a stylistic mode of objective
scrutiny is evident from the beginning of the film,
the first shot of which isolates in close-up not a human (the usual agent of visual cinematic identification), but a car. By opening with a shot of a vehicle license plate being hosed down before going into a car
wash, The Seventh Continent exemplifies Haneke’s
concentration on what I would describe as cinematic
desubjectivisation, a stylistic muting of character centrality, psychology or insight and a concomitant deemphasizing of the processes of audience identification. This thwarting of character centrality is evident
throughout the opening moments of the film: we see
body parts but not full faces, voices are unattached
to characters (the female voice-over narration during
the scene of Georg’s work, for instance, is only later
attached to Anna) and actions are disconnected and
17
decontextualized. This partial, de-psychologized and fragmented representational
mode is equally and even more disturbingly present in excruciating final scenes
of the family suicide. Although the deaths of Eva and Anna occur off screen and
are primarily indicated through sound (indeed, arguably the most disturbing scene
in the film is Anna’s off screen gurgling as she dies from the poison), the impact,
intensity and detail of these final moments of suffering is almost too much to bear.
However, although affecting and harrowing, the suicides are nonetheless marked
by Haneke’s distinct tone of ironic distanciation, most notable in the accompaniment of the deaths by Jennifer Rush’s ballad “The Power of Love”, which emanates
throughout the scene from the one household object that escapes destruction – the
television. Placed in conjunction with the unbearable actions occurring off screen,
the song becomes a pointed commentary on the emotional glaciation of contemporary capitalist culture and its objects.
Further, the television itself takes on a significance not only in this scene but in the
final image of the film where its meaningless blank signal offers a precise visual
metaphor for death and for the obliterating and suffocating noise of conformity that
18
has dominated the film (the deafening sounds of the carwash, road work, stereo music, for example) and contributed to the family’s decision to suicide. The nonsense
of the television snow thus works in conjunction with the partial and fragmented
narrative of family suicide to stress the impossibility of fully understanding or representing the causes that could lead to such acts. The Seventh Continent thus derails
any sense of suspense in the film’s development: instead, the tone throughout is
more a pervasive sense of imminence, dread and morbid certainty, which works
with the austere minimalism of Haneke’s cinematic style to depersonalise the suicides and their possible causes. Suicide is here not an instance of personal pathology or psychological distress so much as it is a pointed and severe critique of the
routinised, empty and glacial existence of contemporary global capitalism.
This is where the uncannily unemotional nature of the family’s self destruction in
The Seventh Continent is significant, as the mechanistic, impenetrable and inexorable nature of this act is emphasized through the anti-psychological structure of
its presentation. Most significant in this is the act of destruction that precedes the
suicides: after careful planning and organization, the family sets out to destroy all
their products of capitalist accumulation (household objects, money, clothes, family
pictures) before they kill themselves. What is most remarkable in this sequence is
the way in which this obliteration is carried out with the same order and precision as
their daily routine; the sequence is even filmed in the same style, a parallel that suggests that even when the family attempts to break with the mechanized glaciation of
their existence, they are nonetheless caught up in the same patterns and structures.
Through these stylistic parallels and patterns, The Seventh Continent encourages
audience reflection and interrogation by formally confronting the viewer with the
very failures of emotional connection and communication that the film addresses
diegetically. Indeed, this challenging objectivity is perhaps Haneke’s most obvious authorial signature as his minimalist style tends to restrict or at least re-channel
emotional expressiveness in favour of a more intense investigatory objectivity. For
Haneke, how we address and confront effects, actions and results is more significant
than the search for causes and this is where the affective and ethical power of his
films lies. By refusing to explain violence through psychological cliché and in offering viewers the fragments without the whole and the effects without the cause, The
Seventh Continent allows the family suicide to remain the complex, unknowable
and aporetic act that it must of necessity always be.
Lisa Coulthard is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of British
Columbia. Her main research falls into the area of film theory and violence, and she
is currently writing a book titled The Super Sounds of Quentin Tarantino.
19
Benny’s Video | 1992 | 105 min | Austria/Switzerland
On
Benny’s
Video:
What’s it like,
the real?
Garry Watson
MH:
I remember, at the screening in the Vienna festival, where it premiered,
there was a press conference afterwards … And at one point I said “Don’t you
want to speak about this Austrian habit of sweeping unpleasant things under
the carpet?” Total silence ...
ST: The ability to repress is very strong.
MH: Yes.
– Michael Haneke interviewed by Serge Toubiana
W
(Benny’s Video DVD)
hat in the present circumstances makes Benny’s Video an important, challenging and (despite its disturbing subject matter) an unexpectedly
optimistic work of art is the way in which it sheds new light on something by now
20
fairly familiar, a central protagonist who seems emotionally numb. Or to put it another way, what is remarkable about the film is how – in the course of examining the
habit (by-no-means exclusively Austrian) “of sweeping unpleasant things under the
carpet” – it ends up by staging a return of the repressed that simultaneously serves
to demonstrate the resiliency of human nature: just when it seemed that the latter
might have been eradicated, it reasserts itself.
But let’s start with what is familiar, even if the startling manner in which Haneke
presents it may momentarily delay the recognition that we have seen versions of it
before. Benny is another one of those characters who is weirdly dissociated, both
from a sense of reality and also from his feelings. This becomes most apparent in
the scene in which we see him killing a girl of about the same age as himself (14?
15 maybe?), a girl whose name we never get to know, whom he has picked up
outside his local video store and brought home. Having just shown her some footage that he filmed himself of a pig being slaughtered on a farm, he then decides to
produce – to impress her? for fun? – the butcher’s gun that was used to kill the pig
and that (he tells her with some pride) he nicked. After first loading it, Benny hands
it to her so she is holding the trigger end and he is pressing the muzzle against his
chest. He then asks her to press the trigger. She declines and puts the gun down.
“Coward,” he says. “Coward yourself,” she replies. In response to this Benny picks
it up and presses it against the girl’s stomach. “You press it,” she says and when he
doesn’t she again calls him “Coward.” It would seem that like little children they
are both caught up in the game of dare-devil and so the next thing that happens is
that, without any hint of malice (he had after all encouraged her to shoot him first),
Benny does indeed press the trigger. There is more to say about the scene than this
and I’ll come back to it later but for the moment I simply want to note the obvious
questions we find ourselves asking. Benny doesn’t seem to realize that pressing the
trigger will likely result in the girl’s death but how is this possible? How can he not
know this? And how can he not care – either about her dying or about dying himself?
Since we are obviously in the presence of the absurd, we might well find ourselves
being reminded here of the writer once thought of as the philosopher of the Absurd,
Albert Camus; in particular, given Benny’s lack of affect and the murder he commits,
we might recall the opening of Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942):
Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.
Mersault can’t be sure but also, like Benny, he doesn’t seem to care very much – in
his case, either about his mother’s death or about the death of the man he kills later
on. Prompted, furthermore, by the combination of (again) Benny’s lack of affect and
by the fact that one of the many art-works hanging up on the living room wall of
Benny’s video
21
Benny’s home is by Andy Warhol (a “Marilyn Diptych”), we can also note something
the art critic Hal Foster has to say (in his book The Return of the Real [1996]) about
“the famous motto of the Warholian persona: ‘I want to be a machine’”:
Usually this statement is taken to confirm the blankness of artist and art alike, but it
may point less to a blank subject than to a shocked one, who takes on the nature of
what shocks him as a mimetic defense against this shock: I am a machine too, I make
(or consume) serial product-images too, I give as good (or as bad) as I get.
And finally, prompted this time by the kind of horror film we see Benny watching
taken together with the news headlines (Football Fans beat up Asylum Seekers,
Serbian Troops attack Civilian Targets) we hear coming from one of the TV screens
in his room throughout the film, we might recall one of the comments the narrator of
Nathaniel West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locusts makes on the people who “had
come to California to die”:
Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both
fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires,
miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a
joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough
to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed.
My point is not that Haneke necessarily had any of these specific examples (West,
Camus, Warhol) in mind when making Benny’s Video. Other artists and intellectuals might legitimately come to mind in this context too and what matters is not only
what Benny’s Video has in common with earlier Modernist or Post-Modernist works
(of art or Critical Theory); it is also (and at least as importantly) how it differs. Benny
doesn’t always behave mechanically, like “a blank subject” and while he too has
been “cheated and betrayed,” in his case, the nature of the betrayal is different.
There is admittedly much in Benny’s Video that could plausibly be used to argue
that Benny has been betrayed in basically the same way as West’s Californians. In
fact, if we were to judge by what Haneke says at the beginning of his interview with
Serge Toubiana, this might well seem to be his own position too:
I was often asked, “What triggered this film?” I remember answering – It’s something
Benny says in the film when his father asks him, “Why did you do that?” And he answers that he wanted to know what it’s like. It’s a sentence I read once in a magazine
that told the story of a crime committed by a boy ... It was a boy who killed another
child or something like that. When the police interrogated him,that was his answer.
And I was shocked by that … “I wanted to know what it was like.” For me, those
are the words of a person who’s out of contact with reality. When you learn life and
reality only through the media, you have the sense that you’re missing something.
22
What is Haneke saying here if not that the visual media Benny is constantly exposing himself to has cut him off from (in effect, cheated and betrayed him out of) a
sense of the real? And of course, as the film shows us, there is some truth to this. But
it is not the whole truth.
We now need to look more closely at the murder scene and we can start by noticing the exchange produced by Benny’s screening of the pig’s death. The girl’s first
response to it (after commenting on the white spots on the screen: “It’s snowing”)
is to ask him “What was it like?” “What?” he asks (apparently unsure what she is
referring to). “With the pig,” she explains. “I mean, ever seen a dead person? For
real, I mean.” He says that he hasn’t (she explains that she hasn’t either) and (as if
to ask, what has that fact about us got to do with anything anyway?) he adds that “It
was only a pig.” He then offers the following information:
I once saw a TV program about the tricks they use in action films. It’s all ketchup
and plastic. It looks pretty real, though.”
It is as if he is saying not just that it’s only a pig but also that it’s only film; as if he is
suggesting that it (death) isn’t real anyway. After a slight pause, a memory surfaces
of the death of his grandfather: Benny remembers being lifted up by his father to
23
see into the open coffin but he says that he shut
his eyes (and so, presumably, didn’t see the dead
man); for her part the girl says her grandparents
died a long time ago and she doesn’t remember
them. It would seem, therefore, in the light of
this that what mainly motivates Benny to pull
the trigger is indeed the desire to find out what
it will be like. What then happens is that the girl
abruptly falls out of the camera frame, revealing as she does so the TV monitor behind her
that is recording all of this, so that we see her
falling out of the TV screen too. Within seconds
we then hear her whimpering and see her (along
the bottom of the TV screen) trying to crawl
away from Benny.
Now it seems to me very important to note that
Benny’s first response is – in a tone of genuine
concern – to offer to help her but, after she has
rejected this with an emphatic “No,” he becomes anxious about the noise she is making .
And when his asking her to “Be quiet. Quiet”
produces no effect, we see him rushing back
across the TV screen (the previous exchange between them having occurred out of our line of
vision, to the left of the screen) for more ammo,
filling up, and then rushing back across and out
of the screen to shoot her again. It seems that
this is the only way he can think of quietening
her down. Actually she is already quieter at this
point but she screams loudly (out of sight) when
he shoots her. Again Benny pleads with her to
be “Quiet” but this only produces more loud
screaming. “Be quiet,” he then begs. “Please.
Please be quiet.” But she can’t or won’t be quiet
and so we see him rushing back for yet more
ammo, loading up, and returning to shoot her
once more. She is screaming louder than ever
now, understandably sounding terrified, as we
hear him shooting her for the third and final time
24
Though Benny
is unable to
articulate
it to himself
or others
in this way,
what I think
his actions
demonstrate is
that he needs
to ‘exist’…
and securing the silence he so desperately needed. In fact, at this point the camera
remains for around another 35 or so seconds in the same position it has been in
throughout the long drawn-out killing and during this time the only movement we
see and slight sound we hear is when Benny slumps down into a sitting position on
the floor besides the dead body (the latter remaining out of sight but one side of
Benny’s body visible in the left-hand corner of the TV monitor).
If, then (after he has shot the girl for the first time), Benny’s first response to her obvious distress is to offer to help, his second, as soon as her distress starts to become
more vocal, is to panic and to try to shut her up. In effect, his rapid second response
is to try to repress her, to sweep the extremely unpleasant thing that she has become
(or the unpleasant thing that he has done) under the carpet. But this is to speak
metaphorically. What he actually or literally proceeds to do is drink some water, get
some yoghurt from the fridge and eat it at the kitchen table, go to the toilet, look
through the girl’s handbag and empty the contents out and do some homework
in his study (while loud rock music is playing in the background and models are
parading back and forth in a fashion show on the TV). In other words, he quickly
returns to a (for him) more or less “normal” routine that becomes slightly abnormal
only when he decides to film the dead body lying on the floor and also perhaps when
– in the course of mopping up the blood, which is mostly around the girl’s head – he
undresses so as to avoid messing up his clothes. As a result, he gets some blood on
his body, which he notices in the mirror – and idly spreads over his chest – while he
is speaking on the phone to his friend Ricci, who calls up to invite him out. Nevertheless, Benny doesn’t hesitate to accept Ricci’s proposal that they go to a nightclub
that evening. Why not? Because he just killed a girl? It seems that he has almost
forgotten about that: it just hasn’t sunk in. Or on the other hand, perhaps he decides
to go out with his friend because he wants to tell him what he has done. It’s true that
later that evening, when he and Ricci are getting ready to sleep in adjacent beds
in Ricci’s home, there is a moment when Benny seems on the verge of confiding in
his friend. And the next day, when he goes to see his sister we infer, surely, that he
does so out of what has now crystallized into a definite need to confide in someone.
