AUSTRIA

The world
that is known
Michael Haneke interviewed

Haneke's films document the failures of modern society on a variety of levels.

Christopher Sharrett talks to the director about his ongoing critique of Western
civilisation.[*]

Haneke is, perhaps, the most controversial of contemporary European directors. His
films, all of which are determinedly successful in making no concessions to the
viewer, have both been alienated audiences (being booed at Cannes) and won them
over (including a 33-week theatrical run in the US for his most recent title released
there), and he has established a position as one of cinema's important provocateurs,
a concept lost in an era where cultural/political subversion is often seen as passé, or
conceived with jaundiced, anti-humanist cynicism. Equally importantly, he has
presented demanding philosophical questions in a formal cinematic language that
has a bold and uncomprising nature to match its content.

Born in 1942, Haneke entered film-making rather late in his career, after
distinguished work in Austrian theater complemented by seriously engaged, ongoing
study of philosophy and psychology. His first feature, Der siebente Kontinent (The
Seventh Continent, 1989), is a staggering work based on a news story about a family
opting for collective suicide rather than continuing in the present alienated world.
Unable to accept the notion that the family took their own lives (could the terrors of
daily life override the life instinct?), relatives insisted that authorities pursue the case
as a murder, despite all the evidence militating against such a conclusion.

The film takes numerous deceptive turns as we expect the family, which goes
through daily life in a set of rote behaviors relentlessly chronicled by Haneke's
highly disciplined camera (using close-ups and slow intercutting forcing the viewer
to consider the features of banal activities), to leave for the promised utopia of rural
Australia, since a lush tourist ad for the country appears at regular intervals in the
film.

The film introduces altogether unanticipated questions about the nature of utopia,
suggesting that the quietude of death may constitute a satisfactory promised land in
the mind of the suicide. With its many silences, its interest in the alienating features
of contemporary urban life, its remarkable sense of architecture as signifier of
entrapment, Der siebente Kontinent introduced Haneke's kinship with forebears such
as Antonioni.

With each film—thus far Der siebente Kontinent, Benny's Video (1992), 71
Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (71 Fragments of a Chronology of a
Chance, 1994), Funny Games (1997), Das Schloß (The Castle, 1997), Code inconnu:
Récit incomplet de divers voyages (Code Unknown, 2000), La Pianiste (The Piano
Teacher (2001) and Le Temps du loup (Time of the Wolf, 2003)—Haneke affirms
his presence as one of the key modernist directors at a time when modernist
ambitions seem defunct. 71 Fragmente, Benny's Video and Funny Games are among
the most unsettling of the cinema's many meditations on television and other media,
in particular their role in the erasure of conscience and emotion. These films are by
far the most contentious—and perhaps because so least discussed at this writing—
observations on the media and their relationship to violence, alienation, and social
catastrophe.

Funny Games in particular is the most disturbing remark on action cinema and those
works pretending to comment on its social ramifications. Containing elements of
Sam Peckinpah and other directors, this tale of a young family besieged by two
yuppie psychopaths becomes Brechtian, suddenly "rewinding" scenes, implicating
the viewer, who is asked to choose an ending (the film opts for the bloodiest and
least consoling). Unlike any number of self-reflexive films engaged with the study
of media culture and the role of violence therein, Funny Games never becomes a
strained position paper, nor does it participate, for all its relentlessness, in the
excesses it criticizes.

Revisiting Kafka's Das Schloß may seem an odd gesture at this date, but Haneke's
inflections of Kafka affirm his commitments to reexamination of some of the basic
notions of modernity. Haneke's version is the least involved in narrativizing Kafka,
and is concerned more with a sense of disruption and dislocation, the structure of the
film featuring literal breaks that foreground the novel's artifice.

Code inconnu's exploration of the collapse of language picks up concerns of

Bergman, Resnais and Antonioni, suggesting to us that the questions posed by such
artists have been ignored as if they have been fully answered, even as the media age
has only further complicated them. Using as its linchpin a discarded paper bag
cruelly tossed into the lap of a beggar by an insolent, dissolute boy, whose off-hand
action affects all the major characters of the narrative in a manner suggesting not the
"six degrees of separation" connecting humanity but rather the ever-widening abyss
absorbing it, Code inconnu displays Haneke's remarkable "applied theory," his use
of semiotics and language theory in a deeply-felt, harrowing exploration of the end
of communication, and that failure's relationship to racism and economic and social
injustice.

His La Pianiste contains a complex commentary on classical Western cultures's

legacy, in particular its relationship to the idea of the family and gender politics,
while in Le Temps du loup, his latest feature, he employs catastrophe to strip his
characters of the foundations of contemporary bourgeois living—family unity,
running water, electricity—to further explore how civilizational values that may
seem rigidly universal to those who subscribe to them bear up when applied to
situations for which they were not intended.

In all these films Haneke establishes firmly his sensibility. He rigorously eschews
the snide humor, affectlessness, preoccupation with pop culture, film allusions and
moral blankness of postmodern art. Yet nothing about Haneke's work seems
anachronistic, precisely because he recognizes that the crises that affected 20th-
century humanity, in particular alienation and repression, continue in the new
millennium even if they are simply embraced as features of contemporary life in
much postmodern artistic expression. His harrowing explorations of psychological
and societal breakdown and the oppression of technological civilization evoke a
yawn only from those who accept the terms of this civilization.

Haneke is currently in the pre-production phase of a new film Caché (Hidden). This
interview was conducted by conference telephone call in November, 2002, and
April, 2003, before the release of Le Temps du loup. I am most grateful to my
colleague Jurgen Heinrichs, without whose skills as a translator the interview would
have been impossible.

Your work seems an ongoing critique of current western civilization.

I think you can take that interpretation, but as I'm sure you know it is difficult for an
author to give an interpretation of his or her own work. I don't mind that view at all,
but I have no interest in self-interpretation. It is the purpose of my films to pose
certain questions, and it would be counter-productive if I were to answer all these
questions myself.

I'm interested in your sense of the modern landscape, in particular your images
of architecture and technology. In a film like Der siebente Kontinent the
cityscape comes across as both alluring and deadly, somewhat in the manner of
Antonioni.

I think that this landscape operates in both of the modalities you mention. It isn't my
interest to denounce technology, but to describe a situation in a highly industrialized
society, so in that sense my films are very much concerned with a predicament
specific to this society, European society, rather than, say, the Third World. My films
are aimed, therefore, more to an audience that is part of the conditions of Western
society. I can only deal with the world that I know, to be a little more precise. As for
Antonioni, I very much admire his films, no question.

There seems to be some degree of competition in your films between classical

culture and popular culture. I'm thinking in particular of the opening of Funny
Games, where the music of Mascagni, Handel and Mozart suddenly changes to
John Zorn's thrash-punk music.

This question has been asked a great deal. I think there is a certain amount of
misunderstanding here, at least in regard to Funny Games. That film is in part a
parody of the thriller genre, and my use of John Zorn was also intended as parodical.
Zorn isn't a heavy metal artist. I have nothing against popular music and wouldn't
think of playing popular against classical forms. I'm very skeptical of the false
conflict that already exists between so-called "serious" music and music categorized
strictly as entertainment.

These are totally absurd distinctions, especially if one insists that an artist such as
John Zorn must be seen as either classical or experimental or pop, since his work
cuts across all categories. I see in John Zorn a kind of über-heavy metal, an extreme
and ironic accentuation of that form just as the film is an extreme inflection of the
thriller. I think Zorn's style tends to alienate the listener in a sense that heightens
awareness, which was effective to the points I wanted to address.

In that film it seems the first "funny game" is the guessing game that the
bourgeois couple plays with their CD player, guessing the classical
compositions. Is there some association here of the bourgeoisie possessing
classical culture?

That wasn't my first concern. Of course, there is a certain irony here in the way that
the bourgeoisie has insinuated itself in cultural history. But I didn't intend for the
Zorn music to be seen solely as the music of the killers, so to speak, with the classical
music strictly as the theme of the bourgeoisie. This is too simplistic. But, of course,
with the guessing game at the beginning of the film there is an irony in the way their
music suggests their deliberate isolation from the exterior world, and in the end they
are trapped in a sense by their bourgeois notions and accoutrements, not just by the
killers alone.

The two yuppie psychopaths seem to be intellectuals, especially in their chatter

when they dispose of the wife. They are rather unusual serial killers, at least
when we look at the genre.

I think this may be true only of one of them, not Dickie, the fat, slow one. They
really don't have names—they are called Peter and Paul, Beavis and Butthead. In a
way they aren't characters at all. They come out of the media. The tall one, who is
the main "plotter" so to speak, might be seen as an intellectual with a deviousness
that could be associated with this type of destructive fascist intellect. I have no
problem with that interpretation. The fat one is the opposite; there is nothing there
on the order of intellect.

Funny Games seems to be a contribution to the self-reflexive films about media

and violence along the lines of Natural Born Killers (1994) or C'est arrivé près de
chez vous (Man Bites Dog, 1992).

My goal there was a kind of counter-program to Natural Born Killers. In my view,

Oliver Stone's film, and I use it only as example, is the attempt to use a fascist
aesthetic to achieve an anti-fascist goal, and this doesn't work. What is accomplished
is something the opposite, since what is produced is something like a cult film where
the montage style complements the violence represented and presents it largely in a
positive light. It might be argued that Natural Born Killers makes the violent image
alluring while allowing no space for the viewer. I feel this would be very difficult to
argue about Funny Games. Benny's Video and Funny Games are different kinds of
obscenity, in the sense that I intended a slap in the face and a provocation.

If we can return to music, it seems in La Pianiste that classical music, while

embodying the best sensibility of Erika, is also implicated in her pathology.

Yes, you can see the music functioning in that way, but you need first to understand
that in that film we are seeing a very Austrian situation. Vienna is the capital of
classical music and is, therefore, the center of something very extraordinary. The
music is very beautiful, but like the surroundings can become an instrument of
repression, because this culture takes on a social function that ensures repression,
especially as classical music becomes an object for consumption. Of course, you
must recognize that these issues are not just subjects of the film's screenplay, but are
concerns of the Elfriede Jelinek novel, wherein the female has a chance, a small one,
to emancipate herself only as an artist. This doesn't work out, of course, since her
artistry turns against her in a sense.

Schubert's Winterreisse seems central to La Pianiste. Some have argued that

there is a connection between Erika and Schubert's traveler in that song cycle.
This goes back to the broader question as to whether music represents the
healthy side of Erika's psyche or simply assists her repression.

Of course, the 17th song holds a central place in the film, and could be viewed as
the motto of Erika and the film itself. The whole cycle establishes the idea of
following a path not taken by others, which gives an ironic effect to the film, I think.
It is difficult to say if there is a correlation between the neurosis of Erika Kohut and
what could be called the psychogram of a great composer like Schubert. But of
course there is a great sense of mourning in Schubert that is very much part of the
milieu of the film. Someone with the tremendous problems borne by Erika may well
project them onto an artist of Schubert's very complex sensibility. I can't give a
further interpretation.

Great music transcends suffering beyond specific causes. Die Winterreisse

transcends misery even in the detailed description of misery. All important artworks,
especially those concerned with the darker side of experience, despite whatever
despair conveyed, transcend the discomfort of the content in the realization of their
form.

