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Michael Haneke by Mattias Frey Previously based in Berlin, Mattias Frey is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard University (USA). His articles on German and Austrian Film have appeared in soma, cinetext, The Unorthodox Reel and Let's Go. |
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| A cinema of disturbance:
the films of Michael Haneke in context – Michael Haneke, “Film as Catharsis”
Michael Haneke is with good certainty both Austria's most esteemed and most controversial active filmmaker. His feature Benny's Video (1992) shocked crowds with its restrained, antipsychological portrait of a teenager who kills a young girl “to see how it is”. Funny Games (1997) inspired a fierce debate on how one can interrogate violence in film. On the whole, Haneke's polemical filmic program attempts to lay bare the coldness of European society and challenge Hollywood's blithe treatment of violence. His acknowledged influences include Kieslowski, Tarkovsky, Straub, Antonioni, Jon Jost, and above all Bresson. To date his greatest commercial success has been The Piano Teacher, which garnered three awards at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and went on to become a hit in arthouse cinemas worldwide. Born in 1942 in Munich, Michael Haneke grew up in the Lower Austrian city of Wiener Neustadt. He studied psychology, philosophy and theater at the University of Vienna and wrote film and literature reviews on the side. From 1967 to 1970 he worked as editor and dramaturg at the southern German television station Südwestfunk. It was in 1970 that Haneke began writing and directing films and (similar to most Austrian directors of his generation) his initial experiences behind the camera were projects for television. Haneke has also directed a number of stage productions (including Strindberg, Goethe, Bruckner, and Kleist) in Berlin, Munich and Vienna. His first film intended for cinematic release, The Seventh Continent, premiered in 1989. Writers on filmmakers tend to plot a director's career as a teleological historical narrative with a familiar literary pattern, in this way circumscribing his or her texts for the sake of a neat (if contrived) principle of organisation. In the case of Haneke, however, a director's career arrived at a caesura not only marked by a change in artistic subject and emphasis, but also by a shift in geography, language, and source of economic support. In this sense, we can broadly divide Haneke's career in two: (i) his initial feature films in the period 1988–1997, devastating critiques of Austrian society, funded predominantly by public Austrian funds, and (ii) his last three efforts, investigations of broader European problems, financed in coproductions with largely French monies, starring high-profile French actors. What follows will treat his Austrian productions with closer scrutiny, as his more recent films seem to represent a trend still coming into being. This essay does not intend to generate all-inclusive generalisations or provide sweeping interpretations about the cinema of Michael Haneke. Instead, it aims to familiarise the reader with Haneke's works, while at the same time offering theoretical perspectives with which one might better understand the films. These approaches, predominantly drawn from contemporary French thought, are glimpses or clues and not grand exegeses. In this way the essay functions like Haneke's films, furnishing fragments and provoking critical thought, rather than presenting ready-made answers. Welcome to surmodernité: The Seventh Continent Not beautiful photography, not beautiful pictures,
but rather necessary pictures, necessary photography.
– Robert Bresson
It is the story of a successful career, it is the story of the price of conformity, it is the story of mental short-sightedness, it is a family story and it is the story of a lived consequence.