And since his sister is out when he calls and his need remains unsatisfied, his next
decision – made on the spur of the moment while passing by a barber’s shop – is to
go and ask for all his hair to be shaved off.
I take this to be a hopeful sign, the first serious indication that below Benny’s placid,
surface behavior – his blankness, if you will – all is not well, that his attempt at going
on with his life as if nothing significant has happened has failed. What he needs at
this point is some reaction from his parents, who have left him alone for the weekend while making their regular weekend trip to the farm.
25
His mother, Anna, is in the middle of preparing the evening meal when Benny arrives home and before either greeting him or even looking up from her work she
starts complaining about the fact that he hasn’t left a note to explain where he has
been and why he would be late. Her only reaction when she looks up and sees his
shaven head is that she stops speaking, thus breaking off her complaint in midsentence. We then get a shot of parents and son eating their dinner together in silence (except for the sounds made by knives, forks and food being eaten). And after
35 seconds of this, Hanneke cuts to Benny wearing only his pajama trousers and
bending over the bathroom sink while his father, Georg, is positioned behind his
son, leaning on the open door and asking a series of questions which (in the absence
of any response from Benny) end up by forming a sort of mini-lecture – one mostly
delivered to his son’s back (but also in a way to us since we are looking directly into
the reflection of the father’s face in the bathroom mirror):
Don’t you think there are better ways to rebel? Who are you trying to impress? Not me, I
hope. Do you think your mother’s overjoyed? Or is it the new fashion among your mates? The
baby skin-head gang, or what? Seriously, don’t give me that teenage stuff about not being
loved. People have to agree on certain things. Provided one is reasonably intelligent, which
you won’t deny you are, one sticks to the rules if one wants others to stick to them too, particularly when it takes so little effort. Do you think it will endear you to your teachers to see
you with this concentration camp look? Good heavens! Do you know how long it’ll be before
you look human? And we have to look at you. [Benny now has his pajama top on and has
started to move past his father] Don’t walk away while I’m talking to you. All this gets on your
nerves, doesn’t it? [To which, after another pause, Benny responds by asking “Can I go now?”]
Like Anna, Georg also forgets (or refuses) to ask the simple question as to why Benny has shaven his head. Unlike Anna, Georg does let his son know he is displeased
with him but his displeasure mostly takes the form of mockery and it basically cuts
off the possibility of dialogue even as it appears (there are pauses left at the end of
almost every sentence) to be inviting it.
Given, then, his parents’ failure to react in the way he needs them to react, the
following evening Benny tries something more drastic. While his mother is in his
room, sitting behind him but watching the TV to the side of him, he switches from
the TV image to film of the murder. He has clearly decided he wants her to see it.
And when, seconds later his father comes to the door to ask Benny to put the TV
back on, his attention too is immediately caught up by the real life-and-death drama
now unfolding on the screen. Now, one would think, there is no escape, no way for
Benny’s parents to avoid dealing with what they are being shown. Now they will
surely have to react. And minutes later, after he has shown them the body (which he
had put in the fridge) and the murder weapon (that he had put away in a drawer),
Benny’s father does begin to ask him some questions, while his mother silently looks
26
on. What is startling at this point, however, is what is not said. Instead of “How
could you have done such a terrible thing?” the father mainly wants to know if
Benny has spoken to anyone about it: his only concern seems to be whether or not
anyone might be able to connect Benny to the dead girl; whether or not he is in any
danger of being found out. For his part, having unburdened himself by handing the
responsibility for what he has done over to his parents, Benny now appears to be
at his ease, so much so that – in the middle of being interrogated by his father – he
calmly announces (as if it is the most natural thing in the world) that he is feeling
hungry and soon, after eating a sandwich prepared by his mother, he retires to bed,
assuring his father that Yes he does think he can sleep and No he isn’t scared. On
the other hand, even if Benny is at this point as relaxed as he seems, he doesn’t immediately fall asleep. What we don’t know at the time but subsequently learn is that
he stays awake to tape the conversation his parents are now having alone in the adjoining living room area. The question they are asking themselves is whether they
can avoid turning Benny in, how they can dispose of the body – in short, whether
27
they can manage to sweep the whole thing under the carpet. Though it is the father
who seems to be the first to want this, the mother goes along with the plan they begin to work out together, pointing out, for example, that if the body is to be made to
disappear then it will have to be dismembered into extremely tiny pieces. They end
up by agreeing that the mother will take Benny away for a few days holiday while
the father gets the job done. So mother and son go to Egypt and when they return
to their apartment a sense of normality has been restored – it seems as if nothing
has occurred.
The plan appears to have been successfully executed, the problem removed – with
surgical efficiency. There had been a couple of hints earlier on of how things might
have taken a different turn, one when the mother had started sobbing uncontrollably while lying next to Benny in bed on their Egyptian holiday and earlier when the
father’s systematic way of reasoning in the face of Benny’s horrific deed had provoked an eruption of nervous laughter in the mother. But on the whole the mother
has managed to maintain her self-composure and the closest the father has ever
come to seeming rattled was when he began to discuss the possibility of a cover-up
with his wife. By the same token, the closest he ever comes to an admission that
perhaps his own behavior in the past has been somehow lacking and that this might
possibly have had something to do with Benny’s action is when Benny has gone to
bed on the evening of his return and he sits down beside his son and initiates the
following exchange:
Father: I’m glad you’re home.
Benny: [looking uncomfortable] Me too
[Pause]
Father: I love you.
[Pause]
Father: Sleep well, then. [Pause. Benny looks worried but they are not making eye contact] I
want to ask you something. [Pause] Why did you do it?
Benny: What? [Pause. This sounds like a genuine question] I don’t know. [Pause] I wanted to
see what it’s like … [Pause] probably.
Father: And what is it like? [No answer]
For her part, the mother makes a point the next morning of sharing her breakfast
with Benny, which means she will open her shop later than usual. At this point
we then move forward for a unspecified period of time as Haneke cuts to show us
parents and son sitting together to watch film Benny has shot of a second Pilot and
Passengers party organized by his sister Eva, this one hosted by Georg and Anna
who had closed down an earlier one but who are now impressed by their daughter’s entrepreneurial skills. And from this we cut to a sequence in which we see the
parents watching Benny singing in his school choir. We have already started to hear
28
the song while watching the party footage and it seems to summarize the journey
parents and son have all three been on:
Despite the ancient dragon
Despite the gaping jaws of death
Despite the constant fear
Let the world rage and toss
I stand here
And I sing
I stand here and I sing
In perfect calm
In perfect harmony.
In this case, however, the harmony is short-lived as Haneke suddenly cuts from this
to a shot of Benny’s open bedroom door at night and we hear his parents quietly
discussing how they will get rid of the dead body. We have been abruptly returned
to the past, watching footage that (unbeknownst to his parents) Benny was filming
when they had thought he was safely out of the way. At the same time, we realize
that this is now incriminating evidence and within seconds we learn that we are now
in a police station where Benny is showing this film to the police. The film comes
to a close with him emerging from his interview with the police to meet his parents
who are now in police custody in the corridor outside. They say nothing, he says
“Sorry” and leaves. We are observing their encounter on monitoring cameras inside
the police station and we continue to watch the empty corridor (and to listen to news
headlines about on-going violent conflicts) for a while after the parents have been
led into the room Benny has come out of.
Why does Benny go to the police and reveal what his parents and he have done
at the end? For the same reason, I think, that he said he pressed the trigger of the
butcher’s gun and shot the girl: he wanted to know what it was like. What what was
like? “To be an actor in reality,” suggests Toubiana in the interview. “That’s it,” says
Hanneke. But it seems to me that this too is in need of explanation and I suggest
that it can best be understood in terms provided by T.S.Eliot in his 1930 essay on
“Baudelaire”:
So long as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we
are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist.
Though Benny is unable to articulate it to himself or others in this way, what I think
his actions demonstrate is that he needs to “exist” (which means that he needs to
come into contact with the real) and what the film shows us (what he seems to sense
instinctively) is that this can only happen if he is held accountable or responsible for
what he has done. In other words, we only exist (or are human) insofar as we are
29
on the ethical plane and we can only be on this plane if we accept responsibility
for our actions. This means that, whereas the action taken by Benny’s parents were
designed to prevent him from existing (or coming into contact with the real), the
action Benny takes at the end has the reverse effect: though they do not seem to be
initially grateful for the favour, Benny has ensured that they too will now have the
opportunity to begin to exist (presumably in prison), precisely to the extent that they
come to realize the true nature of what they have done – the fact that they have
been complicit in evil.
I would direct those who are troubled by the fact that that last word is conspicuously
left unuttered in Benny’s Video to the interview (again with Serge Toubiana) found
on the 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance DVD. In it we find Haneke speaking of “beauty,” “grace” and a “metaphysical side” of his work, of how, furthermore, it is no coincidence that his work is of interest to a theological school (even
if he is “not religious” – but at the same time, as he says, “what’s religion?”). Here
is an extract:
In an age when God no longer exists, the desire for another world remains. I don’t mean
desire for heaven but for another image of the world. And I think you can only evoke it by
avoiding to show it ... If you force out a desire for it by pointing your finger at the things that
are wrong, that’s the best way to evoke it ... You should always rebel against what’s wrong,
against evil. You can rebel against that in film by showing it. But by showing it in a way that
gives you a desire for the alternative … The duty of art … is to cultivate the human desire
for that [“the concrete expression of the spirit”], which is the most beautiful thing there is.
My own feeling is that this alone is enough to justify my recourse to Eliot’s terminology here but so, in my view, is the film’s opening sequence which I have deliberately
postponed discussing until now.
We are situated, in the beginning, in the interior of a barn and it is dark. The very
first thing we see are the dark shapes of two men and a pig, all silhouetted against
and moving towards an open door that is full of dazzling light. The reluctant and
resisting pig is being forcibly moved to the outside (with one of the men holding
onto its tail and to a cord tied around its neck) and we are following close behind,
observing what is happening (we later realize) through Benny’s eyes (we are seeing
through his hand-held camera). Within seconds we are outside the barn and in the
farmyard where there are a number of other people all interested in observing what
is about to happen. (Only later do we learn that Benny’s parents are among this
group and that it is his father who holds up his hand as if to say – in a somewhat halfhearted protest – that Benny should not be filming this.) We hear a dog barking and
the pig squealing (clearly in fear) and still less than a minute into the film we watch
the pig being killed. A butcher’s gun is pressed up against its fore skull, the trigger
30
is pulled, the pig keels over, twitches a bit, and dies. Except that the pig’s death is
not exactly over yet because what next happens is that we find ourselves helplessly
watching the film being rewound and then see the shooting for the second time, this
time in slow motion and to the accompaniment of deep unearthly sounds (spaced
out like some kind of reverberating gong).
All of this occurs before the credits and it is vitally important that we grasp the significance of what we have been shown. The first thing is that we are witness to a
REAL killing. If anyone is in any doubt about this they will look in vain at the end
of the film for the assurance that no animal has been harmed in the making of it. So
in this precise sense the film begins by doing something genuinely and troublingly
transgressive. Moreover, if it is distressing enough to watch an animal being killed
in this way, the instant replay makes one feel queasy in the stomach. Or at least,
that’s how it makes me feel and, though I’d be surprised to learn that most viewers
don’t react in the same way, it seems appropriate here to speak in the first person.
What the instant replay makes me feel, then, is a sense (slight but distinct) of shame,
as if I am watching something I oughtn’t to be watching (or in any way participating
in). And what is this? The exhibition of a particular form of obscenity, the kind that
puts one in a position of power (that of an onlooker) as one observes the death of a
creature weaker than oneself.
Although, at the same time, it has to be recognized that since the spectators have
no say in the matter, since we have no option other than to watch what is there on
the screen, it is of course the person doing the rewinding (Benny, we subsequently
learn) who has the real power here. But I think there is a sense in which we as
spectators simply can’t avoid experiencing some of it, which also therefore means
that – however much we may inwardly protest (get me out of here), however great
our revulsion from it – we can’t avoid being to some degree fascinated (and contaminated) by it.
It seems to me that of the two killings that occur in Benny’s Video (the second – 20
minutes into the film – of the teen-age girl), this first one is the more disturbing.
Mainly because, even though it is a pig rather than a human being being killed, the
first death is real, the second fictional. What, if anything, justifies Haneke’s decision
to expose us to this? If anything justifies it, it would be as a means of forcing us, the
viewers, to accept our share of responsibility. At least insofar as we are meat eaters,
such killings are of course being done for our benefit all the time. But this is something (one of many things, no doubt) we prefer not to think about. And a crucial part
of the responsibility Haneke’s film is asking us to accept involves the willingness to
try to think things through and to make connections, which is another way of saying
31
that exercising it means recognizing that one has a certain power. In making this
latter point, I am thinking of two more reasons why the first killing is likely to be
experienced as more disturbing than the other one. On the one hand, there is the
question of proximity: while we experience the death of the pig up close, our experience of the later episode is more distanced, as we observe Benny’s actions from the
outside. On the other hand, there is panic in the later episode (on the part both of
killer and victim), panic and blundering ,whereas the killing of the pig is much more
controlled. And somewhat paradoxically, this is more disturbing, probably because
it seems less human.