Walter Klemmer seems to be the hero of the film, but then becomes a monster.

You need to speak to Jelinek [laughs]. All kidding aside, this character is actually
portrayed much more negatively in the novel than in the film. The novel is written
in a very cynical mode. The novel turns him from a rather childish idiot into a fascist
asshole. The film tries to make him more interesting and attractive. In the film, the
"love affair," which is not so central to the novel, is more implicated in the mother-
daughter relationship. Walter only triggers the catastrophe. In the book, Walter is a
rather secondary character that I thought needed development to the point that he
could be a more plausible locus of the catastrophe.

One comes away feeling that sexual relationships are impossible under the
assumptions of the current society.

We are all damaged, but not every relationship is played out in the extreme scenario
of Erika and Walter. Not everyone is as neurotic as Erika. It's a common truth that
we are not a society of happy people, and this is a reality I describe, but I would not
say that sexual health is impossible.

Images of television recur numerous times in your films. Could you address
your uses of TV, and your understanding of media in the current world?

Obviously, in Benny's Video and Funny Games I attempt to explore the phenomenon
of television. My concern for the topic isn't quite so much in Der siebente Kontinent,
Code Unknown, and La Pianiste, although the place of television in society
influences these films as well. I am most concerned with television as the key symbol
primarily of the media representation of violence, and more generally of a greater
crisis, which I see as our collective loss of reality and social disorientation.
Alienation is a very complex problem, but television is certainly implicated in it.

We don't, of course, anymore perceive reality, but instead the representation of

reality in television. Our experiential horizon is very limited. What we know of the
world is little more than the mediated world, the image. We have no reality, but a
derivative of reality, which is extremely dangerous, most certainly from a political
standpoint but in a larger sense to our ability to have a palpable sense of the truth of
everyday experience.

In Der siebente Kontinent there is a privileged use of both TV and pop music in
the moment just before the murder/suicide. The family watches a rock video of
"The Power of Love" on their TV as they sit in the demolished apartment.
There is a sense both of the song as a genuine plea as well as the inadequacy of
pop culture.

There I asked the producer to supply me with certain types of songs. The issue of
copyright was a problem, of course. I chose a song, actually a series of songs which
appealed to me, not so much because of the text, but because of a certain sentiment.
As you suggest, the moment generates a certain ironic counterpoint to the story.

There is another very interesting piece of music in Der siebente Kontinent,

where you use the Alban Berg violin concerto, suddenly interrupted, as the
young girl watches a ship go by while her father sells the family car in the junk
yard. She seems to possess a vision of utopia that her family can't realize.

You can certainly interpret it that way, or simply as the girl spotting a boat, a very
banal moment. Of course, the Berg piece is not accidental. There is also a citation of
the Bach chorale which could be a motto of the entire film.
In the same film, the series of shots showing the couples' destruction of the
apartment recalled to me somewhat the end of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point
(1970). The shots of the destruction of the household goods are beautiful, but
there is real anguish and horror as well. The color scheme, here and elsewhere
in the film, is extraordinary.

I'm a little surprised that you found beauty in this sequence. You could look at the
phenomenon of the destruction of one's own environment in terms of a German
notion, which in translation is "destroy what destroys you." It can be seen as a
liberation.

But the way it is represented is rather the opposite. They carry out the destruction
with the same constricted narrowness with which they lived their lives, with the same
meticulousness as life was lived, so I see this as the opposite of the vision of total
destruction in Zabriskie Point. The sequence is portrayed as work. I have tried to
portray it as something unbearable. As the wife says, "my hands really hurt from all
that arbeit," so all this hard work of destruction merely precedes the self-destruction.

As for the color, I have always tried for cool, neutral colors. I couldn't say that I tried
for a rigid color schematic in Der siebente Kontinent. In this film, however, my
aesthetic centered mainly on the close-up, the emphasis on enlarged faces and
objects. From an aesthetic standpoint, much of the film could be said to resemble
television advertising. I have many reservations about television, but saw a use for
its style here. Of course, if Der siebente Kontinent had been made for television it
would have failed totally in my view. But in the cinematic setting, a close-up of
shoes or a doorknob takes on a far different sense than a similar shot in TV, where
that style is the norm. This was a very conscious choice, since I wanted to convey
not just images of objects but the objectification of life.

You seem very interested in the long take. There are a number of static shots in
your films, like the final image of La Pianiste. I'm also thinking of shots like that
of the blank bathroom wall just before Walter rushes in for Erika, the many
shots of Erika's face, the long take of the bloody living room in Funny Games,
or the numerous still lifes in Der siebente Kontinent.

Perhaps I can connect this to the issue of television. Television accelerates our habits
of seeing. Look, for example, at advertising in that medium. The faster something is
shown, the less able you are to perceive it as an object occupying a space in physical
reality, and the more it becomes something seductive. And the less real the image
seems to be, the quicker you buy the commodity it seems to depict.
Of course, this type of aesthetic has gained the upper hand in commercial cinema.
Television accelerates experience, but one needs time to understand what one sees,
which the current media disallows. Not just understand on an intellectual level, but
emotionally. The cinema can offer very little that is new; everything that is said has
been said a thousand times, but cinema still has the capacity, I think, to let us
experience the world anew.

The long take is an aesthetic means to accomplish this by its particular emphasis.
This has long been understood. Code Unknown consists very much of static
sequences, with each shot from only one perspective, precisely because I don't want
to patronize or manipulate the viewer, or at least to the smallest degree possible. Of
course, film is always manipulation, but if each scene is only one shot, then, I think,
there is at least less of a sense of time being manipulated when one tries to stay close
to a "real time" framework. The reduction of montage to a minimum also tends to
shift responsibility back to the viewer in that more contemplation is required, in my
view.

Beyond this, my approach is very intuitive, without anything very programmatic.

The final image of La Pianiste is simply a reassertion of the conservatory, the
classical symmetry of that beautiful building in the darkness. The viewer is asked to
reconsider it.

Would you speak to your conception of the family as it is portrayed La Pianiste?

I wanted first of all to describe the bourgeois setting, and to establish the family as
the germinating cell for all conflicts. I always want to describe the world that I know,
and for me the family is the locus of the miniature war, the first site of all warfare.
The larger political-economic site is what one usually associates with warfare, but
the everyday site of war in the family is as murderous in its own way, whether
between parents and children or wife and husband.

If you start exploring the concept of family in Western society you can't avoid
realizing that the family is the origin of all conflicts. I wanted to describe this in as
detailed a way as I can, leaving to the viewer to draw conclusions. The cinema has
tended to offer closure on such topics and to send people home rather comforted and
pacified. My objective is to unsettle the viewer and to take away any consolation or
self-satisfaction.

Porno and erotica play a role in La Pianiste that caused much controversy in
America. There is an ongoing debate about whether or not porno has a
liberating function.
I would like to be recognized for making in La Pianiste an obscenity, but not a
pornographic film. In my definition, anything that could be termed obscene departs
from the bourgeois norm. Whether concerned with sexuality or violence or another
taboo issue, anything that breaks with the norm is obscene. Insofar as truth is always
obscene, I hope that all of my films have at least an element of obscenity.

By contrast, pornography is the opposite, in that it makes into a commodity that

which is obscene, makes the unusual consumable, which is the truly scandalous
aspect of porno rather than the traditional arguments posed by institutions of society.
It isn't the sexual aspect but the commercial aspect of porno that makes it repulsive.
I think that any contemporary art practice is pornographic if it attempts to bandage
the wound, so to speak, which is to say our social and psychological wound.
Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in
that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life
consumable. Propaganda is far more pornographic than a home video of two people
fucking.

I notice that the porno shop Erika visits is in a shopping mall, which is a little
unusual to an American viewer.

That was shot on location, the original setting. That is the way porno is sold in
Vienna. Maybe we are a tiny less puritanical than the Americans [laughs].

Just before she goes to the mall and the porno shop we see Erika practicing
Schubert's Piano Trio in E Flat with her colleagues. The music stays on the
soundtrack right up to the moment that she puts coins in the video booth to
start the porno video, at which point the music stops, as if Schubert finally can't
compete with this image.

I have no problem with that interpretation at all, but again, I don't want to impose
my own views beyond what I have already committed to film.

One of your concerns seems to be, at least as expressed in Code Unknown, that
all communication, the linguistic code, has failed. The scene of the deaf children
drumming toward the end of the film seems to emphasize this failure.

Of course, the film is about such failure, but the scene of the children drumming is
concerned with communication with the body, so the deaf children have hope after
all, although the drumming takes on a different function at the conclusion when it
provides a specific background. Yes, the failure of communication is on all levels:
interpersonal, familial, sociological, political. The film also questions whether the
image transmits meaning. Everyone assumes it does. The film also questions the
purpose of communication, and also what is being avoided and prevented in
communication processes. The film tries to present these questions in a broad
spectrum.

The world your films describe seems catastrophic. There is the family suicide
of Der siebente Kontinent, the violence of Funny Games, the image of the media
in Benny's Video, the collapse of meaning in Code Unknown, the tragedy of La
Pianiste.

I'm trying as best I can to describe a situation as I see it without bullshitting or

disingenuousness, but by so doing I subscribe to the notion that communication is
still possible, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this. I cannot make comedies about these
subjects, so it is true the films are bleak. On the subject of violence, there are an
increasing number of modalities with which one can present violence, so much so
that we need to reconceptualize the whole concept of violence and its origins.

The new technologies, of both media representation and the political world, allow
greater damage with ever-increasing speed. The media contribute to a confused
consciousness through this illusion that we know all things at all times, and always
with this great sense of immediacy. We live in this environment where we think we
know more things faster, when in fact we know nothing at all. This propels us into
terrible internal conflicts, which then creates angst, which in turn causes aggression,
and this creates violence. This is a vicious cycle.

There seems to be some confusion about the title of your last film, which is
actually La Pianiste although marketed in America as The Piano Teacher.

I was adapting the title of Jelinek's book, which in the original is Die
Klavierspielerin, or The Piano Player, which is a deliberately awkward title and an
uncommon term in German. This is to point to Erika's degraded situation. Pianisitin
is the German word for the female pianist, so the title of the novel in German is a
put-down suggesting Erika's crisis. The English translation of the novel is The Piano
Teacher, which isn't correct at all, and is of course a little nonsensical and even more
devaluing of the protagonist. I left the German title of the book not quite as it is, to
give her more dignity, which is simply my approach to the material.

La Pianiste is the most popular and recognized of your films thus far. Do you
feel that it best represents your sensibility and development as a film-maker?
I wouldn't say this, since the idea isn't mine but based on a novel, whereas my other
films come from my own ideas. I recognize myself a bit more in those films rather
than in works based on other texts. Of course, I chose the topic of La Pianiste
because I was very much drawn to it, and what I could bring to this work. But in
some ways it is a bit distant from me. For example, I couldn't have written a novel
on the subject of female sexuality. The topic of the novel interested me, but my
choice of other source material for a film will probably continue to be the exception.

I notice that your recent films are in French, although the setting remains
Austrian.

