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

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

– Michael Haneke, “Film as Catharsis”

Michael Haneke is arguably Europe’s most esteemed and most controversial filmmaker.
After twenty years of directing for the cinema, he has earned a place in the pantheon of
the most acclaimed active auteurs. 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 programme attempts to lay bare the
coldness of Western society and challenge Hollywood’s blithe treatment of violence.
With acknowledged influences including Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Marie Straub,
Michelangelo Antonioni, Jon Jost, Abbas Kiarostami and above all Robert Bresson, his
recent work has garnered a host of accolades and arthouse
success. Caché (Hidden, 2005) won the Palme d’or and was voted by The Times as the
“film of the decade”. Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon, 2009) earned Academy Award
nominations for Best Cinematography and Best Foreign-Language Film.
Born in 1942 in Munich, Michael Haneke grew up in the Lower Austrian city of Wiener
Neustadt. He studied psychology, philosophy and theatre at the University of Vienna
and wrote film and literature reviews on the side. From 1967 to 1970 he worked as
editor and dramaturge 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, Vienna and Paris. His first
film intended for cinematic release, Der siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent),
premiered in 1989.

Writers retrospectively plot a director’s career as a teleological historical narrative with

a familiar literary pattern, in this way circumscribing his or her works for the sake of a
neat (if contrived) principle of organisation. Examining a living, very much active
filmmaker is problematic and, I would argue, assessing Haneke is particularly
challenging. No sooner has a commentator made a “definitive” pronouncement on what
does or does not characterise Haneke’s oeuvre, than the director defies all
expectations. After being initially positioned in the context of Austria’s television and
film (cottage) industries and cultural politics, for example, he moved his operations to
Paris and began making French-language “European” films with high-profile arthouse
stars and multinational funding. Over the years, Haneke has regularly issued
devastating squibs denouncing the manipulative American cinema (see the epigraph to
this essay)—and then proceeded to make a picture with Hollywood money. After years
of nostalgic recuperations of celluloid materiality and cinematic spectatorship, he began
to make films that depend on digital technology and demand DVD viewing.
In spite of my own admonition against trying to pin down a moving target, I will
attempt to work out a few characteristics of Haneke’s cinema and the experience of
watching it. Although these principles do not apply equally to each individual film, they
provide a framework to begin to approach the director.

Stories chronicle the failings of emotionally cold individuals and the implosion of
bourgeois social structures when placed under a complicating duress.

Culturally, these narratives concern and comment on the identity politics of European
class systems, gender roles and ethnic hierarchies, as well as the individual and
collective guilt that these structures engineer.

Narrative forms tend toward the episodic and elliptical. Befitting art cinema practices,
characters’ motivations remain obscure and their goals ambiguous; clear narrative
resolutions are foreclosed or made impossible to determine. Haneke’s cinema provokes,
demands but ultimately frustrates interpretation.

Stylistically, Haneke’s work favours the long take over montage and static shots over
camera movement. Specific patterns of editing, framing, sound design and performance
produce an uncomfortable viewing experience that, at best, invites a critical attitude
towards media, images and the representation of violence and, at worst, uses these
elements as titillation or authorial signature.

More so than the works of other filmmakers, watching Haneke is coloured by his media
performances, theoretical observations and self-analyses. On the festival circuit and in
provocative interviews, an ensemble of Hanekean provocations and buzzwords (e.g.,
“Every film rapes”; “I want to rape the viewer into independence”) competes with the
viewer’s experience and invites critical attacks.

Welcome to surmodernité: The Seventh Continent

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

– Robert Bresson

In the 1989 edition of Austrian Film, the Austrian Film Commission’s annual
promotional booklet on the national film crop, Haneke describes The Seventh Continent,
the first film of his “Vergletscherungs-Trilogie” (“glaciation trilogy”) (1) as follows:

The film is about the life of Georg, his wife Anna and their daughter Eva over a period
of three years:
It is the story of a successful career,
it is the story of the price of conformity,
it is the story of mental short-sightedness,
it is a family story
and
it is the story of a lived consequence.
 This laconic summary is an apt
approximation of the sparse film that premiered at Cannes 1989. The setting is a
hopelessly defamiliarised Linz, the city rendered as a wasteland of
industry, Autobahn and row houses. The characters populating this world are literally
faceless: Haneke avoids shots including faces and instead concentrates on close-ups of
hands and objects. There is little “story” to speak of. Father, mother, and daughter
have all but stopped talking to each other. One day the daughter claims to be blind,
although she isn’t. The mother’s brother comes for dinner and begins crying for an
inexplicable reason. The father begins destroying the house and flushes piles of
banknotes down the toilet. The family commits suicide. All of this transpires with no
convincing motives and only scant psychological insight into the characters.