However, this should not be taken to mean that the film wants us to see that control
per se is bad. What I think the film is challenging us to grasp is the double-edged
nature of control: it can be used either for bad or for good. On one level, for example,
if Benny uses film to distance himself from reality, it also makes possible a kind of
witnessing, providing him with the kind of evidence that enables him to go to the
police and claim the right to be held accountable. On another level, if the kind of
control exercised by Benny’s parents over the expression of their and their son’s feelings has disastrous consequences, this is not to say that the parents oughtn’t to have
been exercising any control. On the contrary, in fact. If we first see the father holding
up his hand as if to discourage Benny from filming the death of the pig and then see
him putting an end to the first party his daughter has been giving (this one without
permission, in his absence), the film is not suggesting that the father’s laying down
of the law is in any way the cause of Benny’s problem. In fact, what we are made to
feel is crucially missing is a willingness on the Father’s part to be firm in saying No
when No needs to be said and to say it (along of course with Yes) as an expression of
love. Or to put it another way, what is lacking in Benny’s parents is a willingness to
take responsibility for the difficult task of cultivating what is best in their son. And
what is hopeful in the film is the force of its demonstration that, even when it has
been left untended, there is in human nature a deep need for contact with the real,
what the film encourages us to think of as the ethical real that can sometimes surface
in the most surprising ways.
Garry Watson is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at
the University of Alberta. In addition to his work in other areas besides film, he
has published a book on Mike Leigh and articles on the Western, Michael Moore
and Margarethe Von Trotta.
32
rmany
71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance | 1994 | 96 min | Austria/Ge
2
Shots
in
71
Fragments
A
Jerry White
film as visceral and depressing as 71 Fragmente einer
Chronologie des Zufalls (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, 1994) simply
begs to be read in terms of its storyline. What do these characters tell us about
loneliness, what do these narrative events tell us about violence, etc.? And no doubt
the storyline here – very loosely based on an incident that, as the opening text tells
us, actually occurred in 1993 – is important. But Michael Haneke isn’t a novelist or
a playwright, he’s a filmmaker, and the way that he’s using film here is equally important; his formal choices also tell us plenty about loneliness, about violence, about
modernity. It’s especially important to pay attention to the use of sequence-shots
(shots of long duration that make up an entire sequence in themselves).
Overall, 71 Fragments is a sort of “in-between” film for Haneke: it deals with the
themes of extreme alienation and violence that are common to his Austrian films
33
such as Benny’s Video (1992) or Funny Games (1997), but it does so in a way that is
quite cool and detached, and at times almost lovely, in the way that his French films
like Code Inconnu (2000) or Caché (2005) are. I wouldn’t say that the experience of
working in France mellowed Haneke, exactly, but the caustic brutality of Benny’s
Video and Funny Games is missing in these French films, replaced by a more studied, and ultimately more unsettling portrayal of the European bourgeoisie as haunted by its own moral failures: some existential, some more economic. The morality of
economic inequity is, in the French films, emphasised by the presence of dirt-poor
immigrants or minorities: the old Romanian woman in Code Inconnu, the Algerians
in Caché. We have similar figures in 71 Fragments’ homeless Romanian boy, young
street-thief, and young girl in foster care. They are reminders of the concrete deprivation that defines Western European life, a deprivation that Haneke’s French films
use an alienated Juliette Binoche to emphasise, and which 71 Fragments visualises
as a table-tennis-obsessed student or a lonely grandfather with nothing to say to his
bank-manager daughter. Indeed, these two figures specifically – the grandfather
and the student – are introduced to us via imagery that (anticipating the imagery
of Code Inconnu especially) is highly studied and precise, in vivid contrast to the
colder, bleaker images of the kids.
Probably the most memorable shots in the film involve that ping-ponging student.
Both to make my point about sequence-shots and to avoid spoiling the ending, I’ll
focus on the scene earlier in the film where we see him practicing. He smacks
ping-pong balls as a barely-visible machine fires them at him over and over again;
you can’t really see where the balls wind up. This is a single shot, rendered with a
completely static camera; it lasts almost exactly three minutes, although it feels like
a lot longer. This sense of duration comes in no small part from the repetitive motion here; you can feel the student’s arm getting sore as he whacks and whacks and
whacks the balls (and at one point he pauses a bit, clearly starting to cramp up a bit).
That repetitive motion is complemented by the sound of the balls shooting at him
and his paddle striking them. For a sequence that is so completely still – no cutting,
no camera movement – it thus has a very intense feeling of cadenced motion. But
that motion is circular: the effort is genuinely intense, the action genuinely rhythmic, but the sense of stasis is still overwhelming. This combination, this tension, and
really this paradox, is at the core of the film’s portrayal of everyday European life;
furious activity is everywhere, and everyone still drowns in inertia.
Something very similar is going on with the shot of the old man talking to his daughter on the phone. As with the ping-ponging student, this unfolds in a single shot
with a completely still camera. Like the ping-pong sequence it’s quite a nice shot;
we are fairly close to the action but not too close, and the layout of the image hides
34
as much as it reveals (we are in a pleasantly warm study, all brown bookcases, comfy
chairs and fading wallpaper, but it’s hard to see what lies beyond the doorway the
old man is seated next to, or what exactly is on the television set in the background).
But this sequence-shot is a lot longer than the ping-ponging one: a full 8½ minutes.
The old man’s loneliness and anger at his daughter becomes clearer as the shot goes
on (as the obsessiveness of the student did), and the little rests the cramping pingponger takes are echoed here by a little chat the old man has with his granddaughter. But again, there is an unmistakeable tension here between action and stasis;
the dad is angry at being made to feel a burden, and in places he is yelling at his
daughter. That’s not rhythmic like the smacking of the ping-pong balls is, but these
emotional outbursts give some punctuation to the shot. And like the circular quality
of the student’s motion, the sense of resignation, of being forever fated to repeat the
same, is palatable. Here’s a challenge for those who want to watch the film again
on DVD; when this sequence comes up, turn the subtitles off (German speakers are
exempt from this little exercise!). The coldly angry, and most importantly the repetitive quality of the sequence are still there. Understand the dialogue and you’ll see
that the old man is not really saying anything, just going around in circles because
he is so alone. Let that still image wash over you completely, prevent the dialogue
from distracting you from its duration, its closeness, its richly evoked portrait someone slowly becoming angrier, and you will really see that the old man is not really
saying anything, just going around in circles because he is so alone. You’ll see the
way in which for Haneke, this is not just a matter of story but primarily of matter of
visuals, of doing what only film can do.
71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls is filled with sequences like these; I’ve
chosen these two only because they remain in my mind the most clearly. The image where the ping-ponger watches the video footage of his match, or where the
bank guard and his wife have a supper that is punctuated by domestic violence are
two more examples of incredibly evocative, single-shot sequences whose powerful
analyses of the alienation of European life lie in the way that they unfold visually. A
lot of 71 Fragments draws on relatively straightforward editing to tell a story about a
society on the edge of deranged violence. The places where is breaks from that sort
of strategy, through, are where the film’s real mysteries are being evoked.
Jerry White is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta.
He regularly contributes to academic publications, as well as film magazines
such as Cinema Scope (Toronto), Vertigo (London), and Dox (Copenhagen).
35
The Castle | 1997 (TV) | 123 min | Germany/Austria
Adapting
Alienation:
Haneke’s Vision
of Kafka’s
The Castle (Das Schloss)
Carrie Smith-Prei
W
hen asked by a critic about what some believe to be his
didactic approach to filmmaking, Michael Haneke replied: “I violate spectators into
1
autonomy.” While this statement refers to the director’s interest in shaping the relationship between his films and his viewership, when broken down into its individual
components – violation, spectatorship, autonomy – this statement also points to the
process of adapting Franz Kafka’s large, uncompleted novel fragment The Castle
(Das Schloss) for Austrian television. Haneke transposes these three themes, also
present in Kafka’s modernist tale of alienation and power, into visual cues that form
Haneke’s ethical take on the aesthetics of Kafka’s text.
Kafka’s novel, written in 1922 and published posthumously in 1926, tells the story of
the land-surveyor K. who arrives in a snow-covered village controlled by an everwatchful castle. He professes to have been summoned by the castle, but there is
confusion as to the true nature of his appointment. The story narrates his repeatedly
36
frustrated attempts at validating his existence in the village by making contact with
the castle: he approaches messengers, clerks, and secretaries, and becomes romantically involved with women he deems have connections to the castle. Although
the castle’s bureaucratic machinery and methods of surveillance are never directly
explained, the overall oppressive atmosphere of the story is defined by the violently
absurd power structures upholding the castle-village relationship. Throughout, K.
struggles with increasing exhaustion; as the fragment comes to an end, K. is invited
to speak with a powerful secretary about his situation only to be overwhelmed by
sleep.
Haneke’s 1997 adaptation visually reflects the atmosphere of Kafka’s novel. We
follow K. (played by Ulrich Mühe) as he fights with power structures and wards off
villagers’ suspicious looks. At every turn the film K., like his literary counterpart,
is confronted by miscommunication, numbness, and alienation. In order to reflect
formally the novel’s fragmentary nature, Haneke uses black screens to break up
sequences and scenes; for a brief moment the disruption defining Kafka’s novel
interrupts the film’s intact storyline. The black screen can also be understood as
the “violation” Haneke discusses above. The aspects of seeing/not-seeing thematized by the black screens reflect the overall subversion of communication running
throughout the story. K. receives letters he can barely decipher, he learns that there
is no telephone in the castle, K.’s assistants speak over one another in a jumble of
repetition, and the file containing the history behind his summons has gone lost under an absurd pile of files. Through the black screen, the viewer shares K.’s difficulties in communicating his wishes to the castle; the viewing experience is hindered
or broken and the viewer must struggle to keep the narrative intact. Therefore this
visual violation also points to Haneke’s interest in including the spectator within the
confines of the film. The disruptive black screen forces the viewers to engage with
the film by questioning the truth of visual representation and completing the gaps
in the story.
The film’s opening scene illustrates how these visual and narrative tactics form the
third aspect of Haneke’s ethical approach, autonomy. We meet K. as he arrives in
the village inn and is offered a straw bed by the fire. After K. has settled in the
screen goes black. He is shaken awake by Schwarzer, son of a lower-level official of
the castle, who informs him that no one is allowed in the village without the castle’s
prior approval. Upon hearing this information, K. absurdly asks: “Is there a castle
here?” The ridiculous exchange of information is repeated shortly thereafter, as
Schwarzer must make two telephone calls in order to confirm K.’s identity as land
surveyor. The narrator announces, “the castle had appointed him to the post of
land surveyor,” as K. slowly turns his head toward the camera. The spectator is
37
confronted with a close-up of K.’s face in the precise moment his identity is verified.
Another black screen ends the scene. Autonomy, here the triumph of authenticated
identity, is ruptured through the abrupt disappearance of the image at the moment
of recognition. Like the first black screen that signals sleep, the black screen here
erases subjective consciousness.
Interestingly, it is perhaps this visual portrayal of Kafka’s interest in powerlessness
or Ohnmacht, a word that in German fittingly refers to not only loss of power but
also a literal loss of consciousness, that best fulfills Haneke’s formula for his filmmaking. Haneke wishes to incite the viewer’s the desire for autonomy – that is,
to develop individuality in the face of anonymous power structures – through the
viewer’s experience of discomfort. In The Castle, the viewer experiences this in the
visual blackouts and the frustrated communication, but also in K.’s overwhelming
sleepiness, or in the frigid snow and blizzards blanketing the scenes and obscuring
sight. Haneke’s films often characterize humanity’s numbness, from the coldness
central to the three films of his aptly dubbed “glaciation trilogy” to the depiction of
violence perpetrated by anesthetized youths in Funny Games (1997) to the slow psychological terror of Caché (2005). He often connects numbness to the effects of tele-
38
The Castle
shows the
almost
valiantly
absurd
struggle
to retain
individual
identity in
the face of
alienation
forces.
vision on the acceleration of this “glaciation”. In a 2003
interview, Haneke explained his interest in television
as a symbol of “our collective loss of reality and social
disorientation. Alienation is a very complex problem,
but television is certainly implicated in it.” Television
destroys our ability to perceive reality and “to have a
3
palpable sense of the truth of everyday experience.”
Unlike Haneke’s other films that directly depict the
result of the media’s alienating properties, The Castle
shows the almost valiantly absurd struggle to retain individual identity in the face of alienation forces. The
failure of visual, oral, and aural communication – the
sensatory modes of film – symbolizes that struggle and
places it within the realm of visual media. That The
Castle itself is a television movie, not a theatrical release, would suggest that this struggle is also intimate;
unlike the violence projected onto the big screen in
the anonymous space of the movie theater, this quiet
alienation penetrates the individual in the safety of the
home.