This is to accommodate the producers and actors. My principal source of support

has come from France, and my casts have been largely French. Isabelle Huppert,
Juliette Binoche, Benoit Magimel, Annie Girardot... they are wonderful. Austria's
film industry is a bit more limited in resources. The French production industry has
been very helpful to me, and I am very comfortable with the language.

Could you speak a bit about your new projects?

I am making Hidden, which is about the French occupation of Algeria on a broad

level, but more personally a story of guilt and the denial of guilt. The main character
is a Frenchman, with another character an Arab, but it would be incorrect to see it
strictly as a story of the past but rather a political story that deals with personal guilt.
So it might be seen as more philosophical than political. The second film I'm
preparing is Le Temp du loup (The Time of the Wolf, 2003) [which has now released].
This is about how people treat each other when electricity no longer comes out of
the outlet and water no longer comes out of the faucet. I'm a bit concerned that after
the events of September 11th this film will be read very specifically, but it takes
place in neither America nor Europe, and focuses on very primal anxieties.

Could I ask you for your views on the current international situation, the war
on Iraq, the "war on terrorism" and the like?

I think that at least 80 per cent of the people of Europe, and perhaps the United
States, did not want war. The war is horrible. War is always the dumbest way of
solving problems, as history clearly shows. My impression is that the American
government made up its mind a long time ago, so I'm rather pessimistic about the
outcome. The war is insanity. The US government doesn't see it this way, because it
represents powerful interests. But the people don't want it. Some may be nervous
merely because of the economic consequences, and some seem to follow blindly,
but my impression is that the people are very much against war.
 Christopher Sharrett

Long night's journey into day

Michael Haneke's
Le Temps du loup
(The Time of the Wolf, 2003)

In his latest film, Haneke turns his hand to the revived genre of the disaster movie.
As Adam Bingham explains, the director subverts our expectations to create what
is possibly the darkest film of 2003.

In a recent interview in Sight & Sound, Michael Haneke said with regard to his new
film Le Temps du loup (Time of the Wolf, 2003) that: "The danger with the
catastrophe genre in Hollywood is that it's one of exaggeration, so it makes
catastrophe seem attractive—something we can enjoy because it's so unrealistic."[1]

Typically with this most uncompromising of directors, he seems to have made his
latest work with the most diametrically antithetical method of realisation in mind,
almost as a kind of manifesto or anti-mainstream matter of principle. In other words,
the director of Benny's Video (1992) and Funny Games (1996) has once again set
out to challenge the viewers' pre-conceived ideas about genre film-making, about
exactly what they want or expect from specific narratives.

Except that this time he has moved squarely

into what is, on the surface, a science-fiction
story (people trying to negotiate and survive
a post-apocalyptic landscape). And, on the
back of his recent, piercing character and
society studies Code Inconnu: Récit
incomplet de divers voyages (Code
Unknown, 2000) and La Pianiste (The Piano
Teacher, 2001), he has brought to bear here a
more marked complexity of tone and effect that eschews the slightly too self-
conscious audience baiting of Funny Games to explore in unflinching and
uncompromising detail the practical realities of Western bourgeois humanity
systematically stripped bare of all the trappings of its existence, from affluent home
and surroundings right down to food and electricity. In both a literal and
metaphorical sense, this is the darkest film of 2003.
After the apocalypse

Le Temps du loup centres on a mother (Isabelle Huppert) and her two children, Ben
and Eva, who are left to fend for themselves in the wilderness following an
unspecified past apocalyptic event (we enter their story in medias res) that has
claimed the life of the husband/father and left the world they know in chaos. All very
well, and all very generic, but, as alluded to above, Haneke's point of departure from
the norm makes itself felt from the very start. The film takes the recognisable façade
of the currently in-vogue again disaster genre (compare this with Margaret Atwood's
recent, Booker short-listed novel Oryx and Crake, or with Roland Emmerich's
upcoming film The Day After Tomorrow) and cuts straight through it to the dirty,
complex human reality at its core.

For example, much of the early and middle sections of the film has the three
protagonists simply wandering around in the complete pitch darkness: cold, hungry,
terrified and deeply confused. Then, when they do meet up with others, first a young
boy then later a group of survivors gathered at a railway station awaiting
transportation away, much time is given over to not action, not even to planning or
preparation, but simply to talk of a myth of saviours, to petty squabbling and, as
before, to sitting around simply not knowing what to do.

Ironically though, given that Haneke largely

ruptures the codes of mainstream generic
film-making, the style of this work, much like
La Pianiste, is almost everywhere suffused
with an almost mainstream transparency and
with a spare, functional visual style, opening
up a distinct fissure, a tension, in the
discourse of the film that is somewhat new to
this director's cinema (at least in a form that
is this subtle, the ruptures to the parodic classicism of Funny Games operating in a
very different way—to foster distance).

This push and pull feeling is further reinforced by the typically Haneke technique of
alternately drawing us into and away from the characters, so that we both observe
and experience their nightmare. However, there is arguably more of the former in
this film than has been the case in previous Haneke pictures, and in this case such
an effect is achieved as much through technical means than by the manner of
narration and syuzhet construction a work like La Pianiste employs (something
supported by a slightly greater preponderance of point-of-view shots than is
generally common with Haneke, but coupled with a refusal of close-ups).

To the end of our experiencing the protagonist's predicament, the effect is achieved
partly through analogy. In other words, our disorientation at having a familiar base
kicked out from beneath us by Haneke's method matches such a feeling in the
characters as their world is ripped from them. This is rather a crude way of describing
such an effect (and also perhaps oversimplified), but it is worth remarking on as a
departure for Haneke from the way he has handled similarly codified narratives in
the past.
A glint of hope?

What is also surprising about Le Temps du

loup is that Haneke hints at a possible
transcendence and salvation at the film's
close. Much is made, by some of the people
awaiting salvation at the railway station of
myths—a rumour of a clan of Messiahs sent
to safeguard the world—and indeed of
religion and faith, as many begin the ritually
sacrificial act of hurling themselves into the
flames of a soaring fire.

Haneke seems to view these acts not with the coldly dispassionate, even
misanthropic eye he has long been accused of harbouring (and this film has been no
different in its severe treatment by critics and audiences, being booed at Cannes and
largely unenthusiastically received) but almost with awe and wonder, with a sense
that such ways of dealing with this extreme situation are, in their way, as courageous
as any overt heroism that Hollywood can proffer. To this end, the final image of the
film of a train speeding through the countryside brings with it a powerfully
redemptive connotation, particularly coming after the attempted but thwarted self-
sacrifice of Ben. It is, of course, ambiguous at the very best, but from this director it
shines like a flame in the dark.
There is, having said all the above, much to
mark this out as very clearly a Michael
Haneke film beyond its rigorous refusal of
spectacle and entertainment. The directness
of the camerawork and emphatically
naturalistic mise-en-scène have been
commonplace for much of his career. The
powerful theme of communication
breakdown that is so central to Die Siebente
Kontinent (The Seventh Continent, 1989) and Code Inconnu is here explored through
the representation of characters cast adrift in a chaotic world they cannot
comprehend, let alone understand, as well as in the simmering tensions and
prejudices that for a long time hold sway in the mock society formed at the railway
station. However, it is viewed as a stratified hierarchical structure rather than it as a
collection of equals (which, in essence, is what they all are).

In the end, whatever ones opinion of Haneke, it must surely be concluded that he is
a unique film-maker in the world today. His has long been a cinema that confronts
dark subject matter head on, and with an intensity, integrity and breadth of vision
that commands attention and respect. Entertainment is not the sole raison d'etre of
the cinema, and today more than ever a director who seeks to challenge, to provoke,
to disturb and ultimately to promote thought and contemplation is to be cherished.
As critic Peter Matthews has noted: even "Haneke's flaws put the successes of other
directors to shame."[2]

Adam Bingham

The horror of the middle class

Michael Haneke's La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher, 2001)

Like many a horror film, La Pianiste shows that the most unsettling monstrosities
have their origins in everyday middle-class life. Christopher Sharrett looks at how
Haneke portrays bourgeois sexuality in its most scary form.
Michael Haneke's La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher, 2001) is a work of contemporary
horror, its sensibility rooted less in genre (although this is relevant) than in a line of
US and European cinema locating mental breakdown and social disorder precisely
at the heart of Western bourgeois patriarchal civilization. Like Michelangelo
Antonioni's Il Deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964), it suggests that the sensitive human
subject, especially the female, cannot thrive in the repressive contemporary
industrial/postindustrial world. Like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), it develops
the notion of the fractured subject, the "monster," as product of bourgeois family
life.

La Pianiste's horror is within its understanding that mental illness flows

axiomatically from commonly held assumptions about this life, conceived as an
immutable, irreducible standard. La Pianiste's connection to the horror genre may
be principally because it shares the genre's postmodern realization that the gothic is
no longer relevant to notions of the monstrous, except in the use of a few stylistic
conventions; the essence of horror is within human relationships and the collapse of
a false social order about which we are in great denial.

The film has a few companion pieces within the European cinema, including Gaspar
Noé's remarkable Irréversible (2002), whose gore effects and descent-into-inferno
motif is associated, like La Pianiste, with the crumbling of the veneer of Western
civilization. Noé's modern horror story, bracketed by Mahler and Beethoven,
concerns patriarchal sexuality's association with the monstrous, and the
ineffectuality of the European intellectual tradition in even a rethinking of the
terrible assumptions regarding race, class, ,gender and sexuality that undergird this
civilization. Indeed, Irréversible is almost an apocalyptic coda to La Pianiste.

Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), like Norman Bates, can be regarded as a psychotic
monster only if we disregard the basic Freudian tenet of the pervasiveness of
neurosis in civilization, a "discontent" that can be measured in degrees of its
appearance but whose pandemic quality must be seen as a given. The film's focus on
Walter's (Benoit Magimel) definitions of the normal, his idea of romantic love, and
the corresponding construction of Erika as monstrous Other (which, of course,
Haneke undermines) are central to the film's horrific vision.

As in the best works of cinematic horror (Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho, The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, Salò), the normal bourgeois world is the locus of the horrific,
the monsters of such works not arcane aberrations but logical culminations to a
culture of repression and oppression. Walter Klemmer may be a fascist beast (he
seems so in Elfriede Jelinek's novel), but he is "normalized" by Haneke.
 Hints even of state fascism appear in Walter.
His conjoining of engineering with high
culture refers us to the Frankfurt School
(Erika coincidentally mentions Adorno's
comments on Schumann relative to her
mental breakdown), in particular the idea of
the enlightened, technocratic mind inevitably
leading to fascism. Fascist associations are
hinted at iconographically in Walter's black
and red hockey uniform, but his rape of Erika just after his locker room tomfoolery
with the hockey team (the repressed gay underpinning of the male group has been
central to understanding both fascism and patriarchy) and his savage assault on Erika
make such allusions necessarily peripheral.

Unlike the sexual politics of a work such as Bernardo Bertolucci's Ultimo tango a
Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1992), La Pianiste creates not an elegy for relationships
flowing from the solipsism of the angst-ridden, dethroned male, but a critique of the
dynamics making gender relations impossible under current assumptions,
necessarily linking eros with thanatos in a manner hardly involved in late 20th-
century existential abstraction.