What to make of a film that reveals so little of itself? One might first turn to the director. In interviews, Haneke has in turn emphasised his intention to leave the work of interpretation to the spectator: “I try to make anti-psychological films with characters who are less characters than projection surfaces for the sensibilities of the viewer; blank spaces force the spectator to bring his own thoughts and feelings to the film. Because that is what makes the viewer open for the sensitivity of the character” (2). Haneke, in other words, goes to extremes in withholding information in order to compel the spectator to “think with” and “feel with” the film, instead of simply consuming it. Another useful source for understanding The Seventh Continent and Haneke's stark dramaturgy is the social theorist Marc Augé. Augé investigates what form of obligation we encounter in the anonymous “non-places” of modern urban space: hotel rooms, supermarkets, ATM machines and various spaces of transition and passage – like the conveyor belts that drag passengers slowly from one section of the airport to another. Augé's argument is that although we don't 'rest' or 'reside' in these spaces but merely pass through them as if interchangeable, we nevertheless enjoy a contractual relation with the world and others symbolised by our train or plane ticket, bank card, email address, and hence anonymity and identity are oddly drawn close. Augé infers from such spaces a paradox of what he calls surmodernité, roughly translatable as “supermodernity” or “hypermodernity. In his own words: This is the diegetic world of The Seventh Continent: supermarket checkout counters and credit cards, car washes and automatic garage doors; as Amos Vogel describes the film, “anonymity, coldness, alienation amidst a surfeit of commodities and comfort” (4). The characters wander aimlessly and seemingly without motivation between Augé's anonymous “transit points” and “temporary abodes: espace quelconque”. The family could be anywhere, on any seventh continent, most important (and most alienating and destructive) is the dialectic between anonymity and identity. From Oedipus to Narcissus: Benny's Video – Jean Baudrillard (5)
There are a host of potential theoretical thrusts available in connection with this film, from Debord's “Society of the Spectacle” to the media theories of Paul Virilo to Deleuze's connection between communication and capital. I have dealt with these approaches in depth elsewhere (6). Instead, the assertion above by Jean Baudrillard will be the focus of a reading of the film. Commentators on Benny's Video nearly unanimously cite Benny's murder of the nameless girl he meets at the video store to be the key scene in the film. Like the two other panels in Haneke's triptych (the family's suicide at the conclusion of The Seventh Continent and when the student runs amok at the end of 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance), a murder serves as the focal point of Benny's Video. This moment is the nexus for the critics' respective agendas – moral/theological issues, formal concerns (Haneke's denial of unmediated visual access to the murder), violence in film etc. As important as this scene is, however, what this scene isn't or what this scene displaces is equally as important. Of the three films in the trilogy, Benny's Video is the most aesthetically and formally conventional. Thus, for example, when Benny brings the girl back to his place after meeting her at the video store, the spectator expects (both by conditioning via traditional cinematic narratives as well as through the way Haneke conventionally stages the meeting) a sexual encounter: boy meets girl, girl meets boy, boy kisses girl… Instead, in this film, boy meets girl, boy kills girl. What should be Benny's first sexual experience becomes a violent act that he records and ritually rehashes. A sexual act first comes after the violent one in an auto-erotic spectacle, Benny strips naked and observes himself in the mirror, smearing himself with the girl's blood (7). This scene might be seen as the cinematic confirmation of the Baudrillard quotation above: in the postmodern moment the myth of Narcissus is now the guiding myth/trajectory/paradigm that structures experience and narrative, rather than the Oedipus initiation story. This is sealed when Benny rearranges the girl's shirt so that she is “properly” covered, a lack of curiosity that further distances him from normative heterosexuality. If the Oedipal myth in its various hetero- and homoerotic forms functions to reproduce the idea that human subjectivity is sexually realised in the bonded, love relationship, then the Baudrillardian Narcissus myth as found in Benny's Video instructs Benny that mediated, digitally manipulable violence is the “authentic” experience in a “me” world without connections, so why not “see how it is”? Benny comes of age not through sexual conquest and replacing a mother figure (8) but rather by eliminating/killing the potential object of desire and distancing himself into the cave/care of video equipment, over which he commands absolute control (9). 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance – Michael Haneke
71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) reads like a structuralist exegesis straight from Roland Barthes' S/Z. The final installment of the “glaciation trilogy” transforms the (true) story of an Austrian university student who one day runs amok into 71 discrete scenes. The project of chronicling the causes for a killing spree as well as the preceding events in the lives of the victims would seem almost necessarily melodramatic and pathetic. Haneke, however, renders the story refreshingly unpsychological. The spectator is treated to snapshots like four minutes of the future “killer” playing table tennis alone or a later victim silently watching the evening news. These 71 moments, remarkable only in their unremarkability, form a system that implicates an entire form of society for the crime of one. As always, Haneke's static camera captures the happenings from an icy distance. 71 Fragments marks a departure from the longitudinal studies of a single family as seen in the first two parts of the trilogy. The violent outburst is instead contextualised within a cross-section of society: a lonely father, a couple in a dysfunctional relationship, a woman who wants to adopt a child, a Romanian immigrant. The film is moreover a preview of coming attractions, particularly in Haneke's attention to non-Austrian people and cultures, specifically to the former Yugoslavia. This “foreigner thematic” reappears in Code Unknown and The Time of the Wolf. 71 Fragments indicates the beginning of Haneke's transition: he is no longer solely an Austrian director, but a European director as well. Funny Games: The Aesthetics of Violence, The Politics of Self-Referentiality I try to give back to violence that what it truly
is: pain, injury to another.