This viewer is implicated in the final sequence. As the
film comes to a close we watch K. and Gerstäcker, who
wishes to provide K. with work and a bed, struggle
through a blizzard. They are shrouded in darkness and
snow as their words are swallowed by the wind. After
a stretch of silence, the narrator outlines the scene to
follow, which the viewer, still watching the men fight
against the elements, must merely imagine. The narrator describes Gerstäcker’s mother, sitting in a warm and
dimly lit cottage. The narrator notes that the woman is
difficult to understand and the final spoken sentence of
the film, “but what she said…,” leaves the exchange of
information incomplete; we never hear what it is she
said. Instead we watch an obscured image while listening to what is ultimately the failure of oral communication. The sentence, “[h]ere ends Kafka’s fragment,”
written across a black screen ends the film. By utilizing
this statement to close the film, Haneke references the
act of adaptation by destabilizing authorship: the stateThe Films of Michael Haneke
39
ment describes but does not belong to the original text. However, by informing his
viewers of the reason for the text’s abrupt end, Haneke also subverts any final wish
to violate the spectator into autonomy. He provides the fragment with closure and
in so doing, restores the possibility that intact narratives can indeed exist. In this
manner, “[h]ere ends Kafka’s fragment” could be “what she said.”
Carrie Smith-Prei studied and taught German literature and film in St. Louis, Berlin, and Dublin before coming to the University of Alberta to join the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural
Studies as an Assistant Professor of German.
Endnotes
1. As quoted in: Roy Grundmann, “Auteur de Force: Michael Haneke’s ‘Cinema of Glaciation,’”
Cineaste: America’s Leading Magazine on the Art and Politics of the Cinema, 32.2 (March 2007): 12.
2. Christopher Sharrett, “The World That Is Known: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” trans.
Jurgen Heinrichs, Cineaste, 28.3 (June 2003): 30.
3. Sharrett 30.
40
Funny Games | 1997 | 108 min | Austria
Funny Games U.S. | 2007 | 111 min. | U.S.A.
Paul Matwychuk
Game
Theory
x2:
I
Michael Haneke’s
Never-Ending
Cycle of Torture
n a video interview included in the DVD for his original 1997 version of Funny Games, Michael Haneke claims that his film was inspired by newspaper accounts he had read of violent crimes being committed by young people
from the German middle class. Since the perpetrators came from good, financially
prosperous families, the crimes could not be blamed on any of the social factors –
broken families, financial deprivation, drugs – that often drive young people growing up in poverty into committing violently antisocial acts. Haneke says he found the
phenomenon troubling, and channeled that unease into the script for Funny Games.
It’s an odd statement to make – partly because it sounds more like he’s describing
his 1992 film Benny’s Video (about an alienated German teenager so numbed from
hours of watching violent videos that he brings a girl to his bedroom and kills her),
and partly because Funny Games seems completely uninterested in providing sociological motives of any kind for the actions of Paul and Peter, the two young men
who spend pretty much the entire film humiliating, torturing, and finally killing a
mild-mannered family in their summer cottage.
41
Indeed, Haneke deliberately includes a scene where Paul laughs off the father
Georg’s attempts to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing – first Paul
spins a story about Peter’s troubled home life, then claims they’re both drug addicts
who kill nice families to support their habit. Paul is doing more than merely lying
here – he’s making fun of the very idea that their behaviour could have an explanation, that it could arise from anything other than an irrational urge to cause pain and
misery. (Viewers may be reminded of a similar running gag from The Dark Knight,
in which The Joker tells a different, contradictory story every time someone asks
him how he acquired his grotesque facial scars. It’s almost as if Paul, Peter, and The
Joker have no past – or at least, their actions are so purely irrational, so beyond any
simple psychoanalysis, that looking for an explanation for their actions would be a
wild goose chase.)
That said, Haneke provides enough clues to suggest that Paul and Peter come from
the same privileged social background as Georg, Anna, and their son Schorschi.
Their hair is neatly cut. They wear tennis whites, clean sneakers, and deck shoes.
Paul appreciates Georg’s expensive golf clubs and, as we find out in the film’s final
sequence, he also knows how to handle a sailboat. In the early scenes, they conduct
themselves with such politeness that it’s almost obnoxious – always making sure to
refer to Georg as “sir” and claiming to take offence at even the smallest breach of
etiquette. Indeed, when we first meet them, nothing about their appearance seems
out of place within this upscale community of weekend yachters and golfers. That’s
how they gain admittance so effortlessly into Georg and Anna’s home – Peter only
has to appear at the back door politely asking to borrow some eggs and Anna lets
him right in.
Haneke’s ambiguous characterization of Paul and Peter is one of Funny Games’
shrewdest touches. Right up until the end of the film, it is impossible to figure out
what they’re up to, how they choose their targets, or even what their relationship is
to each other. Why, for instance, do they go through the whole charade of borrowing
eggs, and then “accidentally” smashing them? Does it amuse them to annoy their
victims in this way? Do they take pleasure in seeing how far they can prevail on their
politeness? Are they perhaps hoping to provoke their victims into doing something
rude – is it only when their sense of propriety is offended that they feel justified in
going on the attack?
More questions arise. Are Paul and Peter’s little spats – as when Peter angrily tells
Paul to stop making fun of his weight and calling him “Tubby” – for real or just another put-on? Why do Paul and Peter leave the house after killing Schorschi, only
42
Funny
Games is
a movie
created to
condemn
the kind of
people who
go to see
a movie
like Funny
Games.
to come back an hour or so later to torment Georg and
Anna some more? Just to toy with them? In Paul and Peter’s minds, do Georg and Anna “deserve” their fate? Is
there anything they could have done differently to have
convinced Paul and Peter to leave them alone?
Funny Games has been compared to Cape Fear, the 1962
thriller directed by J. Lee Thompson in which Robert
Mitchum played an ex-con who attacks Gregory Peck’s
middle-class family – but in that film, Mitchum’s attacks
were “justified” by the fact that Peck was the lawyer
who had originally put him away, using some trumpedup evidence to do so. Funny Games may be more
aligned with Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape
Fear, which toyed with the idea that the con (this time
played by Robert De Niro) had arrived almost as punishment for the father’s “sins” against his family (adultery,
moral hypocrisy, and so on). The family in Funny Games
gets a minimal amount of characterization, but they’re
introduced driving to their cottage in their SUV, playing some kind of “guess-the-composer” game with their
collection of classical music CDs. They seem like a loving, cultured family – but is there something about their
life of comfortable complacency (living in their beautiful,
white homes, ordering so much meat they can’t possibly eat it all themselves), something about their carefree
conviction that nothing bad could ever befall them, that
Haneke finds so offensive that he can’t resist vandalizing it? (The abrasive John Zorn music that Haneke plays
over the opening credits, full of chattering vocal gibberish and an eardrum-piercing saxophone solo, drowning out the Handel CD they’re listening to, is the audio
equivalent of someone angrily scribbling over a poster in
the subway with a black Magic Marker.) Are Paul and
Peter like malevolent spirits, summoned up like Robert
Mitchum or Robert De Niro’s sweaty Max Cady, to give
them a dose of reality?
And as the film progresses, it starts to look like Paul and
Peter may not even be technically “human” in the way
43
that Georg, Anna, and Schorschi are – they’ve shown up at Georg and Anna’s cottage to torture and kill them purely because that’s the function Michael Haneke has
created them to carry out. Paul is even conscious of the fact that he’s in a movie, and
occasionally even talks to the audience. (Curiously, Peter doesn’t seem to have been
granted this level of consciousness – at one point, Paul addresses the camera while
Peter sits beside him on the couch, snacking, apparently unaware of the fourth wall
being shattered right in front of him.)
Contrary to many people’s memory of the film, Haneke breaks the fourth wall only
a handful of times – I counted only five (okay, possibly six):
1. During the scene where Anna goes looking for the body of the family dog while Paul coyly gives her directions, Paul turns to the camera
and gives the audience a smug wink. (In the 2007 American version, Paul
merely satisfies himself with a smirky smile.)
2. When Paul puts a pillowcase over Schorschi’s head and bets Georg and
Anna that their entire family will be dead in 12 hours, he turns to the camera to ask the audience if we think they’ll survive, sardonically remarking,
“You’re probably on their side, aren’t you?”
3. Later on in the night, when Paul explains to Anna the rules of the game
he calls “The Loving Wife,” he once again starts talking to the audience,
telling us how he’s only giving us what we want: “a story with plausible
plot development.” (Curiously, the American version omits one of the funnier jokes from the 1997 original, when the killers remark, “Besides, we’re
not up to feature length yet.” The fact that the actor delivers the line at the
91-minute mark – when the film has technically achieved feature length –
doesn’t diminish its humour.)
4. In the film’s most outrageous moment, Anna grabs a hunting rifle from
a coffee table and blows a bullet right into Peter’s stomach – whereupon
Paul picks up a remote control and literally rewinds the movie to a point
a few seconds before Anna got the gun so that this time he can snatch it
away from her before she even gets a chance to shoot it. This moment
probably makes more sense on home video than in a theatre – I’ve never
understood how Paul is able to rewind a movie like a VHS tape when it’s
actually being projected from a booth on celluloid.
44
5. In the final scene, Paul shows up at the back door of a cottage owned
by friends of Georg and Anna’s, asking to borrow a few eggs – presumably intending to start the whole kill-and-torture process over again with
a new family. As the wife heads off to the kitchen, Paul stares into the
camera, whereupon the image freezes and the closing credits play while
Paul’s image continues to look ominously at us. Can he see us? Will he be
coming for us one of these days as well?
6. I’d also make the case that the playing of that cacophonous John Zorn
music over the opening credits counts as a meta moment as well. It’s the
film’s only instance of non-diegetic music, and it gets the film off to a deliberately disorienting start. Later in the film, Haneke uses the song almost as Paul’s theme music – when Paul corners the runaway Schorschi
in the upper floor of a neighbour’s empty house, he plays the Zorn CD on
the stereo as scary “mood music” for the final stages of their chase – sort
of like Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs playing “Stuck in the Middle
With You” before he tortures the cop. (This is another moment of the film
whose logic bothers me. Was Paul carrying around that John Zorn CD in
his shorts all night long, just waiting for the proper spooky occasion to
play it? Or did he just spot it in the CD collection of the house’s owners? I
don’t know... they didn’t seem like Zorn fans.)
45
One of the most striking aspects of Funny Games
is the way Haneke incorporates these flagrantly
artificial moments into a film that otherwise places such a high premium on naturalism, from the
completely deglamourized, makeup-free performances by Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe
(whose characters’ agony, both physical and emotional, is never less than utterly convincing) and
scenes like the grueling, unbroken 10-minutelong shot in which Anna, in her underwear, her
legs bound and her arms tied behind her back,
slowly gets to her feet, frees herself, and then
helps her injured husband stand up and limp
downstairs.
Haneke films that entire, excruciating scene from
a clinical remove, like a scientist coolly observing
his subjects from behind a pane of one-way glass.
But there’s a paradox here: Haneke is definitely
carrying out an experiment in Funny Games,
but Georg and Anna aren’t its subjects – we are.
We’re the ones, in Haneke’s view, who deliberately seek out violent entertainment, who understand the rules that Hollywood movies play by in
order to manipulate our responses to onscreen
violence and even sometimes get us to approve
of murder; and he’s the scientist who wants to see
how we’ll react when those expectations are deliberately upended.
Haneke peppers the film with details that seem
to be setting up Paul and Peter’s defeat, but none
of them pay off. The friends of Georg and Anna
whom Anna invites over for dinner just before
Peter comes by to borrow the eggs? They never
show up. That knife that Haneke shows us falling onto the floor of the boat? The one the killers
don’t know about? Sorry – just a red herring. That
pregnant line of dialogue about Peter not being
able to swim? Nope – he never falls overboard.
46
Haneke is
definitely
carrying
out an
experiment
in Funny
Games, but
Georg and
Anna aren’t
its subjects
– we are.
Georg, Anna, and little Schorschi all die, one by one, in the most casual, anti-dramatic, meaningless ways possible.
Subverting audience expectations is something all good horror and suspense directors learn to do – both genres thrive on misdirecting audiences, leading them to expect one plot development and then walloping them with another. If the writer and
director do their job well, audiences might even laugh with delight at how cleverly
they’ve been fooled.
But in Funny Games, Haneke seems determined to make you feel guilty for deriving
any enjoyment whatsoever from the events onscreen. He’ll deliberately shape his
narrative to provoke a certain response from his audience, and then condescendingly scold them for having that response. (“You’re probably on their side, aren’t
you?”) It’s hard to think of a more perverse movie – Funny Games is a movie created
to condemn the kind of people who would go see a movie like Funny Games.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, “the kind of people who would go see
the kind of movie that Funny Games only appears to be, judging from the poster.”
Because here in Edmonton, the original German version of Funny Games was not
seen by the consumers of violent mainstream entertainment; instead, it played to
a tiny handful of art-film connoisseurs at Metro Cinema. Haneke himself seems
aware of that fact – and frustrated that the very mainstream moviegoers who most
“needed” to see a paradigm-smashing movie like Funny Games are precisely the
ones most resistant to watching anything with subtitles.
And so, in 2007, Haneke somehow convinced Warner Independent Pictures to finance a remake of Funny Games, this time in English, as Funny Games U. S. And
unlike poor George Sluizer (whose English-language remake of his own Dutch
thriller The Vanishing removed the original’s terrifying, bleak final scene and substituted a notorious Hollywoodized “happy” ending), Haneke insisted on restaging
his original film nearly shot-for-shot.