Unlike Liliana Cavani's Il Portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974), which (rather
parodically) suggests that sadomasochism is part of the twisted social contract of
fascism, La Pianiste needs little reference to past or present forms of state power to
establish sadomasochism as an essential form of exchange (with one partner the
master, the other the servant, with roles occasionally reversed as desire itself a prized
commodity and symbol of power) under patriarchal capitalist society. As a work of
the post-feminist, seemingly "liberated" age, La Pianiste asks if there are now
avenues of resistance, or a genuine oppositional culture to patriarchal capitalism's
normalcies, and if some postmodern adversarial interventions—a fixation of some
cultural critics—can occur short of revolutionary change.

Erika's self-mutilation of her genitals forces a reconsideration of the neo-primitive

culture of scarification, tattooing and other body modification not as adversarial
gesture of a new counterculture but simply another (rather obvious) manifestation of
alienation. Her mutilations have less to do with the romanticized cult of self-
destruction of extreme dance/rock band Nine Inch Nails and industrial culture ("I
hurt myself today...") than with an understanding that eros cannot exist in a culture
that insists on the reduction of the self to base matter, the heart of the death-wish that
Freud couldn't adequately define, since he failed to see it in political terms.
The film's political statement may be
centered in these moments. Minus any
avenue of authentic expression (and Erika's
art is as limiting in its social circumscription
as her household, with its wretched,
phallicized mother), the subject must self-
destruct. A social world as constrained and
stultifying as Erika's, for all its pretenses of
democratic enlightenment, destroys the
atomized, monadic self. Her voyeurism and fixation on pornography is the
questionable appropriation of the male "gaze" that much feminist theory—
progressive and reactionary—has assumed is central to patriarchal assumptions and
authority.

Erika's gaze suggests only the further disempowerment of the female by capitalist
civilization, and capital's endless ability (absent structures for revolutionary change)
to absorb any adversarial tendencies. Haneke's view of porn as a safety valve of a
repressed civilization rather than an emblem of at least a potential for radical change
seems to stake his position in such debates fairly clearly. While the sale of porn in
shopping malls may suggest Austria's relative freedom of expression, it is difficult
to overlook the image of porn as another false need of consumer culture.
A lonely journey

Schubert, Erika's ostensible link to sanity and a liberating element of the cultural
past, is absorbed and obliterated by the consumer capitalist world that encourages
competition. If Erika is not as hyperbolic a character as Professor Rath in Josef von
Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930) (there are more than a few
relevant links between the two films, especially in the misperceptions engendered
by romantic love), she is certainly a postmodern extension of his assumptions. Her
tyrannical instructions and humiliations of her students both cover the fury contained
in her own repression and enforce a culture where learning and growth are matters
of rewards and punishments, guaranteeing the neurotic civilization of which she is
such a representative figure. Tropes from horror regularly appear in the teacher-
student relationship, in particularly the gruesome assault on Anna, and the reference
by her mother to "chopped-off hands," the same remark made by the cruel, demented
mother in the film's unnerving, violent opening moments.

Schubert, and classical music overall, have been noted by Haneke as part of the film's
"very Austrian situation." Winterreise may be seen as the film's theme, or La Pianiste
as its cinematic rendering, but perhaps only if we view the film as a caustic critique
of romanticism and art's salvific function. Winterreise's is Romanticism's most
brilliant exploration of alienation, its significance fully understood by the refined
sensibilities of Erika and her young suitor Walter. But Schubert's song cycle is less
an annotation of Erika's tragedy than it is a sketch of such art's inability to comment
on the realized alienation of the postmodern world—the 17th song, "Im Dorfe,"
appears on the soundtrack as Erika sniffs dried semen in a discarded tissue as she is
confined in a dark video booth (she is always trapped in a male domain, always
effecting a haughty male posture). The Winterreise of La Pianiste may contain a
Romanticism closer to Coleridge or Mary Shelley than Mueller/Schubert, more
filled with ghastliness than mere anguish.

Erika's citation of Adorno at the recital is hardly ironic; the Frankfurt School
informed us that simple awareness of the deficiencies of capitalist civilization is
hardly a form of resistance, a point made clear by Erika's deterioration and by
Walter's brutalization of her, even after his protesting, as if to foreground his refined
intelligence, that Schubert "brought [them] together." The utopian aspect of
European culture is obliterated by Walter, the fascist worldview realized outside of
state power. More telling regarding Erika's relationship to music as her one pathway
to liberation is music's regular connections to notions of the father.

The mention of Adorno is connected to Erika's late parent, whose death in an asylum
sets up a "sins of the father" dynamic enforced by Erika's tortured artist veneer that
only further propels her need to oppress herself and those most vulnerable in her
ambit. The potentially liberating elements of musical history beyond the actual
compositions on the soundtrack, such as Schubert's gay sexuality, have no relevance
to Erika. Indeed, the scowling portraits from the classical pantheon that adorn her
studio suggest that she lives under the considering, disapproving male gaze of the
Western world's past.

The film's comment on the compatibility of oppression with postmodernity, an era

that has supposedly dispensed with the univocal voice of patriarchal oppression, is
in Walter and Erika's first sexual confrontation in the Kubrickian bathroom of the
stately Vienna Conservatory. The bathroom, with its rigid geometry and antiseptic
cleanliness, associate not just masturbation but sex itself with the notion of "secret
sin," the couple's encounter an expressionist caricature of the preamble to the terrible
game-playing of romantic courtship.
The sickness of romance
Walter's predatory aspect, is first sketched in his leap to the top of the bathroom stall,
interrupting Erika's privacy (suggesting his anal-sadistic quality?) as he unlocks the
stall door. Walter, rather than the apparently authoritarian Erika, is always the
dominant presence. The oral/anal aspects of their sexual encounter suggest the
culture's policing of sexual behavior that both prevents sexual development (except
within the sanctioned heterosexual trajectory) and defines anal/oral gratification as
infantile. Rather than a regression to a free, unrestrained stage of sexual
development, the exchange is a logical extension of the body-policing that ensures
repression.

Walter tracks down Erika after the incident of the broken glass (during which Erika
takes pathetic revenge on a supposed emotional rival), following her to the
bathroom, interrupting her as she presumably sits on the toilet. Whether she is
masturbating or excreting is irrelevant, the point being her lack of control over even
her body, her minimal escape from the world and her constricted being. Walter
polices her communication with her body, and in so doing enforces his sexual rules,
eventually cruelly berating her sexual orientations, finally nearly killing her for them
(he reminds her it's partially her fault).

Walter's commitment to romantic love gives him the confidence that his is the
mature, healthy sexual posture, while Erika, is "sick," a castrating threat (especially
as she momentarily painfully grasps his penis) that he briefly tolerates out of the
assumption that his love—and corresponding demands—will conquer all. His
playful, if rather manic, run from the bathroom back into the conservatory, the
camera connecting the refined, balanced enlightenment world of classical art to the
always-forbidden and concealed body functions represented by the lavatory,
foreshadows the vengefulness of his final assaults and eventual casual dismissal of
Erika which is also, it should be said, a dismissal of the best aspects of classical
culture embodied in Erika for all her damage by bourgeois civilization.

The film's pivotal horrific moment is, of course, Walter's reading of Erika's letter in
which she suddenly reveals herself as a vulnerable, desiring figure. Erika's
internalizing the need for self-destruction engendered by her repression culminates
in her letter, a form of speaking truth to power that Walter finds abhorrent. Walter
then can no longer remain the sensitive potential swain as he assumes the role always
nascent in the narrative. Walter becomes a perfect microcosmic representative of
Louis Althusser's ideological state apparatuses.

In the terrifying scene before the final rape at Erika's apartment, Erika encounters
Walter as a uniformed figure among the joking male group of the hockey team, his
brutalizing, enforced oral sex carried out between metal clothing racks that suggest
barrack bunks (Auschwitz? a NATO base?). Erika's wretched flight across the ice
rink is a postmodern Winterreise, a very truncated winter journey with no stops for
Romanticism's introspection, instead the flight of the horror film's "final girl" truly
disempowered by the monstrous normal.

La Pianiste is a summary statement on the collapse of gender relations in late

capitalist civilization, while interrogating critically Raymond Williams' notion of the
residual, figured in the greatness of Europe's cultural past. Considered by many a
dead object (rumor has it that record companies will soon cease new recordings of
classical music), Haneke insists on music's relevance to our moment. Culture's
ineffectuality against—or complicity in—the devastated emotional landscape of the
film may be La Pianiste's greatest source of horror, certainly its most challenging
question.

Christopher Sharrett

"What are you looking at and why?"

Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997) with his audience

In this Brechtian-influenced analysis of Michael Haneke's most controversial film,

Tarja Laine looks at how the director "manages to depict violence not as
entertainment or even as an innate part of life, but as inconsolable."

According to Philip Hallie, one cannot understand evil unless one empathises with
those who are being victimised.[1] Empathy provides understanding and an inner
view regarding another person's situation, and this can take place in the cinematic
realm as well: films make available to us new emotional experiences, and through
films we have the opportunity to understand human problems from someone else's
point of view. Empathy is often characterised as an emotion in which one feels as if
one was experiencing the other person's feelings as one's own, losing one's self-
awareness in the process. This is not the case, however. In empathy, one experiences
a sense of closeness with the other, but it also requires awareness of one's own
emotions, for otherwise empathy would not lead to a deeper understanding of the
other's situation.[2] In this article I will show how, in Michael Haneke's Funny
Games (Austria, 1997), empathy invites the spectator into a process of critical
thinking about violence in the media.
The progressive potential of empathy

In Funny Games, two decent-looking and seemingly well-educated young men who
call themselves Paul (Arno Frisch) and Peter (Frank Giering)—but at times also
Beavis and Butt-head, or Tom and Jerry—force their way into the holiday residence
of Anna (Susanne Lothar) and Georg Schober (Ulrich Mühe), and their little son
Schorschi (Stefan Olapczynski), and start to systematically torture the family. First
Paul kills the family dog with a golf club. Then Peter strikes Georg with the same
club, shattering his kneecap, after which Anna must undress in order to stop the
young men from torturing her son. With a friendly smile on his face, Paul suggests
a "funny" game: "I'll wager a bet that in twelve hours you three will be kaput?" The
game of physical torture and psychological humiliation now begins in earnest.

Funny Games is by any measure a shocking film

experience. According to some critics, it is also a
shockingly contradictory film experience. This
may be the case because the film is not meant to
be "mere" entertainment, but a critique of
entertainment, mass media and mainstream
cinema generally. Funny Games is purposefully
shocking rather than enchanting, and it is meant
to question the use of violence, rather than to
actually use violence, as a major narrative element. Yet in the view of some, the film
fails in its ethical pursuit because it invites the spectator to empathise with the
protagonists. For example, Jari Lindholm, a film critic for Helsingin Sanomat (the
biggest newspaper in Finland), writes that:

The film is oppressive, but it is not repulsive, because the spectator's central concern
is not his own peace of mind—no more shocks, thank you—but the fate of the
sympathetic protagonists: kind director, please don't hurt them anymore. As long as
the spectator follows the plot of the film perfectly still, he cannot really be shocked
and define his relationship to film violence anew, because he misses the most
gruesome aspect about violence: randomness.[3]

Lindholm's critique reflects an attitude that many contemporary critics share, one
that has its roots in the thinking of Bertolt Brecht. According to Brecht, emotions
and identification with fictional characters serve to contaminate the audience's
reasoning and renders viewers susceptible to the workings of ideology. Through his
paradigm of "distanciation," Brecht defined the privileged model for political theatre
and cinema, and, until recently, there have been no systematic attempts to elaborate
an alternative model.[4] But identification and emotional response also have the
potential to serve as an agency for psychic and social change, and to invite the viewer
to take a reflective, critical stance towards the film in question.