– Michael Haneke
The plot of the film is terrifyingly simple. A wealthy Austrian family of father, mother and son (plus dog) go on vacation to their lakeside summer house. Two well-groomed young men arrive clad in golf gear and ask to borrow some eggs. The two then proceed, without any motive, to terrorise and then kill dog, son, father, and mother. Funny Games turns Cape Fear on its head; it is an anti-thriller. The threat to family bliss comes from within the upper class, rather than from a rogue element at the edge of society. Innocent children and animals are savagely offed in the very beginning stages of the film. The violence, moreover, is never really shown, but rather indicated in the soundtrack or recorded in the faces of the killers or other family members. Haneke focuses instead on the effects on the victims, revealed for example in a several minute-long shot of the father attempting to stand up. Finally, there is no rescue sequence, revenge scenario, or happy ending to the story – the last shots show the two killers ready to strike the next vacation spot. In the many interviews of Michael Haneke, perhaps the question that seems to be posed most often is: “Do you enjoy disturbing the audience?” In Funny Games there is certainly a surfeit of violence, enough to shake even the most jaded viewers (and which prompted scores of spectators, including Wim Wenders, to walk out of the screening at Cannes in 1997). In addition, Haneke employs a number of self-referential devices to, as the director once said, “rape the spectator to independence.” Halfway through the film, for instance, one killer winks into the camera and subsequently asks the viewer, “what would you bet that this family is dead by nine o'clock tomorrow?” The film thus plays with the spectator just as the young men play their “funny game” with the family. The killer Paul later explains why he can't possibly stop his abuse: “we're still under the length of a proper feature film.” The ironic self-referentiality reaches its apex when a character actually rewinds the film. When the mother manages to grab a gun and shoot Paul's accomplice, Paul grabs a remote control and rewinds the scene, thus securing control over the film's outcome. Funny Games' denial of visual access to acts of violence bespeaks central aspects of Michael Haneke's filmic program. Haneke's views on representing violence and his concomitant spectatorship theory are well documented in numerous interviews as well as his own essays (“Film als Katharsis”, “Violence and Media”, “Schrecken und Utopie der Form: Bressons Au hasard Balthazar”). There are striking parallels in Haneke's logic in reference to his favourite themes of violence, media and spectatorship, with argumentation in history/memory/trauma theory. For example, Haneke's philosophy draws on Holocaust depiction theory (such as that formulated by Claude Lanzmann) in that he makes films about violence without showing it (i.e. Bilderverbot), or more precisely, Haneke thematises the representation of violence in the way that he denies the spectator his/her presumed visual access to the violence. Similar to Lanzmann, Haneke's provocative filmic program is an attempt at corrective to Hollywood's glorified treatment of violence (or in Lanzmann's case, the sentimentalised and psychologised version of the Holocaust as found in the mini-series Holocaust or later in Schindler's List): Haneke concentrates on the suffering of victims, rather than allowing the spectator to identify with any pseudopsychological motivation of the perpetrator; he uses a slow tempo in montage and camera to allow audience a distanced “thinking space”; he challenges the action film's practice of selling violence as a consumer good (i.e. violence as spectacle, dramaturgy); and again finally, Haneke resists visually depicting acts of physical violence. In this way, Haneke attempts to discuss violence without inciting fascination or titillation for his subject. Whether Haneke succeeds in this last crucial point has filled the feuilleton pages of newspapers across Europe and abroad. Some have praised Haneke in his formal daring; others have scathingly criticised him for excessive didacticism and depicting violence in essence no differently than in action films. A final note on Funny Games should point out the connection between the film and its Austrian contemporaries. A wave of ironic and often self-referential “black comedies” appeared in Austria in the late 1990s and the first few years of this century. Funny Games should therefore also be seen in the context of films like Die totale Therapie (Christian Frosch, 1996), Die Gottesanbeterin (Paul Harather, 2000), Komm, süßer Tod (Wolfgang Murnberger, 2000), and Der Überfall (Florian Flicker, 2000)and their typically Austrian mix of comedy, violence, and irony. Michael Haneke's French Films and the Future of his European Filmmaking – Michael Haneke