Haneke’s fidelity to the original Funny Games seems to reinforce the notion that
the film is less a living, breathing artistic creation than a controlled experiment that
requires every element to be duplicated precisely in order to achieve the desired
effect. It’s kind of fascinating to see how many of even the smallest, most inconsequential-seeming details show up in both films: the shot of the family dog making a
nuisance of itself, sticking its head in the refrigerator as the mother (this time simply
named Ann) unpacks the groceries; the televised auto race that plays moronically
in the background after Paul and Peter leave the house and Ann tries to free herself
47
from her bonds; the absurdly large sweater that Ann puts on before climbing out the
kitchen window to look for help.
But there are a few subtle differences that creep into the American film as well,
through some mysterious confluence of the new actors’ physical appearances and
their fleeting, in-the-moment acting choices. This is all very subjective, but to my
mind, Peter comes off as a much more cretinous, loathsome figure in the American
version than in the German, where he merely seems clumsy and hapless – Brady
Corbet, who plays the role in the remake, grins a lot more often, almost as if he
enjoys being subservient to Paul. Also, and maybe this is just my imagination, in
the remake I get the feeling Haneke deliberately plays up the father’s impotence,
his humiliating inability to fight back these intruders on account of his smashed
kneecap – perhaps a further attempt to subvert and frustrate the expectations of the
American audience?
Or are they the expectations of audiences all around the world? Has the entire globe
been colonized by American movie conventions? And if so, perhaps it’s incumbent
upon Haneke to keep remaking Funny Games over and over again, in Spanish,
Japanese, Swedish, Hindustani, Italian, Tamil – subjecting one upstanding family
after another to game after identical game of “The Loving Wife.” Maybe that’s why
Peter and Paul don’t die at the end of Funny Games: they know they have lots more
work ahead of them.
Paul Matwychuk is the film editor of the Edmonton alt-weekly SEE Magazine and the resident film
and theatre reviewer for Edmonton AM on CBC Radio. His blog, The Moviegoer, can be found at
http://mgoer.blogspot.com.
48
Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys | 2000
| 118 min | France/Germany/Romania
Code
Unknown:
Reading Through
A
Reverberation
AMY FUNG
s a fragmented series of incomplete tales, Code Unknown
(Code Inconnu) (2000) remains auteur Michael Haneke’s most obscurely unfolding
narrative. Challenging linearity and a filmic authenticity of truth in image, Haneke
decenters linear narrative structure in favour of more dispersed development
through incomplete sections of long tension-building sequences. Each sequence is
separated from the next by an abrupt cut and then a complete blackout. Rupturing any sense of narrative flow, yet building upon a collective drive of underlying
tension, this sequential momentum finally erupts in the film’s climatic sequence of
collective drum-playing whose sounds run right through four sequences and three
blackouts. The tension building throughout flows out as a reverberation through the
deaf-mute children who drum in unison. It is a process that occurs through mapping
a group rhythm onto individual acts and its presence is felt instead of seen or heard.
From the film’s first scene of a young deaf girl standing against a sterile blank wall
making gestures and retreating from the camera, Haneke establishes and heightens
the estrangement of coded communication. The young girl is revealed to be the
lead in a game of charades amongst fellow deaf mute children, who one by one
attempts to guess what they see. From “alone,” “hiding place,” “gangster,” “bad
conscience,” “sad,” to “imprisoned,” the young girl shakes her head at each answer
Code Unknown
49
before the scene ends frozen on the young girl’s expressionless face. Nothing has
been communicated except for the failure of communication itself. The guesses all
aptly apply to the emotions the girl could be expressing, which also runs parallel
to the emotions present but unspoken throughout the film itself. Although the girl
makes outward gestures, her intentions and actions remain indecipherable – and
this is a condition that will apply to each of the film’s main characters too.
Four lives and stories converge along a street in contemporary Paris, and their
chance encounter breaks out into respective tangents that complicate social issues
of declining rural populations, immigration, and racism. Filmed with crisp precision in long takes, Code Unknown does not play out as melodrama, suspense, or
anything genre-specific. Rather, the film clips along cutting from scene to scene in
mid-action and often mid-sentence, scrolling from one story fragment to the next.
From the French actress to the farmer to the illegal Romanian immigrant, the characters’ actions and conversations are captured without halt as they slide away and
finally crash back into one another. Ending the same way it begins, the film does
not trigger or even capture a change in society: the Romanian returns illegally after
deportation and continues panhandling on the same street, and the actress changes
her apartment security code once again.
Uninterested in restoring narrative balance of any sort, Code Unknown remains one
of Haneke’s most difficult films to date. Often noted for his scathing critiques of
contemporary European society, Haneke fits more into the realm of reflection and
mediation than critique or judgment, as his observations into life seek out an existential reasoning rather than a moralistic imperative.
As Haneke shifts focus from Austria to Paris, the social issues are magnified through
the characters who randomly come into a brief encounter on a street corner. Anne
(Juliette Binoche) comes out of her apartment and is accosted by her lover’s younger
brother, Jean (Alexandre Hamidi), who ruefully notes that the code of her front door
keypad lock has changed again. In an extended shot parallel to the bustling pedestrian traffic, we are made privy to their conversation with bodies walking in front,
behind, and between the two as they walk left to right along the street. This action
of following movement, mostly from left screen to right screen, occurs throughout
the rest of the film in various places by all the characters. Their explicitly similar
movements reinforces a fragmented sense of direction and unity, a disunity that
Haneke ultimately exploits narratively and spatially. Walking left to right, Jean is
at the mercy of Anne’s hospitality as a city Parisian with an apartment; once the
movement shifts, Jean aggressively displaces his own helplessness by insulting a
beggar. After Anne buys Jean a brioche and leaves him the keys, Jean walks back
50
From the
film’s first
scene…Haneke
establishes and
heightens the
estrangement
of coded
communication.
right screen to left and crumples the brioche bag and throws
it down on Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu) who is begging outside the bakery. Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), a young Parisian
of Malian heritage catches up to Jean and pulls him back
to apologize to Maria. Jean resists, a scuffle ensues, Anne
rushes back to protect Jean, Maria is detained, and Amadou
is refused his I.D. and arrested. The simplicity of the scene
comes from the camera’s gliding position and continuous
shot duration, positioning us as surveyors of the unfolding action without ever attaching to any single individual psyche.
We are presented with various social classes clashing in this
one morning, including the shop owners and onlookers to
the nonplussed citizens walking by and watching. The construction of the scene is not only between the speaking parts
of Anne, Jean, Maria, and Amadou, but lies heavily on how
they relate to each other and to the people around them. Just
as Jean emerges seemingly out of nowhere, so do Amadou
and Maria, suggesting that human connections are sudden,
random, and everywhere, ready to spark at any moment to
create a new tangent that has consequences beyond our own
individuality, affecting a code entirely unknown.
Following the narrative line of Anne, we see her audition for
a thriller in a dilapidated room. The entire scene from beginning to end is a single take. The lack of establishing context
means that the scene can be construed either as an audition or as a snuff-video. With no context, we only see Anne
looking into the camera as she becomes more frightened,
pleading for her life, with only a voice confirming that she
will die and that she should reveal her “true face.” Isolated
from everything in the outside world, the killer in the thriller
film, who is also the director in this meta-scene, asks Anne
to “react to what’s happening,” but within the metacontext
of Haneke’s film, the reaction to the situation is multifaceted,
its intention cannot be pinpointed and only exists in a highly
constructed world within this sequence.
Anne, who makes-believe for a living, has a problematic relationship with her lover, Georges (Thierry Neuvic), a photojournalist who seeks out “truth” in war-torn countries.
Code Unknown
51
Georges, in a voice-over to a letter (presumably addressed to Francine’s husband),
speaks of how easy it is to talk about “the ecology of the image,” and the “value of
the non-transmitted image,” but concedes that in the end it is life that counts. He
recounts that while he was being held captive, a guard continually threatened him
with a gesture indicating that he would slit his throat, but the next guard continually
repeated the phrase “What can I do for you?” in perfect English. In both scenarios,
Georges experiences a false sense – either of threat or of hope. He can only connect
through the mediation of his camera, which he sees as capturing a truth. But his
distanciation from the people in his photographs carries over to his home life. When
Anne calls his attention to the fact that the neighbor’s daughter may be being physically abused, Georges makes it clear that it is of no concern to him and shows more
interest in choosing between a Chablis and a Sancerre. The argument is shown first
as a head-on following of Anne and Georges, until she tests him with her possible
pregnancy. But then we are not allowed to see her face, and so, like the passing onlooker in the store whom Anne sneers at, we cannot know if Anne is telling the truth
or not. Only when the fight breaks out do we see her and Georges together in the
shot again. Georges prefers to look outward to the obvious suffering elsewhere rather than face the situations at home. The little neighbour girl’s funeral is later shown
with not a word spoken, just as not a word was spoken during her torment at home.
Silence dominates Jean and his father, who hardly utter a word to each other on the
farm. They eat in complete silence save for the sounds of hurried eating, they work
at feeding the animals with not a breath uttered, and when Jean is surprised with
a motorbike, there is only the sound of the motor racing off. In complete silence,
52
Jean’s father reads Jean’s good-bye note and, in a subsequent scene, executes all
the animals in his barn – a harrowing gesture of despair. There is greater tension in
these silent sequences than in most of the ambiguously coded dialogue throughout
the film.
Similarly, Georges’ inability to relate or connect to people except through his camera
eventually leaves him alone despite numerous conversations with Anne. His series
of photographs taken in the cars of Metro trains directly alludes to famed American
photographer Walker Evans’ Many Are Called (1966). After his big success with Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939), Evans began capturing portraits of people on
the New York subway using a hidden camera in his jacket. Georges, whose casually
framed images have the same candid directness as Evans’ photographs, is after the
same sense of authenticity that Evans achieved.
Georges’ teenaged brother Jean, who despises his own poverty, takes out his frustration on Maria by contemptuously dumping garbage in her lap. After Maria is
deported, we see her with her grandson in Romania, in a sandy windswept scene
where she is visually erased by the dust thrown up by construction machines from
the ongoing development around her. Maria is almost as invisible as she was in
Paris, vanishing in the scene as life moves all around her. At home Maria lies to
her friends that she was working in a school and things were going well and she
returned because she missed the children. The only scene of joy in the entire film is
Maria’s daughter’s wedding celebration of dancing and singing, and one wonders
why she wants to smuggle herself back into Paris where she will relive the shame
of begging for money. She does this presumably because there is no work at home
and everyone she knows also works away elsewhere in Dublin or in Italy or in Paris.
Conversely, Amadou’s father leaves Paris to return to a life in Mali, abandoning his
family in Paris, and we see him arrive in his home town in his car, a much greater
status symbol in Mali than in Paris where he drives a cab. Jean’s father, like Maria,
enjoys a post-Paris individual freedom and privilege, but unlike Maria, has left his
family in Paris instead of at home. Amadou is the only person in Paris who acknowledges Maria as a human being, and this makes him the only redeeming character.
But he too is problematized: to his family he acts too white, and to most Parisians
he is only black. He tells tall tales from his father’s days back in Mali to his enraptured white girlfriend. His white doctor friend gives sedative pills to Amadou’s
mother after she has prophetic migraines. When he is taken in by the police after
his confrontation with Jean (a situation not unfamiliar to him), his sobbing mother
can’t believe anyone would wish Amadou away, would wish him to return to the
home of his ancestors, for that is “ridiculous.” Amadou is not from there, but visibly
he is not from Paris, which remains embroiled in heated post-colonial debates and
Code Unknown
53
issues of assimilation versus segregation. In a telling scene, Amadou signs with his
deaf sister, who asks where their father went. When Amadou signs “Africa,” she responds with, “Where is Africa?” Trapped being African to Parisians and Parisian to
his family, Amadou is a realization of the ongoing duality of most modern European
cities and the expression of a traditional social structure clashing with a globalized
changing society.
The underlying narrative tensions building throughout the film and over forty scenes
finally explode through reverberations of the drumming by the deaf mute children.
The rhythm flows across all the tangential stories suturing the film together into
an underlying tension. Preceding the explosion of drumming is the difficult scene
of two youths harassing a woman – who turns out to be Anne – on the metro. One
young man aggressively taunts Anne while the other plays his audience, teasing her
as too upper-class looking to have to ride with commoners like them. Her silence
provokes him further as a sign she is too good to talk to him, and in mockery he characterizes himself explicitly as “a little Arab boy looking for a bit of affection.” The
scene begins with a tall, athletic looking white man sitting down in the middle of
the shot with backpacker’s bags, dominating the frame and the action beginning in
the far background before moving to the foreground. The anticipation provoked by
the composition is that the athletic white man will intervene to protect Anne at some
point, but he only throws a few glances at the action. It is the small, dark-skinned
man barely noticeable in the bottom left corner of the frame who stands up to the
aberrant youths. The scene, which again is in one extended take, goes from scream
to whisper like many of Haneke’s scenes, taking the position of a passive bystander.