My argument is that it is precisely the empathetic response produced by Funny

Games that invites viewers to question, and possibly redefine, their own
relationships with violence in the media. By empathising with the film's victims, the
viewer is able to better understand the consequences of violence. This does not take
place in films like Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange (UK, 1971) or Oliver
Stone's Natural Born Killers (US, 1994) where the viewer feels little or no empathy,
instead watching the violence as a distanced observer. As a result, Clockwork
Orange and Natural Born Killers are (in a sense) too clever for their own good, too
self-reflective to be really radical.
Violence as a way of life

In their essay "Austrian psycho killers and home

invaders: the horror-thrillers Angst & Funny
Games," Jürgen Felix and Marcus Stiglegger write
that horror in Funny Games is based on the fact
that the situation the protagonists are facing is at
the same time terrible and absurd, "one that exists
beyond the pale of all reasonable behaviour,
psychological motivation, or logical
explanation."[5] This contradiction between the
"normal" and the "senseless" provides a space for
empathetic understanding on the viewer's part, one
that involves him/her in a critical process as well.
The contradiction in question is established from
the very beginning of the film: as the Schober
family is driving to their holiday home, the
soundtrack changes without warning from the
elevated sounds of George Frideric Handel to John
Zorn's aggressive heavy metal.
At the level of rational understanding, neither the Schobers nor the audience have
any access to the world of senseless violence with which they will soon be
confronted, and which provides the conditions of empathy for the latter. Empathy
arises on the audience's part from the feeling of mutual helplessness directed towards
the senseless, homicidal world introduced by the young men in the film. The first
reaction to this senselessness is irritation—within the diegesis, Anna gets
increasingly frustrated and upset with Peter's deliberately clumsy behaviour—but
annoyance is soon replaced by horror as the situation gets out of control with the
first violent outburst.

The nightmarish situation in which the Schobers find themselves in Funny Games
has the capacity to touch the audience deeply. Anna and Georg cannot protect their
son or themselves. As Felix and Stiglegger argue:

From that moment, right up to the end of the film, we are all involved in a "game"
that we cannot accept or explain, one which isn't "funny" at all—not for the terrorised
family, and not for the viewer who is terrorised as well— because he or she can't
help but identify with the victims.[6]

The Schobers and the audience are asking the killers the same question: "Why are
you doing this?" And all they get are ridiculous answers that cannot be taken
seriously. Paul explains Peter's actions by referring to him as "a spoiled child
tormented by ennui and world weariness, weighed down by the void of existence,"
at the same time winking directly at the camera.

The Brechtian paradox in the film is that the viewer occupies the same emotional
level as the Schobers, while at the meta-narrative level s/he is invited to share the
point of view of the psychopathic killers. Peter and Paul are constantly looking
straight into the camera, winking their eyes at the audience, and addressing the
audience directly: "Do you think they will have a chance? You're on their side, so
who will you bet with?" When Peter shoots Schorschi dead, the audience is not
shown the event (and thereby provided with the basis for catharthis, a conventional
relief of suspense through violent imagery, as Felix and Stiglegger argue). Instead
the camera stays with Paul, who is nonchalantly making sandwiches in the kitchen
when the shooting takes place. The viewer is thereby forced to listen to and imagine
the violent action, to experience its effects afterwards, or as it gets reflected on its
victims' faces:
In Funny Games, it is Anna's ravaged face especially that we must stare at again and
again: a face that gradually loses—torture by torture—all traces of human dignity,
destroyed by escalating acts of humiliation forced upon her by her tormentors.[7]

The self-reflective nature of Funny Games—the fact that Peter and Paul constantly
address the audience, even while our empathy is clearly on behalf of the Schobers—
is quite disturbing, since it forces us to acknowledge our own position with respect
to violence in the media. By combining elements of Brechtian distanciation with
elements that encourage identification with and empathy towards the protagonists,
Funny Games appears to be more efficient in its ethical pursuit than what it would
have been had it stuck to only one of the tactics. When things in Funny Games take
an unfavourable turn for the two young killers—towards the end of the film, Anna
manages to snatch the shotgun from Peter and shoot him at close range—Paul grabs
the remote control, "rewinds" the scene in question and reverses the events in order
to change the outcome. In answer to Anna's question why the pair don't simply kill
the whole family right away, Paul states that losing control over the game "would
spoil the pleasure for all of us, wouldn't it?"

Precisely. Pleasure is the answer to the question, "Why are you doing this?" But such
an answer is just as absurd as any of the others that are proposed in this extremely
violent film. Nevertheless, such films are made for the pleasure, fun and amusement
of audiences every day. The rule of the game in our contemporary society of mass
media entertainment is to produce pleasure, even through violent action.

When Georg pleads with Peter and Paul to put an end to the torture of his family,
Paul replies: "We are still under feature length." Addressing the audience directly,
he continues: "Is it enough already? You want a proper ending with plausible
development, don't you?" The Schobers' suffering does not stop, because the
audience is willing to keep watching. But of course there really is no pleasure in
Funny Games for the audience, because we are empathetically involved with the
victims. By inviting the viewer to empathise so strongly with the victims of violence,
Haneke manages to depict violence not as entertainment or even as an innate part of
life, but as inconsolable. In Haneke's own words: "I give back to violence that which
it is: pain, a violation of others."[8]

Tarja Laine
AUSTRIA
Effects of the real
Michael Haneke's
Benny's Video (1993)

Benny's Video shows the emotional detachment and unwillingness to psychologize

seen in the films of Robert Bresson. Brigitte Peucker looks at how this postmodern
bourgeois melodrama plays with representations of reality to bring us closer to what
is real.[1]

Distinguished by Câhiers du Cinéma critics as one of the 13 most noteworthy films

of 1993, yet nearly subjected to censorship in Switzerland, Benny's Video opens with
the videotaped slaughter of a pig, a sequence notable for the relentlessness with
which the video camera pursues its object. Rendering these images nearly
unendurable are the pig's squeals of pain, sounds that provoke a moral response
inseparable from the affective one the spectator experiences: the spectator's auditory
suffering is relieved only when the scene of the animal's suffering has come to an
end.

Even after its conclusion, though, our senses remain negatively involved with the
film: the end of the video sequence is signaled by "snow"—the visual and audio
white noise of an untuned television—that baffles our sense of sight and grates upon
the ear. A palpable sign of the termination—the death—of the image chain, the video
snow underscores the death of the pig.

In Der siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent, 1989), the first film of the
bourgeois trilogy of which Benny's Video is the second part, snow on the TV screen
has an even more horrifying message to convey, as it is "watched" by spectators who
are dead. Signalling the materiality of the video image and of the screen itself, the
absent images for which the snow stands are reflected in their spectators' unseeing
eyes, while the noise that substitutes for sound falls on deaf ears. As I will argue in
this essay, Haneke's concern with spectator affect is conveyed by means of
modernist strategies that privilege the materialities of his medium. This is one of the
many features that Haneke's films share in common with those of Robert Bresson,
Haneke's self-proclaimed precursor.
In place of absent parents
Benny's Video—the film—revolves around a postmodern consciousness for which
representation and reality are nearly indistinguishable, in which "experiental time"
is constantly recorded.[2] Benny's video footage documenting the pig's slaughter is
coded as amateurish documentary: it is unedited, steadily marked by hand-held
effects, ends abruptly, and hence marked as "real."[3] More importantly, as in other
films featuring slaughterhouse violence, it records a real death, not one enacted for
the camera, and its impact on Benny and on the spectator derives from this
knowledge. If the definitive scene of graphic realism is, as Michael Fried has said of
painting, one that the viewer can't bear to look at—or listen to—then this is realism
par excellence.[4]

But this footage is not simply marked as real, but is

variously manipulated—subjected to slow motion,
re-wound, briefly frozen. This is a sequence in the
process of being viewed, not only by the spectator of
the film, but by a diegetic spectator, as well. It is
being scrutinized by the fourteen-year-old Benny,
who is using video technology to examine the
process of of dying.

Soon he will shoot a young girl with the same weapon that was used to slaughter the
pig, the event will be recorded by the video camera that seems always to be running
in his room, and he will subject this footage to similar scrutiny.[5] Benny will
perform all of these actions seemingly without any response, affective or moral.

Obvious allusions are made here to Baudrillard's insights concerning a postmodern

subject who cannot "produce himself as a mirror," only as screen,[6] but,
additionally, Haneke's film provides us with a wealth of sociological detail designed
to suggest why this adolescent's life might be devoid of feeling, and how, for him,
perception comes to be mediated by the technology with which he is surrounded.

The teenager finds replacements for his absent parents, Haneke suggests, in the eyes
of the video camera and the movement of video images. For Benny, videotaping is
an act of perception, with images on a monitor substituting even for the obscured
view of the outside world through his bedroom window. Benny seems incapable of
relating to anyone—even, one scene suggests tellingly, to himself—except through
its mediation, while the sounds of TV and Rock form an aural space that envelops
him. Since Haneke refuses psychological realism, Benny, like many other Haneke
characters, projects an opacity that renders individual motivation inaccessible.[7]
Yet social commentary lies within Haneke's purview and, when the film points an
accusing finger at Benny's parents, one wonders to what extent psychology has been
invalidated, after all.

The media also come in for a share of the blame. Television reportage, Haneke's
films suggest, has anesthetized our capacity to respond to scenes of suffering. Benny
spends his time watching the aestheticized violence of action movies and the
restrained, "normalizing" television reporting of scenes of death in Bosnia.
Providing violence in another register—but real violence as well—these news
programs present images of carnage accompanied by voices of commentators
carefully trained to exclude all emotion, thus rendering a sanitized version of the real
precisely where the spectator has come to feel that she has access to immediacy.
Of blood and ketchup

If the realism of film is conceptualized in spatial terms, Mary Ann Doane has argued,
the realism of television lies in its relation to temporality, to its sense of
"liveness."[8] 71 Fragments, the third film in Haneke's trilogy, undermines precisely
that sense when we see the same news broadcast more than once, suggesting our
entrapment in a loop that only the end of the film cuts through. Television coverage
works hard to keep the shock of catastrophe at bay, and in Benny's Video, Benny's
vacant expression reflects the TV commentators' calm detachment.