In an interview with the Stuttgarter Zeitung from 8 February 2001 Haneke revealed that if “Funny Games was the conclusion of my Civil War trilogy, Code Unknown could be given the heading of 'World War.'” With Code Unknown, Haneke's searing vision ceased to be confined only to Austria and concerns in the “Alpine Republic”. The film's form takes a cue from 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance in that it offers 27 vaguely connected scenes from the varying perspectives of an actress, an African immigrant, and a war reporter from Bosnia. Code Unknown, however, lacks the violent teleology of 71 Fragments; there is no 'big bang' act of violence at the end. Instead Haneke concentrates on perhaps more quotidian, but none less pressing, problems: the new waves of immigration in Europe or the difficulty of interpersonal communication, be it between a couple in a relationship or between cultures. Code Unknown represents a different cinematic experience from Haneke's earlier features. Haneke had previously used a few actors recognisable to German cinephiles, for instance Angela Winkler or Ulrich Mühe. Still, even they were employed in rather restrained and “anonymous” roles, in keeping with Haneke's philosophy that characters should only be surfaces onto which the audience should project their own emotions and thoughts. The acting firepower and pure expectations that an international superstar like Juliette Binoche brings to Code Unknown (not to mention Isabelle Huppert to The Piano Teacher and The Time of the Wolf) in some sense at least tempers the audience's ability to project anything onto a figure laden with so many associations. Haneke had always sought to position himself as the opposite of Tarantino, as the “last Modernist” whose bare, deliberate cinema treated violence and media with a non-titillating distance without the illusionist chicanery of Tarantino's multilayered association project. In this way, Haneke's “French Films” appear to dilute the ferocious theoretical precision of the “glaciation theory” at the same time that they broaden their thematic attack. Nevertheless, Haneke's penchant for making the spectator feel uncomfortable remains intact throughout, if by other means. In Code Unknown, for instance, one watches Juliette Binoche become hysterically upset when a child nearly falls from a tall apartment building. Suddenly we hear her laugh from off screen: the whole sequence was taking place at a sound studio where Binoche was synchronising her voice for the soundtrack of a film she had appeared in. Sequences like this keep the viewer on his/her toes and questioning the verity of the images he or she sees.
Although not necessarily his richest film, The Piano Teacher was the final reminder to the unconverted that Michael Haneke could no longer be ignored as a major player in European cinema, and accordingly many channels of funding (above all in France) became options for Haneke. In 2003 his follow-up film The Time of the Wolf debuted out of competition at Cannes. The Time of the Wolf represents the shelved Wolfszeit project from Haneke's pre-Code Unknown days. The film is an apocalyptic Sci-fi. The point of departure recalls Haneke's Austrian features: a family, a couple with two children, drives to their vacation house and begins to unload the car. Once inside the house they find another family, who apparently had been squatting in the home. Without warning or explanation, the squatter-father shoots his counterpart and the mother and two children find themselves alone in the wilderness. Haneke treats the viewer to the negative power of the human will to survive. The critical appraisal of the film has been mixed. Some (apparently including the Cannes selection committee, which placed it in the out of competition category) have claimed it to be somewhat disappointing, that it returns to themes that Haneke treated better before. Others have opined that it was an overlooked masterpiece at the festival. Whatever the reception The Time of the Wolf enjoys in its general release, Michael Haneke is unlikely to become more accommodating or less polemical in his treatment of contemporary society. Critics have alternately called his films both overly intellectual and heavy as well as exploitative and unwittingly sensationalist. The schizophrenic reactions of pundits, all seemingly annoyed with one aspect of Haneke's works or another, seem in fact to affirm the impetus behind Michael Haneke's cinema of disturbance. © Mattias Frey, August 2003 Endnotes:
Filmography Cinema: 
Bibliography Marc
Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,
trans. John Howe, London, Verso, 1995.
Articles in Senses of Cinema Do
the Right Thing: The Films of Michael Haneke by
Maximilian Le Cain
Web Resources Film
Directors - Articles on the Internet
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