Jumping from non sequiturs to non sequiturs that begin and end disjunctively and
crumble the structure of story, Haneke does not provide a resolution. Unleashing an
affective reverberation, a tension felt that you do not need to see or decode, Haneke
affirms that each code by itself is unknowable, that it must be understood within a
collective rhythm unfolding across variations. Only through an acknowledgement of
the collective rhythm that underlies each sequence do the individual stories begin to
make sense. Similar to what Georges refers to as an “ecology of the image,” Code
Unknown also bears the notion of an ecology assembled, each bringing forth a set of
independent and interdependent factors set to irrevocably alter one another. Like a
single photographic still that is neither a close-up or a classic postcard composition
– a shot slightly too close to alienate and yet too far to distinguish, a trait emblematic of Haneke’s shots – Code Unknown does not tell the full story until deciphered
through all of its individual parts.
Amy Fung is an Edmonton-based visual art writer and curator. She is currently completing her
Masters in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.
54
ia
The Piano Teacher | 2001 | 131 min | France/Germany/Poland/Austr
From a
Whisper
to a
Scream:
The Dynamics of
Passion in
La
Pianiste
T
Joel Maendel
he years of production for Code Inconnu [Code Unknown] and
La Pianiste [The Piano Teacher] (1999-2001) marked a major shift in the career of
Michael Haneke. He moved from the Austrian film industry to the French, a move
Haneke defends as necessary for funding his productions, though he is obviously
quite comfortable with the language and French actors have served him well. With
1
these two films he received wider distribution , greater critical notice, and became
recognized by many as the most sophisticated of modern European directors. The
two films keenly reflect his twin interests: how the basic building block of society,
the family unit, serves as the source of its ills, and how the commodification of art
has been the downfall of Western culture in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
In the case of La Pianiste, these themes manifest themselves in the relationships of
a stern piano teacher, Erika Kohut, with her Mother and with an apparently normal
young student named Walter Klemmer. The way Haneke spins the table to expose
Walter’s normality as an excuse to act abominably to another human is highly disTHE PIANO TEACHER
55
concerting; more wrenching in fact, than watching Erika punish herself through
self-mutilation. This microscopic study of two people clearly attracted to one another but unable to connect is a painful complement to the macroscopic study of
Code Inconnu, with its sprawling scope taking into account not just sex and art, but
2
ethnicity, politics, and justice.
3
Based on Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel, Die Klavierspielerin, Haneke’s film introduces Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) in a scene of domestic disharmony: a verbal
then physical battle between her and her mother (Annie Girardot) that erupts when
4
Mother asks about Erika’s whereabouts for the past few hours. The scene plays like
a daytime drama, which is exactly what we see next as we cut to Mother watching
a soap on television as the two make-up and prepare for bed. Erika lies in bed next
to her mother in place of her father. One imagines he abandoned the family years
ago and Mother insisted Erika replace him in the patriarchal role.
We meet Walter Klemmer (handsome Benoît Magimel) at a private recital where
both Erika and Walter perform. Walter changes his choice of performance from
Schönberg to Schubert once he learns of Erika’s great admiration for the composer.
The scenes of Walter watching Erika play, and then Erika watching Walter, feel
like the beginnings of a touching romance. It is such scenes as this that illustrate
just how well Haneke can create a typical Hollywood scenario to later expose the
falseness of it (a skill he uses to devastating effect in Funny Games, playing with the
genre of the thriller). The exchange of glances between Erika and Walter is touching and the viewer expects Walter will soften Erika and the two will eventually find
true love. That is, if the viewer has never seen a Haneke movie.
Walter determines at this very recital to drop his engineering classes and pursue
a musical career. The next time the two meet, he interrupts Erika’s lesson at the
Conservatory to inform her he plans to audition for the school. The first cracks in
Erika’s glacial exterior appear as Walter auditions. Erika struggles to maintain her
composure as she is moved by his performance. Her high-held chin drops a few
millimeters and her mouth opens slightly. She makes no notes on his performance,
instead doodling as the other adjudicators heap praise.
Erika’s extreme alienation from society becomes evident at a rehearsal for the Conservatory students, where Erika witnesses a tender moment between Walter and
her pupil, Anna. Her jealous overreaction is to place broken glass in Anna’s coat
pocket, causing injuries to the girl which will possibly end her playing career. Walter takes this act as a confirmation of Erika’s love for him and they share their first
sexual encounter in the ladies bathroom. This is the first indication that Walter is ac56
tually more damaged than Erika. What healthy
individual would be sexually excited at the sight
of innocent blood? Erika tries to teach Walter
discipline by fellating him close to orgasm and
then ordering him not to come. After convincing
her to take him to orgasm, he ends the encounter
with “Next time, we’ll do much better, I promise.
Practice will make you perfect” (appropriating a
common piano teacher’s line).
It is highly probable that Erika is a virgin and is
familiar with the act of intercourse only through
pornography (we witness her attending a peep
show early in the film), which gives rise to her inability to be physically intimate with a flesh-andblood person. She likely led a sheltered childhood, spent mostly in front of the piano and not
with other children. And when she’s not playing
the piano, she is a stand-in for her departed father. When at last presented with the opportunity to engage in sex with another person, she
follows the sadomasochistic path that has piqued
her interest in pornography because it so clearly
matches the way of life she’s been taught. Her
desire for either complete control or utter lack of
control, like the black and white of the keyboard,
sends Walter on a disorienting trip.
The viewer
expects…
the two will
eventually find
true love. That
is, if the viewer
has never
seen a Haneke
movie.
Her hair is down for him for the first time in their
subsequent lesson; she shows signs of trying to
meet him partway. The music he plays in this
scene is the last music we hear in the film, with
45 minutes still to play out. She berates his inability to comprehend the dynamics of Schubert.
“Anarchy is hardly your forte”, she tells him, before handing him a letter of sexual demands, the
music part of the lesson now over.
He tells her he loves her, which is entirely a ploy
to proceed directly to sex. It may have worked
THE PIANO TEACHER
57
with other girls in the past, but Erika is not fazed one iota. After their lesson, she
hesitantly allows him to enter her apartment whereupon he finally reads the letter
she has composed. We can see over Walter’s shoulder that it is densely packed with
information and several pages long. But the impression, at least for me, is that Erika
doesn’t desire sexual release with the acts she describes, but punishment. She can
not be anyone but who she is, yet she feels guilty every moment for not conforming
to societal norms. She asks Walter to punish her not only because she feels she can
trust him, but also because he represents the highest ideals of the society she wants
to conform to. She tells him, “I want what you want” as in she wants to be loved
and respected, but without compromise. He flatly refuses her demands to be sat on
and punched in the stomach. Later that night in bed, Erika’s frustration spills out
as she rolls over onto her mother as if she is carrying out the role of the father in its
every function.
The next day Erika appears unexpectedly at Walter’s hockey game. They enter a
storage closet and she attempts to apologize for coming clean with her desires. She
wants to conform, she is in such need of companionship. Again, neither party is satisfied. He says “I must really disgust you” when she gags on his penis and vomits. She
exits the closet into the white light of the ice rink, fully exposed and entirely vulnerable. Haneke has said that he attempted to make Walter more sympathetic than in the
novel and his reason is to emphasize Walter’s true colours in these final encounters.
That night, Walter returns to Erika’s apartment telling her he was jerking off under
her window. Walter is by now obviously the sick one of the two. Erika has been
nothing but honest with him and now his true nature is exposed. He beats her, saying that it is exactly what she wants. But of course it isn’t, it is a release for him not
for her. He calls her requests “games” and that he would like to “play” but she has
to be nice to him (i.e. have sex with him on his terms). He needs superficial sweetness. He then kisses her (Erika doesn’t kiss back) and he rapes her while she lies
motionless on the floor of her apartment, the blood running out of her face. “Will
you be all right? Do you need anything?” he asks before departing, the nice guy
persona back in place.
Replacing her injured student at the concert, Erika packs a knife in her handbag
before departing for the theatre. Does she plan to kill Walter for his actions? Kill
herself publicly in a final act of disgust? Perhaps she doesn’t know herself. Once
she arrives, she scans the theatre foyer awaiting his arrival. He finally arrives and
she walks towards him but is cut off by Walter’s aunt and uncle. She is frozen. After they depart into the theatre, Erika reaches for her knife and stabs herself, only
shallowly, above the heart. We cut to an exterior shot of the theatre and watch her
58
depart. The camera lingers on the theatre as we are asked to contemplate this
building dedicated to displays of discipline in the service of art. There is no music
over the closing titles.
This final shot is another example of Haneke’s penchant for long takes. Ironically,
shots such as this keep our attention on the characters and not on the cinematic
aspects, in this way allowing no comfortable distance or distraction for the viewer.
This strategy also minimizes ambiguity of plot, with the exception of the very end
of film, but of course the picture must end so who is to say how Erika goes on from
here? The numerous long shots also suggest documentary, as if there isn’t a perfectly timed succession of scripted scenes at work.
Given Haneke’s frank style, it is not remarkable that there have been so many different interpretations of the film. The different reactions are entirely dependent on
who audience members identify with. For the majority, the most likable and easily
understood character is Walter. He is handsome, polite, carefree, and not entirely
sure of what he wants to do with his life. His abhorrent reaction to Erika’s behaviour
repulses the audience he’s ingratiated himself to, leaving most viewers shaken and
unable to feel any attachment to the film thereafter.
Almost all reviews I’ve read of La Pianiste express only a vague understanding of
Erika’s motivations (except Jonathan Rosenbaum, who is plainly befuddled). Robin
Wood’s excellent article from CineAction, however, is an entirely lucid rumination
5
on Erika Kohut. The reason Wood achieves such clarity is because he identifies
on a deeply personal level with Erika in two respects: her struggle to find sexual
satisfaction and her adoration of music. Wood stresses the importance of music to
the film, particularly the lyrics of Schubert’s Winterreise, which Erika and Anna
rehearse throughout the film with a young baritone. Though if Haneke were truly
intent on the lyrics of Winterreise being acknowledged by the audience, wouldn’t
he have added subtitles?
Even the principle artists behind La Pianiste are not entirely on the same page. Huppert, who later parodied this performance in François Ozon’s 8 Femmes wearing a
6
hair bun so tight she can hardly blink (one reels imagining Erika Kohut herself let
loose among that screwball family), has stated that the film illustrates the difference
between love and seduction, with Erika desiring the former and rejecting the latter
while Walter is of the opposite attitude. Erika’s need for love is apparent, but I am
unconvinced that seduction plays any role in Walter’s desires. Haneke, very smartly,
refuses to interpret his own work in print. He will discuss the facts of the case but
not the verdict. He has, however, shed some light on how he imagines Erika came
THE PIANO TEACHER
59
to be. “The music [in the film] is very beautiful, but the surroundings can become
an instrument of repression, because this culture takes on a social function that en7
sures repression, especially as classical music becomes an object for consumption.”
However we choose to view Erika Kohut, she is not soon forgotten. I can not help
but feel pity for Erika, unable to express herself sexually and unable to achieve
greatness as a musician, despite her unreserved passion for both.
Joel Maendel was the programmer and Executive Director of Metro Cinema from 2002 to 2006.
Endnotes
1. Code Inconnu was distributed by Mongrel Media in Canada and Leisure Time Features in the USA,
La Pianiste was distributed by Remstar in Canada and Kino in the USA.
2. La Pianiste and Code Inconnu share one further parallel, perhaps coincidental: Benoît Magimel
was for a time Juliette Binoche’s companion. The two have a daughter, born in 1999.
3. “Die Klavierspielerin” translates as “The Piano Player”, an uncommon term in German.
“Pianisitin” is the conventional German word for a female pianist.
4. Annie Girardot has played mother to Isabelle Huppert before in Docteur François Gailland
(France, 1976).
5. “Do I disgust you? or, tirez pas sur La Pianiste” by Robin Wood (CineAction, Spring 2002).
6. Production on 8 Femmes began in September 2001, 11 months after shooting wrapped on La
Pianiste.
7. From an interview with Christopher Sharrett conducted Nov 02 and Apr 03, printed in Cineaste,
Vol XXVIII, No 3 (Summer 2003), posted on the website Kinoeye.org in an expanded form.
60
any
The Time of the Wolf | 2003 | 114 min | France/Austria/Germ
tish strands
“a little bit of the
end of the world”:
Thoughts on
Time of the Wolf
T
ime of the Wolf / Le Temps du Loup (2003) centers on a cataclysmic event. Something has happened – though we are never given many details, and
principal questions remain enigmatically unanswered throughout the film. Formal
composition and ideas are artfully woven together focusing on universal themes
– morality, law and order, authority, justice, identity, death, mysticism, and most
notably, the possible role of society. Suspenseful and philosophical at the same time,
emotional but not sentimental, Time of the Wolf is a compelling examination of human behaviour in a state of crisis.
Originally planned as a project between Michael Haneke and Isabelle Huppert following Code Unknown (2000), Time of the Wolf was not able to secure full financing until after the international success of The Piano Teacher (2001). Featuring an
ensemble cast including Lucas Biscombe, Anais Demoustier, Beatrice Dalle, Patrice
Chereau, Hakim Taleb, Olivier Gourmet, Time of the Wolf also stars Maurice BeniTIME OF THE WOLF
61
chou whom Haneke fans will remember from Code Unknown as well as his Césarnominated performance in Caché (2005).
An affluent Parisian family (a mother and two children) is left to survive in the postapocalyptic countryside with no personal property, and very little food and water.