For Benny there is no difference between a death marked by "ketchup and plastic,"
as he says of death in the movies, and one that produces real blood. But he knows
the difference between his video and feature films. Benny returns compulsively and
with evident fascination to the documentary images, holding the images of the pig's
death agony in freeze frame. Necrophilic fascination may be one explanation for his
behavior, but another aim is the control of narrative flow and time: he manipulates
this footage in order—half-seriously—to interfere with the inevitability of its
narrative and to reverse "reality." (Haneke's 1997 film Funny Games briefly
succeeds in doing just that, only to suspend all plausibility by "rewinding" the
action.)

Benny's scrutiny of these scenes seems scientific and epistemological, an attempt by

technological means to discover the secret of life and death: later, he will repeatedly
view the images of the murder he commits. But the video camera is stationary in the
murder scene, only accidentally trained upon its players who move in and out of the
frame. Emulating the restraint of Bresson, Haneke's images deny their spectator the
spectacle of violence that they critique in other media. For the spectator, as for
Benny, his act is elusive, incomprehensible.
Haneke's bitter indictment of the upper-
middle class Austrian family continues as the
businessman father and art dealer mother
attempt to cover up Benny's act of murder as
much for the sake of their careers as to protect
their son. Yet when Benny attempts a "flight
into Egypt" with his mother—while his father
remains behind to dispose of the corpse—
their trip, despite its macabre motivation,
takes on some of the qualities of a utopian
space and time.[9] As is evident from videotaped images of Benny shooting video,
his mother herself films with a second camera.

Although the relation of mother and child is mediated by the video camera—indeed,
their meeting ground is the collaborative work of the videotape itself—the very fact
of their relation seems to confer a redemptive effect on this medium. Later, while
channel-surfing in the hotel room, Benny stops at a broadcast of a Bach concert
featuring "Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier." This diegetic music continues as he moves
to the window and, in one of the rare point-of-view shots in this film, with Benny
we see the image of the nighttime harbor while the organ continues to play.

Superimposed upon the organ music, with the image of the harbor still in view, we
then hear the voice of Benny's mother as she enters the room: "Greetings from Papa."
As Benny answers "How is he?" their conversation becomes the fragile rendering of
a family reconstituted. While their "reunion" takes place within a formulaic
exchange and in voiceover, it is solemnized within the auratic aural space of the
Bach prelude, of religious high art.[10] Although the warm colors of Egypt suggest
that even these gestures can only take place in "warm" Third World locales, not in
the cold urban spaces of Vienna, this space nevertheless remains the private space
of familial love, sanctified by religious feeling—the "flight into Egypt" —as well as
high culture. Haneke's film gestures towards a redemptive space, but can go no
further.
The eye of God looking down?

As the title of Haneke's film suggests, the boundary between Benny's Video and
Benny's video is repeatedly revealed to be permeable, as though to suggest that
visual restraint cannot spare even Haneke's images the charge of being tainted. At
various moments, the spectator is only retrospectively aware that the sequence we're
watching belongs to Benny's ongoing video rather than to the film's diegesis.
Blurring the boundaries among a variety of images once again points to their
different, though temporarily indistinguishable materialities, while space and time
are blurred in a gesture that includes both postmodern and modern valeities.

One of the most effective confusions of this kind occurs at the end of the film when
we see a scene shot from within Benny's dark room, looking through the partly open
door into a more brightly lit space—one of Haneke's signature shots. Here, too, the
materiality of film is at issue, for the light that permits the image enters the "dark
chamber" from which it is shot through a partly-opened door suggests the work of
the shutter that admits light into the camera itself. In this scene, we recognize both
image and soundtrack, for we have seen and heard them separately before. It is
Haneke's strategy initially to obscure the context of the image—does it belong to the
film or to the videotape? —and consequently to allow sound to fix its meaning.

Towards the end of the film, the spectator hears once more
the desperately calm conversation in which Benny's
parents discuss how best to dispose of the body of the
young girl whom Benny has killed. A few seconds later,
with an even greater sense of shock, we realize that
Benny's video is once again being viewed, this time with
a voice-over conversation between Benny and the
policemen with whom he is viewing it.

The parents' conversation will serve to indict them as accessories after the fact for
the murder that their son has committed. As Benny turns himself in, the videotape
becomes not only a document of violence, but its instrument as well. In keeping with
the film's trenchant critique of contemporary mores, it remains unclear whether
Benny's act is a moral one—a Bressonian assumption of guilt, with religious
overtones—or merely an act of violence against his parents, the flipside of the
utopian space suggested in Egypt.

The final frames of Benny's Video represent the scene in the police station as multiple
images on the monitors of a surveillance system. Doubly mediated by technology,
these cold, impersonal images are on view for the benefit of an anonymous spectator
representing the Law, and for us. The film's final images—images shot from above,
the "God shot"—are filmic images that frame and control the video images that they
contain.

Haneke's film opens with Benny's video images presented directly to the spectatorial
view, while in its middle section the nature of its images—film or video? —is often
initially ambiguous. Finally, when at the end Haneke's film definitively subsumes
Benny's video and the images produced by the surveillance cameras, the cold
formalism of Haneke's cinema masters and contains video. If Haneke's camera
encompasses and transcends even the eye of the Law, whose eye does it represent?
If these images are meant to gesture towards a higher authority, its identity remains
enigmatic.

In Benny's Video, then, the content of bourgeois melodrama is distanced by means

of a modernist visual style, one that deliberately emulates the cool detachment of
Bresson. Haneke's emphatic affirmation of modernism's refusal of psychology
intersects parodically with the bourgeois family as a defining subject matter of his
films. Exposed by modernist techniques, it is the bourgeois melodrama's self-
containment within the personal that is the object of critique.

The mediatization of the public sphere that characterizes the postmodern period—
Haneke's other topic—is likewise countered by formal means. In Haneke's films, it
is the ability of sound to assault the sensorium and to promote perceptual and
emotional realism in the spectator that wages war against the inauthenticity of the
postmodern. In Benny's Video, as in Haneke's other films, modernist strategies
remain a source of filmic vitality. Revising and making new the bourgeois
melodrama of an earlier era, they charge postmodern simulation with the energy of
the real.

Brigitte Peucker

AUSTRIA
Life, or something like it
Michael Haneke's
Der siebente Kontinent
(The Seventh Continent, 1989)

Haneke's debut, a calm depiction of a Viennese family who form a suicide pact, is
not easy viewing, but, as Adam Bingham argues, the film is optimistic in its refusal
to console its audience.
Everyday suicide

Michael Haneke, it is safe to suggest, is the creative force behind one of the most
coherent and challenging bodies of work in contemporary world cinema. His films
have so consistently and intelligently explored notions of alienation and emotional
nullification in modern life, the collapse of communication and the intrusive,
desensitising nature of the media that Cineaste's Christopher Sharrett recently called
him "One of cinema's important provocateurs" (a term Haneke himself corroborates
by noting that his films are intended as a "slap in the face.")[1]

This notoriety and acclaim, however, has been on the back of recent works such as
Funny Games (1997) and La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher, 2001), and has, to my
mind, never truly credited some of Haneke's earlier films with the importance they
deserve. Chief among such pictures is his first feature, Die Siebente Kontinent (The
Seventh Continent, 1989)—one of the purest modernist texts since the height of
Resnais and Antonioni, and perhaps the greatest contemporary contribution to what
may be termed "the cinema of existentialism": the focus on the actions and morality
of individuals in a seemingly empty universe found in the work of film-makers like
Chantal Akerman, Gaspar Noé and the Krzysztof Kieślowski of Dekalog
(Decalogue, 1988). Die Siebente Kontinent's significane was recognised in Austria
instantly and within two years of the film's release a collection of essays on this
startling debut was published, a rare accolade for a new director.[2]

In this film, Haneke creates an entirely original narrative syntax to convey directly
the experiences of his characters' as their souls are ground down in the crushing
vacuum of modern existence. And also to allow the viewer the space to make their
own connections and to draw their own inferences and conclusions as to what the
film means and, more crucially, how relevant it is. Shocking in both form and
content, this is a film about utter despair born from the everyday, the mundane. As
critic Michael Wilmington has termed it: "A calm chronicle of hell."[3]
A life in three chapters

Der siebente Kontinent covers three years in the life and death of an average,
everyday Austrian family. Nothing of any real consequence happens to them: the
daughter, Eva (Leni Tanzer) feigns blindness at school, and a visit from the mother,
Anna's (Birgit Doll) brother reawakens sadness over the death of her mother, but
nothing extraordinary. They appear to be a normal, close family unit. That is, until
they make the decision (we are told agonizingly, but see no real evidence of this) to
take their own lives, which they do. The end.
The simplicity of the above synopsis is perfectly in keeping with the already noted
calm, ordered surface of Die Siebente Kontinent, and its rigorous, unblinking focus
on the minutiae of everyday life. Haneke, in a manner true to the aesthetic of art
cinema as it was developed by Bergman, Antonioni et al, constructs his narrative
loosely around scenes that would usually be elided (the characters' daily rituals) and
manipulates the audience's understanding of conventional film form, technique and
construction in order to draw attention to how they are commonly taken for granted
in terms of their signification.

To this end, the structure of the film affords the clearest instance. Scene transitions
in Die Siebente Kontinent are entirely punctuated by fades to black; a technique that
usually connotes a significant temporal ellipsis but which here serves to connect
actions taking place in a short space of time; even, with George and Anna at work
and Eva at school, parallel actions.

The essence of this method is to suggest that a temporal ellipsis could well have
taken place between the scenes we see of the daily lives of the three characters. The
point is that their existence is such that they have very little difference or variety in
their lives from day to day, year to year. And though the events depicted in the films
first two chapters both take place in one day, there really could be any length of time
between them (as is reinforced by the fact that we see two almost identical days a
year apart for chapters one and two).

Even more than this, Haneke also de-personalizes the narrative for at least half of its
almost two hours' running time. The early scenes of the family getting ready in the
morning and going to work/school, the scenes of them going about their daily lives
(repeated exactly in the second of the film's three chapters), are all presented in tight,
isolating shots (often but not always close-ups) of the action that exclude the
character's faces from the frame. Indeed, almost fifteen minutes go by before we see
what any of them look like.

The connotations of such a stark style resonate throughout Die Siebente Kontinent
and powerfully underline Haneke's central thematic of the emotional vacuity of
modern life. The most obvious way in which this is achieved is in the impersonal
narrative reflecting the impersonality of these characters' existence. By showing only
shots of hands turning off alarm clocks, hands preparing food etc, the film very
effectively states just how mechanically such tasks, the everyday tasks that make up
these characters lives, are performed. And thus just how empty their lives really are.
This is intensified by Haneke's complete refusal of any psychological elucidation or
insight into their particular states of mind. Behaviour like Anna's sudden breakdown
into tears in the carwash in chapter two is left unexplained (narratively at least). And
Eva's feigning of blindness, though cued in later by the newspaper article Anna finds
in her bedroom about a young blind girl who overcame loneliness, is never explored
here in the way a mainstream production would (by looking at why Eva is lonely
and what can be done about it, besides family suicide, etc).

All of which creates an interesting dynamic whereby we, the viewers, are, one the
hand, kept at a marked distance from the characters because we know so little about
them and what their feelings are regarding the extraordinary events of which they
partake (perhaps their inability to feel anything is the point, but the effect remains
the same). And on the other, we are presented with the diegesis and thematic of the
film in a much more direct, immediate way.

In other words, it is not that Haneke is trying to foreground any Brechtian concepts
of construction and artificiality with this style: he has never, with the exception of
Funny Games, been overtly interested in cinematic self-reflexivity. What is achieved
is an extra-textual underlining of the theme of modern alienation, of modernist
theorist Marshall Berman [4] or existentialist Martin Heidegger's [5] notion of the
essential unknowability of anyone in the modern world. Just as there is a barrier
between the characters within the film, so one exists between those characters and
the audience.

This has been a cause of some concern for certain commentators, who presumably
would like Haneke to spell out exactly what he wants to say so as to absolve them
of delving too far into his nightmare scenario. Robin Wood, for instance, notes (in
an otherwise intriguing and enlightening Cineaction article on La Pianiste) that it is
not clear in Die Siebente Kontinent whether or not Haneke is condoning family
suicide.[6]

This, to my mind, misses the point entirely and significantly shores the film of much
of its uniquely disturbing complexity into the bargain. As I mentioned previously,
Haneke is not simply condoning or condemning the family's act, he is objectively
presenting an extreme case in such a way that the audience are free to make what
they will of it, to truly find their own thoughts and draw their own conclusions.

This is the ultimate, Kafkaesque project of Die Siebente Kontinent (an author
Haneke has much in common with and indeed who he has adapted for television
with Das Schloss, The Castle, in 1996). The central tone of Kafka's three,
posthumously published novels, particularly Der Prozess (The Trial, 1925), is one
of everyday reality tinged with dread and unease. And narratively they convey
nightmare scenarios that remain elusive to both the protagonist and the reader.

Der Prozess opens in the following way: "Someone must have slandered Joseph K,
for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning,"[7] and
throughout, no further, concrete elucidation is forthcoming. The details of what, if
anything, this bewildered, desperate protagonist (like his namesake K in Das
Schloss) has done, as well as what his true feelings about his incarceration are,
remain elusive, ambiguous at best. It is left to the reader to ultimately decide what
his plight means or represents. Whether or not anything of significance can be read
into it.

Such a method of narrative construction is also at the heart of Die Siebente

Kontinent. Indeed, Haneke himself has remarked that: "I can lead a character in a
story in such a way that the sum of his behaviour does not give sufficient explanation
for his decisions. The audience will have to find one."[8] To this, one may add
Richard Roud's statement about Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959, a film
comparable to Haneke's in its explicitly parametric narration), that: "We must make
the connections; we participate in the final meaning of the film."[9]
Images of alienation

One aspect of Haneke's films that has gone largely unexplored, even in the work that
has garnered the most critical attention, is the great power and charge that his images
reverberate with; the meaning that they carry in terms of mise en scène and the way
in which this underlines and reinforces his films' central thematic. Die Siebente
Kontinent, although a cinematic debut, abounds in such intelligence and depth.

The opening scenes set up the tone and theme in a wordless, synecdochic way
reminiscent in effect of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samurai (The Samurai, 1967).
After several extreme close-ups of the family car in the carwash, the film cuts inside
and holds a long take (under the credits) from the back seat looking out of the front
window as the family sit in silence. When the credits have rolled and the wash has
finished, the car drives away past a huge, exotic tourist ad for Australia.

A scene of masterful expositional and thematic elucidation, this opening sketches in

the notion of communication breakdown (to be explored subsequently in the way
Anna and George can only write letters to George's parents about their lives and,
indeed, their deaths). And it lays out both the dialectical style of the film's intrinsic
norms—long-take master shots and more rapidly cut close-ups—and its particular
manner of usage—to convey both fragmentation and stasis, the second-hand,
television-induced acceleration of our experience of the world and the actual, first-
hand aimlessness of contemporary, lived reality.

This opening segment in the car also provides another perfect microcosmic metaphor
for the family: trapped in a car/cage, moving slowly, silently and mechanically
through their lives and dreaming of an impossible escape. The obscure and enigmatic
title of the film—Die Siebente Kontinent—can actually be seen as being born from
this moment and from that particular image, as it recurs dreamlike at several strategic
moments in the narrative, a perfect visualisation of all that is unattainable and
unreachable (there are, of course, only six continents).

Aside from the billboard at the beginning, the next appearance of this landscape,
filling the frame and replete with diegetic sounds and the aura of a dream, is
immediately after Eva is first seen going to bed, saying her little prayer (Dear Lord
make me meek so I in Heaven Thee shall meet) and going to sleep. And the final
time it is seen is just before the family commit the deadly act itself at the end.

The context for these appearances, then, is that of dreaming and death: the only two
viable, even possible escapes for the characters from the drudgery of their existence.
The fact of its association with the prayer, with meeting the Lord in Heaven, neatly
encapsulates both death (meeting God in the after-life) and dreaming (Eva is going
to sleep), whilst the image before the suicide hints that the family may find in death
what they so clearly could not in life.

Other moments in the film reinforce the theme of modernity and emptiness just as
powerfully. At the very beginning of the second chapter, just before the daily
routines witnessed in the first are seen almost identically once again, George and
Anna are seen having sex. For a minute nothing seems out of the ordinary, but, as
they finish, the alarm clock goes off for them to get up, and their act is shown up for
what it is: something to kill the time. The most beautiful act of coming together that
two human beings can engage in has been reduced to a meaningless exploit to
alleviate boredom.

The most telling moment in the third chapter of the film in relation to the above is
the reaction of Eva, who had previously embraced (though had perhaps little
understood) her parents' activities, and indeed Anna Herself, when George smashes
the family fish tank (another central synecdochic metaphor). In this, one of the film's
two tender and emotive scenes, they both scream at George and burst uncontrollably
into tears at the plight of the suffocating fish on the living room floor: a particularly
apposite way of conveying the chaotic mental state they are in. And, again, the
incomprehensibility of what they're doing (they care for the fish but not themselves).
The Sound of music

The music in Haneke's pictures is also something that has often been singled out for
special consideration: from the classical/thrash dialectic that continually informs
Funny Games to the centrality of Schubert's Winterreise to La Pianiste. Where it
becomes, in the director's own words, "an instrument of repression."[10]

Conversely, Die Siebente Kontinent uses Alban Berg's 1935 violin concerto To The
Memory of an Angel (his final completed work) over the narrative's only other tender
scene: Eva standing alone in a car lot whilst George sells the family car, not so much
for thematic ends (although the angel behind the composition—Manon Gropius, the
daughter of Mahler's widow Alma and her second husband, architect Walter
Gropius—was a girl who died tragically young) but more for its strikingly mournful,
elegiac tone and, typically for Berg, for its spare, haunting melody.

What is particularly interesting about this scene in terms of the music is that Berg's
concerto is not clearly either diegetic or non-diegetic. In the soundtrack mix it
certainly appears to be non-diegetic (the only such music in the film). But, on closer
inspection, it can also be read as playing in the family car that George is selling, as
it stops abruptly when the engine is turned on and the car taken for a test drive by
the potential buyer.

The effect of this latent ambiguity is that the sense of Eva as lost, emotionally
disoriented, is replicated and made manifest at the level of discourse, not un-like the
mechanical repetitions of the earlier acts of the film. We feel not overwhelmed, as
Eva doesn't (she is a child and does not, cannot, understand the enormity of what is
happening), but rather that something implacable and inexplicable has been set in
motion, something we can sense in the gut rather than being able to explain or
elucidate on or, crucially, rationalise.
Point of view

This scene is also marked out by the use, one of the very few in the film, of a point-
of-view (POV) shot and a traditional five point/two shot (of the character and what
they are looking at) POV structure, as described by Edward Branigan in his
exhaustive theory of point-of-view in the cinema published in Screen in 1975.[11]
All of which together serves to single this short scene out as different from those
around it: one where Haneke works towards a particular, specific viewer response.
As Eva looks out through a large fence at night to watch a boat slowly passing, one
is made aware of how imprisoned she is by all that is happening around her, how
darkly claustrophobic it feels.

As the music strikes a melancholy refrain, Haneke draws us into the world and
experience of Eva by using a slightly longer lens, closer than before to a telephoto
(which compresses the planes of action and makes the image flatter), to present
another visualisation of the shallow modern world and the lives of those within it:
although this time we feel more than observe its devastation.
An optimistic realist

After saying all that I have about Haneke's exploration of the alienation inherent in
the modern world, it might seem strange, even impossible, to conclude that this man
sees himself (much like Heidegger did) as an optimist: someone who wants, as he
says: "to shake people out of their apathy."[12]

In Haneke's mind, though, this is exactly what an optimist does. Rather than making
glib works that reassure and comfort the audience, that allow them dreams and
escape (something that can be argued to be pessimistic in that, logically, it infers
there is something to be escaped from—something these works won't confront), his
films are concerned squarely with bleak reality.

What Haneke is doing, then, can, ultimately be construed as optimistic. Die Siebente
Kontinent cannot be reduced to the mere level of a warning against allowing ones
life to degenerate into a state of "emotional glaciation" and inertia, but this is part of
why it can be taken as other than pessimistic. It is a film that sets out to challenge,
to provoke, and so to wrest from its audience a sense of complacency about living
in the modern world. If a particularly passive viewer is constructed by the
mainstream Hollywood text, then Haneke is the antithesis. He seeks audience
activity both by leaving the ultimate meaning of the film up to us, and by facilitating
(by shaking us from our apathy) a sense where we might relate the very everyday
reality presented for much of the film to our own lives. And how could we fail to
find something positive from such a comparison.
Being and nothingness

Finally, it is worth considering the existential credentials of Die Siebente Kontinent,

as there have been many claims for Haneke as a great existentialist film-maker. It is
apt with this filmmaker to relate his work to philosophy and philosophical traditions
as he studied the subject himself academically, and has consciously tried to translate
and assimilate the work of several theorists into his own films.

Of the many schools of thought on the subject (no-one ever considers the multitude
of existential theories in relation to film/literature, proceeding as if there is only one
grand theory), the film is best seen in the light of two prominent 20th-century
thinkers: Karl Jaspers and, as already stated, Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger's notion that we know beings (or "Dasein" as he terms them in his 1927
Sein und Zeit, Being and Time)[13] only partially and in a single given situation is
obviously a structuring principle for Die Siebente Kontinent, but the work of Jaspers,
particularly Man In The Modern Age [14] would seem to be the most telling point of
reference. In this work, Jaspers presents a diatribe against the disease of
contemporary technological progress that has fostered an ignorance of the true
nature of human existence. Philip Mairet sums up Jaspers argument thus:

The surrender of man's thinking to rationalism and of his artifice to technics have
consequences which console man with the feeling that he is progressing, but make
him neglect or deny fundamental forces of his inner life which are then turned into
forces of destruction.[15]

This could almost have been written with Haneke's film in mind. The film is full of
deadening, stifling paradigms of technological progress: from the car wash
(teasingly juxtaposed with the tourist ad) to the TV to the machines Anna, an
optician, works with. Also, á la Antonioni (to whom Haneke has frequently been
compared), there are several long and extreme long shots of George, an engineer,
walking through the industrial environment of his workplace in total isolation,
conjuring a powerful image of man the modern automaton.