They encounter a feral young runaway, and together they find an abandoned train
station where others are likewise hoping for a kind of rescue.
“Especially nowadays if you turn on the TV, you’ll see in every bit of news, a little bit of the
end of the world. But it’s always far away, affecting other people. And I wanted to do a film for
our superfluous society who feels good and comfortable, who is watching the end of the world
on TV, because it’s far away. And to give it a taste of what it’d mean if it happened to them.”
- Michael Haneke
Several of Michael Haneke’s films have an absence of presence or the ‘missing’
patriarch, and the reason or way in which they have been removed or incapacitated from the narrative’s central action often marks the tone of the film (The Piano
Teacher, Caché, Funny Games US). Here, the unexpected and shocking death of
the father, Georges Laurent, likewise propels the narrative of Time of the Wolf into
action. Isabelle Huppert has spoken of her interpretation of the film as being a tale;
“Once upon a time … a mother left her home with two little children ….”
Children are also a subject of regular interest in Haneke’s work, and this is also
present within Time of the Wolf. Children regularly act as mirrors to adult characters
attempting to control or rationalization their behaviour, and Haneke’s camera particularly likes waiting on children learning; of being intuitive and exhibiting instinct
during especially difficult, often violent, situations.
Violence has a strong presence in Time of the Wolf. As in other Haneke films, violence is understood a something that affects us fundamentally, yet we are seemingly
unable to avoid it as a means. While Haneke’s other films have circled around the
relationship of violence within a smaller body of characters, in Time of the Wolf
these ideas are filtered through the larger collective. Is violence something to protect ourselves from, our does it always derive from within?
Time of the Wolf is divided primarily into two sections, or movements. The first half
is of the Laurent family, while being autonomous politically and socially, walking
abandoned roads, meeting indifference and hostility from most ‘neighbours’, and
finding shelters only to discover locked doors. Time becomes survival: to be hungry,
thirsty, tired, and cold. The second half of the film takes place at the train station,
and while perhaps the family has solved an issue of shelter and sustenance for the
62
immediate time being, now they are regularly forced to navigate through human
strategy: language, alignments, manipulation, and compromise.
But it is also at the train station where human kindness and creativity is offered
as a possibility. The dignity of the Anzoulay family, of culture exhibited through
collective storytelling and the gift of humour and entertainment. Of sharing music
together, and the folly or beauty in mystic thought such as the “36 of the Just” and
the “Brothers of Fire”.
Here too we see the complexities of human beings culminating in the final scene of
Benny initiating the sacrifice of himself to the fire in order to help the world regain
some sort of balance, and an initially portrayed dangerous man being the one to
save him.
Time of the Wolf is a sombre film. Sound becomes isolated and special, subtle to
shocking. A rickety bicycle, a burning fire, the estranged voices of grieving, a muffled cassette being played, of rifles fired. Inversely, the heavy weight of silent inaction during a scene of sexual assault becomes our burden and is terribly effective.
This quietness heightens and engages our other senses as well – the dampness of
morning in the country, the feeling of wearing a dead man’s sweater, the smell and
heat of dead horses and debris burning in a tall fire. Visually, Time of the Wolf is
a painterly film. We are reminded of human beings being quietly dwarfed by their
natural surroundings in the grey mist of Corot, of characters coming out of the darkness and into the light of Caravaggio, and the film’s conclusion on the French landscape that so many have been determined on capturing.
Film enthusiasts will be intuitive to impressions of Robert Bresson and Alfred Hitchcock. Scenes particularly reminiscent of Bresson’s stoicism include Benny’s quiet
building of a memorial for his dead pet budgie as his mother (Anne) and sister (Eva)
observe in silence. Another memorial scene of people congregating amongst a
make-shift grave for a dead infant son (as the sound of grieving punctures the stillness) and how simultaneously an approaching procession appears in the distance
is especially evocative. The sense of Hitchcock is more subtle; tension is created by
the efficiency of what visual information is allowed within the frame, always propelling us forward. A forever cascading rhythm of events where characters are trying
to keep up both physically and psychologically, and of characters not always being
what they are initially understood to be. Haneke continues to be regularly engaged
by themes ever-present in Hitchcock’s cinema as well; fear, violence, guilt, and desire. Recognizing the voyeuristic nature of cinema is also subtlety addressed in Time
of the Wolf; opening on a still landscape, patterned trees absorb the inclusion of an
TIME OF THE WOLF
63
approaching vehicle. The camera quietly positions itself to align with the trajectory
of the audience. It feels as though we are leading this narrative into being. A complicity? The camera regains its original position to that of observer.
Pessimism is often associated with the films of Michael Haneke, and Time of the
Wolf certainly may fall under such a banner for some viewers. However, there are
moments of such hope and possibility, and of stunning beauty. Brief, but ever bright Dear Papa,
Now I’ve found pencils and paper, I really have to write to you. So much is happening,
and I’ve no one to talk to. I don’t know if you can see or read or hear this now … or if you
can perceive anything, but I want to believe that you can. So I’m going to try, quite simply.
64
tish strands is a former film studies student who lives and works in Montréal.
Hidden | 2005 | 117 min | France/Austria/Germany/Italy
Caché
Steven Shaviro
Editor’s note: the following piece is reprinted, by permission, from the film blog of Steven Shaviro
(at http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=476).
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006
A
t first I thought of writing a proper review of Michael Haneke’s
Caché (Hidden) but I don’t feel up to it. What’s great about the film is that it produces affective blockage on every level. It doesn’t offer the viewer (or the characters) any way out. The protagonists, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette
Binoche), are intellectual yuppies just like the target audience of the film, just like
me. Indeed, whenever I saw their Parisian apartment – in which much of the film
takes place, and which is presented to us (like everything else in the film) largely
in long shot – I felt a bit of sadness and envy and guilt, because everything is so
perfect: meticulously neat and clean, with lots of space, sleekly minimal furniture,
enormous entirely filled bookcases, a roomy kitchen with lovely appliances doubtless purchased at the French equivalent of Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel, and upto-date technology including an enormous TV/video screen. They give perfectly
tasteful dinner parties in the dining room, and work comfortably in the large central
Caché
65
space. It’s just like what my home is supposed to look like, if only I were ever to
grow up (which, considering that I am in my early 50s, i.e. just about the same age
as Auteuil and his character, I evidently never will). Of course, the camera eye is so
distanced, so cooly observant, that it makes this ideal bourgeois space feel utterly
oppressive (as undoubtedly it would feel to me if I actually had it – which doesn’t
stop me from guiltily feeling that I ought to have it).
Caché is about the invasion, the porousness, of this seemingly perfect space.
Georges starts to receive videotapes, from an anonymous source, they are left on
his doorstep, which show him that his house is under surveillance. Nothing really
happens on the tapes – we just see people walking by the street outside, as well
as Georges and Anne leaving the house in the morning, or coming back in the
evening. But their mere existence is disturbing. The long shots from the surveillance footage are indistinguishable from the long shots that Haneke himself uses
throughout the film; indeed, in the opening shot, and several additional sequences
throughout, what we think first is the camera’s “objective” viewpoint turns out to
be that of the videotapes: we only discover this when one of the shots that fills the
screen is suddenly paused, or put into fast forward or rewind. There is no ontological
difference between the diegetic space – yuppified Paris – we are seeing as viewers
of the film, and the video/surveillance space that is captured on tape within the
diegesis. Indeed, there is no ontological difference between the spaces of the film
and the video, and the space that we, the viewers of the film, ourselves live in. We
never discover who sent the tapes: indeed, the narrative is so constructed as to make
the question of “who sent them?” impossible to answer. It’s not just that we are not
given enough information to find out the culprit; it is rather that, from within the
film’s own premises, in terms of the naturalistic world the film sets up, it is utterly impossible for the tapes to have been made at all – there is no way anyone could have
done it. This impossibility (combined with the almost complete accordance between
the tapes and Haneke’s own cinematic style) suggests that the condition of being
under surveillance – indeed, the whole condition of liberal complicity and guilt that
the film explores – is not an empirical matter, so much as it is a transcendental condition of late-capitalist social life.
I have no desire to rehearse the plot of Caché here. Let’s just say that things escalate, as the tapes go on to show Georges his childhood home, and eventually
lead him into a confrontation – no, let’s say rather a failed confrontation, a refusal
of confrontation – with his past. This “missed encounter” raises a maelstrom of issues involving class, race, and hypocritical liberal guilt and denial of guilt. Georges’
bourgeois comfort is entirely connected with, and directly based upon, class privilege and racism. This is the case both structurally and personally, both cognitively
66
and affectively, both socially in general and psychologically in the deepest levels of
Georges’ own inner life. Georges’ personal guilt and complicity might seem at first
to be just an allegory for the more general social condition; except that it is worked
through so intimately, with such rigor and depth, that it becomes simply inescapable. Haneke, with his camera’s cool surveillant distance, takes a sadistic pleasure
in the spectacle of Georges’ squirming – and the viewers’ squirming-by-involuntary-identification – through a series of denials, evasions, lies, and semi-confessions
(both to others and to himself). Georges’ and Anne’s perfect bourgeois marriage
decays into (or is revealed to have always been) a venomous battle of wills and
egos, just barely hidden beneath the glittering surfaces of perfection. Georges’ and
Anne’s relationship to their 12-year-old son Pierrot is also savaged: he is sullenly
indifferent to them, and they are utterly clueless and uncomprehending about him.
The bourgeois nuclear family is a nasty affair, though its relationship to the social
world outside it is even nastier. Georges is implicated (emotionally and morally,
though not legally) in another person’s (a working-class Arab man’s) miserable life
and eventual (on-camera, in the single most horrific scene of the film) suicide, and
we see him getting more and more panicky and self-righteous as he denies the
guilt which is his objectively, and which he evidently does feel on some level (as his
increasing desperation to escape it indicates to us). The film leaves Georges wallowing in his guilt and misery, but also hunkering down in the class and race privilege,
which he so reflexively takes for granted that he never once questions it, nor even
has the ghost of a suspicion that it exists.
And Georges’ position is also that of the viewer (who is structurally, a priori, an affluent white male, regardless of who is actually watching the film). We are made to feel
guilty and complicitous, while at the same time we are given no way out from this
position, and no release even from our own being safe because of the unquestioned
privileges that people less fortunate than us do not have. Indeed, we are shielded
from consequences because we are, after all, watching a film, this is not happening
directly to us in “real life.” Despite the fact that “real life” itself is revealed by Caché
to be no more (as well as no less) “real” than a video. Which means that, whatever
we understand intellectually, on the affective level we end up sharing Georges’ selfprotective sense of unquestioned privilege, as well as his sense of guilt.
In this way, Caché simultaneously abuses and flatters its audience. And I think that
the flattery (rather than the abuse) is the nastiest thing about the film. From a political point of view, after all, guilt is just about the most worthless and useless affect/
emotion there is. Nobody has ever questioned their privilege, or even done anything
decent, out of guilt. Oh, lots of white people “identify” with “minorities” out of guilt,
or give to charity (Live 8, anyone?), or mutter pious platitudes and express their
Caché
67
The bourgeois
nuclear family
is a nasty
affair, though
its relationship
to the social
world outside
is even
nastier.
lege and racism. This is the case both structurally and
personally, both cognitively and affectively, both socially in general and psychologically in the deepest
levels of Georges’ own inner life. Georges’ personal
guilt and complicity might seem at first to be just an
allegory for the more general social condition; except that it is worked through so intimately, with such
rigor and depth, that it becomes simply inescapable.
Haneke, with his camera’s cool surveillant distance,
takes a sadistic pleasure in the spectacle of Georges’
squirming – and the viewers’ squirming-by-involuntary-identification – through a series of denials, evasions, lies, and semi-confessions (both to others and to
himself). Georges’ and Anne’s perfect bourgeois marriage decays into (or is revealed to have always been)
a venomous battle of wills and egos, just barely hidden
beneath the glittering surfaces of perfection. Georges’
and Anne’s relationship to their 12-year-old son Pierrot is also savaged: he is sullenly indifferent to them,
and they are utterly clueless and uncomprehending
about him. The bourgeois nuclear family is a nasty affair, though its relationship to the social world outside
it is even nastier. Georges is implicated (emotionally
and morally, though not legally) in another person’s (a
working-class Arab man’s) miserable life and eventual
(on-camera, in the single most horrific scene of the
film) suicide, and we see him getting more and more
panicky and self-righteous as he denies the guilt which
is his objectively, and which he evidently does feel on
some level (as his increasing desperation to escape it
indicates to us). The film leaves Georges wallowing in
his guilt and misery, but also hunkering down in the
class and race privilege, which he so reflexively takes
for granted that he never once questions it, nor even
has the ghost of a suspicion that it exists.
And Georges’ position is also that of the viewer (who is
structurally, a priori, an affluent white male, regardless
of who is actually watching the film). We are made to
feel guilty and complicitous, while at the same time we
68
are given no way out from this position, and no release even from our own being
safe because of the unquestioned privileges that people less fortunate than us do not
have. Indeed, we are shielded from consequences because we are, after all, watching a film, this is not happening directly to us in “real life.” Despite the fact that
“real life” itself is revealed by Caché to be no more (as well as no less) “real” than
a video. Which means that, whatever we understand intellectually, on the affective
level we end up sharing Georges’ self-protective sense of unquestioned privilege,
as well as his sense of guilt.
In this way, Caché simultaneously abuses and flatters its audience. And I think that
the flattery (rather than the abuse) is the nastiest thing about the film. From a political point of view, after all, guilt is just about the most worthless and useless affect/
emotion there is. Nobody has ever questioned their privilege, or even done anything
decent, out of guilt. Oh, lots of white people “identify” with “minorities” out of guilt,
or give to charity (Live 8, anyone?), or mutter pious platitudes and express their
support for “identity politics” of various sorts, which allows them to be self-congratulatory about how radical they are, when in fact they aren’t. Indeed, many people of
power and privilege positively get off on being made to feel guilty, whether it is the
oft-repeated apocryphal story of wealthy CEOs getting release by being abused by
a dominatrix, or the more common everyday spectacle of white suburbanites feeling
cleansed after getting a good scolding (followed by absolution) from Oprah (or white
people with more intellectual/political pretensions getting a good scolding from bell
hooks). I do not claim to be exempt from this whole process.
And this is exactly what Caché does to/for its viewers. Or better, it indeed exposes
this mechanism of flattery-through-guilt; but without offering any escape from it,
and even without quite criticizing or critiquing it. As if that were just the way it is:
which indeed, it is. This is what the obvious question about Haneke’s own position
comes down to. (Is he claiming exemption from the condition that he otherwise
shows to be universal among people of privilege? Well, yes and no. That’s an evasion, of course, but the evasion itself is the point). What’s most powerful about the
film is that it not only decrees guilt, but cranks the guilt up to a self-reflexive level:
the guilt is reduced or managed by the flattery and privilege that we retain while
observing all this; but such a meta-understanding itself creates a new, higher-order
sense of guilt, which in turn is cushioned by a new, higher-order sense of self-congratulation as to our superior insight, which in turn is an unquestioned privilege
that, when comprehended, leads to a yet-higher-level meta-sense of guilt, and so on
ad infinitum. There’s complete blockage, no escape from this unending cycle. The
experience of the film is one both of self-disgust and of a liberation, through aestheticization, from this self-disgust. The latter is what makes Caché truly insidious,
in an almost Bataillean way.
Caché
69
There’s a long shot/long take at the very end of the film, in which – foregrounded
in no way, so it is easy to miss – amidst a whole crowd of people doing all sorts of
things, we see some sort of contact between two of the minor characters (as far as I
could tell, it was Georges’ son Pierrot and the son of the Algerian suicide) that suggests even new levels of complicity and uncertainty. I think that this only reinforces
the film’s overall coldly delirious deadlock. The more explaining we need to do, the
more we are trapped in the film’s (and society’s) self-reflexive spiral of guilt and
privilege. The film offers no way out, because it never breaks with its sense of privilege, no matter how unwarranted it shows that privilege to be. The creepiness of
finding oneself under surveillance, the creepiness of seeing a marriage break down
into mutual vicious recriminations, is nothing compared to the creepiness of realizing that one still has one’s shield of privilege despite these intrusions, and that the
facade of bourgeois marriage will survive everything that’s going on underneath.
Footnote: I think that some sense of this ethico-political mise en abîme is what explains Armond White’s otherwise bizarre review of the film [“The Expendable Other,” New York Press, Jan. 4, 2006], in which he blames Haneke for exploiting the
Third World yet again under the guise of supporting it, and for lacking the alleged
“complexity and brilliance” and moral clarity of Spielberg’s Munich. White’s adoration of Spielberg is reprehensible and unconscionable, but the reasons he hates
Haneke are pretty much identical to the reasons I consider Haneke is one of the best
and most important European directors working today.
Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. His books include The
Cinematic Body and Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society. He blogs at The
Pinocchio Theory (http://www.shaviro.com/Blog).
70
Michael Haneke
ur e Fi lm s
Fi lm o g ra ph y o f Fe at
Compiled by Dave Gross
All films are directed and solely written by Michael Haneke, unless otherwise noted.
After Liverpool
1974 (TV). 89 min. West Germany. Südwestfunk.
Wr.: James Saunders.
Cast: Hildegard Schmahl, Dieter Kirchlechner.
Sperrmüll (Household Rubbish)
1976 (TV). West Germany.
Cast: Ernst Fritz Fürbringer, Tilli Breidenbach, Karlheinz Fiege, Suzanne Geyer.
Drei Wege zum See (Three Paths to the Lake)
1976 (TV). 97 min. Austria/West Germany.
Südwestfunk.
Cast: Ursula Schult, Guido Wieland, Walter Schmidinger, Bernhard Wicki, Yves
Beneyton.
Lemminge (Lemmings)
Part 1: Arkadien (Arcadia). 1979 (TV). 113 min. Austria. Schönbrunn-Film.
Cast: Regina Sattler (Evi Sattler), Christian Ingomar (Christian Beranek), Eva
Linder (Sigrid Leuwen), Paulus Manker (Sigurd Leuwen), Christian Spatzek
(Fritz Naprawnik).
Part 2: Verletzungen )Injuries(. 1979 (TV). 107 min. Austria. Schönbrunn-Film.
Cast: Monica Bleibtreu, Elfriede Irrall, Rüdiger Hacker, Wolfgang Hübsch,
Norbert Kappen.
71
Variationen (Variations)
1983 (TV). 98 min. Austria. Sender Freies Berlin.
Cast: Elfriede Irrall, Suzanne Geyer, Hilmar Thate, Monica Bleibtreu,
Eva Linder.
Wer war Edgar Allan? (Who Was Edgar Allan?)
1984 (TV). 83 min. Austria/West Germany. Neue Studio Film.
Wr.: Hans Broczyner, Michael Haneke. Novel: Peter Rosei.
Cast: Paulus Manker (Student), Rolf Hoppe (Edgar Allan), Guido Wieland
(Anwalt), Renzo Martini (Clerk), Walter Corradi (Kumpan).
Fräulein (Miss)
1986 (TV). 108 min. West Germany. Telefilm Saar GmbH.
Wr.: Michael Haneke, Bernd Schröder.
Cast: Angelica Domröse, Péter Franke, Lou Castel, Heinz-Werner Kraehkamp.
Der Siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent)
1989. 104 min. Austria. Wega Film.
Wr.: Michael Haneke. Scr.: Johanna Teicht.
Cast: Birgit Doll (Anna), Dieter Berner (Georg), Leni Tanzer (Eva), Udo Samel
(Alexander).
Nachruf für einen Mörder
1991 (TV). 110 min. Austria. Österreichischer Rundfunk.
Benny’s Video
1992. 105 min. Austria/Switzerland. Bernard Lang.
Cast: Arno Frisch (Benny), Angela Winkler (Mother), Ulrich Mühe (Father),
Ingrid Stassner (Young Girl).
Die Rebellion (The Rebellion)
1993 (TV). 90 min. Austria. Österreichischer Rundfunk.
Wr: Michael Haneke. Novel: Joseph Roth.
Cast: Branko Samarovski (Andreas Pum), Judit Pogány (Kathi Blumich), Thierry
van Werveke (Willi), Deborah Wisniewski (Anna Blumich), Katharina Grabher
(Klara), August Schmölzer (Vinzenz Topp).
72
71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (71 Fragments of a
Chronology of Chance)
1994. 96 min. Austria/Germany. Wega Film.
Cast: Gabriel Cosmin Urdes (Marian Radu [Romanian boy]), Lukas Miko (Max),
Otto Grünmandl (Tomek), Anne Bennent (Inge Brunner), Udo Samel (Paul
Brunner), Branko Samarovski (Hans), Claudia Martini (Maria), Georg Friedrich
(Bernie).
Das Schloß (The Castle)
1997 (TV). 123 min. Germany/Austria. Arte.
Wr.: Michael Haneke. Novel: Franz Kafka.
Cast: Ulrich Mühe (K.), Susanne Lothar (Frieda), Frank Giering (Artur), Felix
Eitner (Jeremias), Nikolaus Paryla (Vorsteher), André Eisermann (Barnabas),
Dörte Lyssewski (Olga), Inga Busch (Amalia), Norbert Schwientek (Bürgel),
Hans Diehl (Erlanger), Birgit Linauer (Pepi), Branko Samarovski (Herrenhofwirt).
Funny Games
1997. 108 min. Austria. Wega Film.
Cast: Susanne Lothar (Anna), Ulrich Mühe (Georg), Arno Frisch (Paul), Frank
Giering (Peter), Stefan Clapczynski (Schorschi), Doris Kunstmann (Gerda),
Christoph Bantzer (Fred), Wolfgang Glück (Robert).
Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages (Code Unknown:
Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys)
2000. 118 min. France/Germany/Romania. Bavaria Film.
Cast: Juliette Binoche (Anne Laurent), Thierry Neuvic (Georges), Sepp
Bierbichler (The Farmer), Alexandre Hamidi (Jean), Maimouna Hélène Diarra
(Aminate), Ona Lu Yenke (Amadou), Djibril Kouyaté (Amadou’s father),
Luminita Gheorghiu (Maria), Crenguta Hariton Stoica (Irina), Bob Nicolescu
(Dragos), Bruno Todeschini (Pierre), Paulus Manker (Perrin), Didier Flamand
(The Director), Walide Afkir (The Young Arab), Maurice Bénichou (The Old
Arab).
La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher)
2001. 131 min. France/Germany/Poland/Austria. Arte.
Wr.: Michael Haneke. Novel: Elfriede Jelinek.
Cast: Isabelle Huppert (Erika Kohut), Annie Girardot (The Mother), Benoît
Magimel (Walter Klemmer), Susanne Lothar (Mrs. Schober), Udo Samel
(Dr. Blonskij), Anna Sigalevitch (Anna Schober), Cornelia Köndgen (Mme.
Blonskij), Thomas Weinhappel (Baritone), Georg Friedrich (Man in drive-in),
Philipp Heiss (Naprawnik).
73
Le Temps du loup (The Time of the Wolf)
2003. 114 min. France/Austria/Germany. Bavaria Film.
Cast: Isabelle Huppert (Anne Laurent), Béatrice Dalle (Lise Brandt), Patrice
Chéreau (Thomas Brandt), Rona Hartner (Arina), Maurice Bénichou (M.
Azoulay), Olivier Gourmet (Koslowski), Brigitte Roüan (Béa), Lucas Biscombe
(Ben), Hakim Taleb (Young runaway), Anaïs Demoustier (Eva), Serge Riaboukine
(The leader), Marilyne Even (Mme. Azoulay), Florence Loiret-Caille (Nathalie
Azoulay), Branko Samarovski (Policeman), Daniel Duval (Georges Laurent).
Caché (Hidden)
2005. 117 min. France/Austria/Germany/Italy. Les Films du Losange.
Cast: Daniel Auteuil (Georges Laurent), Juliette Binoche (Anne Laurent),
Maurice Bénichou (Majid), Annie Girardot (Georges’s mother), Bernard Le
Coq (Georges’s editor-in-chief), Walid Afkir (Majid’s son), Lester Makedonsky
(Pierrot Laurent), Daniel Duval (Pierre), Nathalie Richard (Mathilde), Denis
Podalydès (Yvon), Aïssa Maïga (Chantal), Caroline Baehr (Nurse), Christian
Benedetti (Georges’s father), Philippe Besson (TV Guest), Loïc Brabant (Police
officer no. 2).
Funny Games U.S.
2007. 111 min. USA/France/UK/Austria/Germany/Italy. Celluloid Dreams.
Cast: Naomi Watts (Ann), Tim Roth (George), Michael Pitt (Paul), Brady Corbet
(Peter), Devon Gearhart (Georgie), Boyd Gaines (Fred), Siobhan Fallon Hogan
(Betsy), Robert LuPone (Robert).
Das Weiße Band (The White Ribbon)
To be released 2009. Austria/France/Germany. Les Films du Losange.
Cast: Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Tukur, Burghart Klaußner, Josef Bierbichler,
Marisa Growaldt.
74
e VENTs
Schedule of
LOCATIONS
METRO CINEMA
All screenings at Zeidler Hall in the Citadel Theatre, 9828 - 101A Ave
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA
The Humanities Centre is located adjacent to the north end of Hub Mall on
the Unversity of Alberta campus.
Wednesday, March 11
3:30pm: Panel, “Anger and Provocation in the Cinema of Michael Haneke”
(@ University of Alberta in Humanities Centre HC L-3)
Thursday, March 12
7pm: Seventh Continent
Friday, March 13
7pm: Benny’s Video
9pm: Panel, “Ethics and Politics in the Cinema of Michael Haneke”
Saturday, March 14
7pm: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
9pm: Funny Games
Sunday, March 15
4:30pm: The Castle
7pm: Code Unknown
9:15pm: The Piano Teacher
75
e VENTs
Schedule of
Monday, March 16
7pm: Time of the Wolf
9:15pm: Caché
Tuesday, March 17
8pm: Funny Games US
Wednesday, March 18
8pm: Code Unknown
Thursday, March 19
7pm: Benny’s Video
9pm: Funny Games
Sunday, March 22
7pm: Seventh Continent
9pm: Time of the Wolf
Monday, March 23
7pm: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
9pm: The Castle
Tuesday, March 24
8pm: Code Unknown
Wednesday, March 25
8pm: The Piano Teacher
76
77
78

The Films of Michael Haneke

Transcription

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