This, as Jaspers suggests, then leads to despair and destruction. Their inner life and
soul effectively killed, there is nothing for George and Anna to do but make this
death outwardly, physically manifest, and strive to finally find the unfindable, reach
the unreachable. And make one last journey in search of the elusive seventh
continent.

Adam Bingham
K I N O E Y E:
De-icing the Emotions
Michael Haneke's retrospective in London

Andrew J Horton

When a director announces "I wish you a disturbing evening" before the showing of his latest film,
you probably are not in for an easy ride. If he says it with cheerful abandon, you have all the more
reason to take him seriously, or so discovered Londoners attending the recent retrospective of
five films by the controversial existentialist director Michael Haneke, part of the Festival of Central
European Culture.

Haneke, who studied philosophy at Vienna University, talks about his films using long barely
translatable German words that make you wonder if discussing his work in English is at all
possible: Entfremdung (alienation from oneself), emotionale Vergletscherung (emotional
glaciation) and Entwirklichung (reality losing its sense of realness).

Behind these fearsome expressions, Haneke's films are very immediate and comprehensible,
although by no means simplistic. He is concerned with a society that no longer knows how to love
- or for that matter how to hate. His films are an attempt to resharpen our feelings and responses
to the world around us, which have been blunted, especially by the media. Rejecting standard
conventions of timing , build up of suspense and logical plotting, he is not worried about inducing
boredom, irritation and frustration. Haneke repeatedly draws us into the cinematic medium, as
any film seeks to do, but then breaks the illusion to show us how we have been seduced and
tricked, and what willing accomplices to it we were.

Although he had been writing television scripts since 1974, Haneke first hit
cinema screens in 1989 with part one of his trilogy on "emotional glaciation,"
Der Siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent, 1989). This leisurely but
intricate study, inspired by the real-life suicide of a middle-class Viennese
family, immediately established Haneke as a unique director. The critic
Alexander Howarth has suggested that the film should bear the subtitle
Some strict thinking on "How strict thinking, writing and viewing found how to love each other." The
suicide
trilogy, which followed with Benny's Video (1992) and 71 Fragmente einer
Chronologie des Zufalls (71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance, 1994), is permeated with a
crushing absence of passion. Apologies are monotonously murmured unmeant, a man's "I love
you" is addressed more to his beer than his wife and a father's reproaches to his son for murdering
a girl are little different from those for staying up too late. This makes bleak viewing, but Haneke
insists he is an optimist. "The people who make entertainment movies are the pessimists," he
explains, "the optimist tries to shake people out of their apathy."

With several literary adaptations already behind him, and such excellent existentialist credentials,
you would think Haneke would be the ideal man to interpret Kafka's Das Schloss (The Castle,
1995). Curiously, though, Haneke's screen adaptation is his weakest film to date. It feels rushed
and hectic, a far cry from both his first film and the texture of Kafka's original novel. Ultimately, it
adds little to our understanding of either Kafka or Haneke.

His latest film, Funny Games (1997), sees a return to form, and it will, if nothing else, do much to
bolster Haneke's notoriety. Whilst Hollywood is spending millions of dollars on marauding aliens,
city-sized dinosaurs and icebergs to convey fear and terror,
Haneke has realised that the people from the house next door
who drop in for some eggs can do the job far more effectively.
Especially if they bet that by nine o'clock the following morning
their hosts will all be dead. Such is the case when two charming
lads, Peter and Paul, pop over to sadistically torture and
psychologically terrorise a family for what could well prove to be
their last twelve hours alive - unless they can escape. Why all Neighbours from hell
the needless brutality? It turns out the well-mannered funsters
have an altruistic urge to provide the cinema audience, who they address directly, with what they
have come to see in the film - mindless violence.

As the duo try to entertain us by playing their games with the family, Haneke plays games with us
in order to awaken us to the senselessness of the increasing lust audiences have for blood on
the cinema screens. He builds up tension and then destroys it. He gives us what we want and
then takes it away. He pulls us out of our comfortable cinema seats and forces us to recognise
our role as protagonists in the film and de facto initiators of the bloodshed. The ultimate object is
to restore to violence its real properties, as opposed to its cinematic ones, and to faithfully
represent the very real suffering and distress that actual violence causes.

The focus is therefore far more on the after-effects than the

Paul (Arno Frisch) engages little Georgie
in some funny games
which just talked about the subject.
actions themselves, which, with one deliberate exception, are
not shown. Haneke skilfully lets us create the violence in our
own minds, and stresses the agony, terror and humiliation
through unimportant actions, a device he used so well in his
trilogy. Doubtless many will disapprove of Haneke using
violence to criticise violence (as censors in several countries
have), but he sees no other way. In a post-screening discussion
with a rather vocal audience, he expressed his reservations
about the efficacy of Wim Wenders's The End of Violence,

Funny Games is a genuinely shocking and discomforting film. In shattering preconceptions and
by confronting you with your darker, more bloodthirsty nature as a cinema viewer, it goes much
further than other films tackling the issue of violence, such as Peter Greenaway�s The Cook, the
Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. This is not a film to be easily dismissed, particularly since it is
currently making its way around Europe and could well be appearing at a cinema near you shortly.
I, too, wish you a disturbing evening.

Andrew J Horton, 26 October 1998 (republished 22 November 1999)

Code Unknown

France/Germany/Romania 2000

Reviewed by Richard Falcon

Synopsis

Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.

Paris, the present. Anne (Juliette Binoche), an actress, meets Jean (Alexandre
Hamidi), the younger brother of her war-photographer boyfriend Georges (Thierry
Neuvic). Jean has run away from his father's farm and asks her for the new entry
code to her apartment; he then discards a crumpled paper bag into the lap of Maria
(Luminita Gheorghiu), a Romanian illegal immigrant who is begging on the street.
Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), a teacher of deaf children, remonstrates with him. In the
ensuing scuffle, policemen arrest Maria and Amadou. Maria is deported. Amadou's
West African mother expresses her grief at the treatment of her son. Anne performs
a scene from the thriller she is filming, in which she is imprisoned in a soundproof
room by a killer.

Georges returns from Kosovo, where he has been photographing atrocities. In

Romania, Maria returns to her husband Dragos (Bob Nicolescu) and her family, with
whom she moves into a small flat. She is ashamed of having had to beg in Paris,
although she did send money home. Jean disappears from his father's farm. His
father responds by killing his livestock, telling Anne and Georges that he is unable
to run the farm without Jean's help. Anne hears sounds of distress coming from an
adjoining apartment but is unsure what to do. She confronts an elderly neighbour
who, she believes, pushed a note through her door purporting to be from an abused
child in the other apartment; the old woman denies it. Antagonised by Georges'
inability to settle, Anne starts a scene with him in a supermarket, claiming that she
aborted their child while he was away. Georges surreptitiously photographs
passengers on the Métro. Maria pays to be smuggled back to Paris. Anne, travelling
home on the Métro, is tormented by an Arab youth who spits in her face before being
challenged by a middle-aged Arab man. As Maria starts to beg on the street, Georges
finds the code to the apartment changed and Amadou's students perform a piece for
massed drums.

Review

"Morality," Cahiers du cinéma critic Luc Moullet famously said in 1959,"is a

question of tracking shots." Michael Haneke's first - predominantly- French-
language film begins with an exquisitely realised nine-minute tracking shot initially
following Juliette Binoche's Anne as she walks along the street. Were this not a
Haneke film, it would be tempting to view these opening moments as a homage to
the nouvelle vague film-makers' fondness for long-take sequences that juxtapose a
beautiful actress with a Parisian boulevard caught in real time. But as in Haneke's
earlier 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance and The Seventh Continent, both
of which introduce the fragmented, episodic narrative structure employed in Code
Unknown, Haneke is concerned here with philosophical first principles rather than
referentiality. As this sequence-shot bears witness to the sudden street incident that
links the disparate experiences of Maria (a Romanian immigrant), Amadou (the son
of West African refugees), Anne, and Jean (the brother of Anne's boyfriend
Georges), the film offers the first of a number of scenes which use the multicultural
public spaces of Paris, not for their fashionability (Haneke points out he could as
easily have filmed his script in London) but as a laboratory for testing the
relationship between representation and reality. The results confirm Haneke's
reputation as one of cinema's most accomplished moralists.

Both Benny's Video and Funny Games tended to didacticism and indulged Haneke's
perverse modernist desire to punish us for our collusion with the commodified- and
thus, for Haneke at least, mendacious- narrative certainties of dominant cinema.
Code Unknown, on the other hand, furthers Haneke's project of countering what he
sees as the degradation of our sense of the real by modulating with true virtuosity
between various realisms. The opening sequence is by turns manipulative- stoking
our indignation at the policemen's casually insensitive and implicitly racist handling
of the confrontation between Jean and Amadou- and naturalistic, artfully thwarting
our desire to reach easy judgement. In a later sequence in the Métro, a static camera
observes in neutral long shot- again with an unbroken take- as Anne is tormented by
an aggressive Arab youth who, incensed by her lack of reaction to his unprovoked
taunts, spits in her face. In between the film presents us with fragments- interspersed
with Brechtian fades and sudden Godardian sound edits- which turn on the difficulty
of relating in a moral fashion to others in a world in which any communication seems
fraught with the dangers of victimisation. Anne, while ironing, turns down the
television when she hears screams coming from another apartment and this too is
left unexplained and unresolved. Alongside this quotidian malaise are the characters'
attempts to achieve contact through dissimulation, such as when Anne challenges
her elderly neighbour, who may or may not have written a letter purporting to be
from an abused child in the adjoining apartment, or when Anne, during an argument
with Georges, claims- we don't know whether it's true or not- to have aborted his
child when he was in Kosovo. Georges' own subterfuge, his surreptitious
photographing of people on the Métro- a form of surveillance that leads to a
marvellous montage of portraits (the work of war photographer Luc Delahaye)-
further complicates the film's insistent thematic build-up around responsibility to
others and the unbridgeable glacial distance between people.

As Haneke has suggested in interviews, all of this would merely be a reiteration of

various modernist clichés about the impossibility of communication were the film
not to comprise one superb sequence after another. Rather than dryly demonstrating
a thesis, each scene conveys a deeply affecting sense of authenticity and immediacy.
The performance of the deglamorised- but still luminescent- Juliette Binoche, whose
approach to Haneke initiated the film, contributes immeasurably to the success of
Code Unknown. A sequence from the film she is shooting (she plays an actress), in
which she is interrogated- one of two startling scens that reveal Haneke's grasp of
the strength of our desire to be manipulated (the other- at first deliberately confusing
levels of reality - involves a toddler crawling on the edge of a tall building)- is a
masterclass in close-up acting. That amid all these heavy-duty moral/aesthetic
preoccupations Haneke manages to offer powerfully understated images of the lot
of economic migrants- Maria's silent deportation and return to Paris- adds to the
sense of Code Unknown as a major achievement. Orchestrating his long takes, his
superb use of off-screen space and chilly long shots, Haneke sets about if not
reinventing, then reinvigorating a non-naive realism for the 21st century. In the
process, he gives us the most intellectually stimulating and emotionally provocative
piece of European cinema of recent times.