What to make of a film that reveals so little of itself? One might first turn to the
director. In interviews, Haneke has in turn emphasised his intention to leave the work
of interpretation to the spectator: “I try to make anti-psychological films with
characters who are less characters than projection surfaces for the sensibilities of the
viewer; blank spaces force the spectator to bring his own thoughts and feelings to the
film. Because that is what makes the viewer open for the sensitivity of the
character”. (2) Haneke, in other words, strangles the flow of information in order to
compel the spectator to “think with” and “feel with” the film, instead of simply
consuming it.

Re-viewing Haneke’s early features more than 15 years after their initial release is a
strange exercise. The films’ address and stance—indeed, the very aesthetic and moral
questions they raise—seem to come from an uncannily distant past. In order to
understand their creative energies, however, they need to be read against the
contemporary social and cultural theory and the anxieties that these theorists
addressed. In the 1980s and 1990s, Marc Augé, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and
others were scrutinising the very perceptual systems (and the environment and
conditions fostering them) that Haneke took to task in his “Austria” trilogy. Indeed, in a
larger sense, Haneke and these thinkers shared a common perspective: they sought to
revive moribund fields with a respective cinematic/theoretical shock therapy. (3)

One useful reference point for 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 other transit points at which we spend an increasing proportion of
our lives. Non-places refer to spaces “which cannot be defined as relational, or
historical, or concerned with identity”. (4) Augé argues that although we don’t “rest” or
“reside” in non-places but merely pass through, we nevertheless enjoy a contractual
relation with the world. These “contracts” are symbolised in train or plane tickets, bank
cards and email addresses. Augé infers from such spaces a paradox of what he
calls surmodernité, roughly translatable as “supermodernity” or “hypermodernity”.

Supermodernity is a paradoxical condition. On the one hand it implies a proliferation of

events, a surfeit of history and above all an abundance of news and information
describing these occurrences. At the same time, this excess means that “there is no
room for history unless it has been transformed into an element of spectacle, usually in
allusive texts. What reigns there is actuality, the urgency of the present
moment”. (5) Supermodernity generates a paradoxical excess and lack of identity. PIN
codes, e-mail addresses, Social Security cards, driver’s licenses and national identity
cards with biometric data function to differentiate between individuals. At the same
time, this proliferation has made personal identity more rigid and formally
interchangeable: everyone can be identified by a “number” and one’s identity can be
“stolen”.

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”. (6) The characters wander aimlessly and seemingly without motivation
between Augé’s anonymous transit points and temporary abodes: the home, that
traditional point of bourgeois differentiation is a refuge, but also a prison; it is one of
many in the suburban development. The family could be anywhere, on any seventh
continent, most important (and most alienating and destructive) is the dialectic
between anonymity and identity.

From Oedipus to Narcissus: Benny’s Video

The digital Narcissus replaces the triangular Oedipus…the clone will be your guardian
angel…Your ‘neighbour’ will be this deceptively similar clone, so that you will never be
alone again and never again have a secret. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’: this old
scriptural problem is solves—your neighbour, you are him. The love will thus be
absolute. Absolute self-seduction.

– Jean Baudrillard (7)

Benny’s Video, the second part of Haneke’s “glaciation trilogy”, begins with a buzz and
a bang: the white noise of a television screen snow shower and the sound of a pig
being shot on the subsequent home video. Benny is a neglected son of rich parents in
Vienna. He spends his days and nights in his room lost in a cobweb of video equipment,
cameras, monitors and editing consoles. He keeps his shades drawn at all times and
experiences the outside world mediated through the camcorders he has set up outside
his windows. He obsessively reviews the farmyard killing of a pig in forward and
reverse, slow motion and freeze-frame. Intermittently, he flips through channels full of
news on neo-nazi killings, toy commercials, war films and reports on the incipient war
in Yugoslavia. One day he meets a girl at the video store and invites her back to his
empty house. He shows her the weapon he used to kill the pig and shoots her with it.
Although the girl’s death occurs out of the camera’s reach, the audience is privy to
excruciating minutes of screams and whimpers. In the end, Benny foils his parents’
perversely cynical attempt to cover up the murder.
 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 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (71 Fragments of a Chronology
of Chance, 1994)), 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 or media. As
important as this scene is, however, 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, one expects (both by conditioning via traditional
cinematic narratives as well as through the way Haneke stages the meeting) a sexual
encounter: boy meets girl, girl meets boy, boy kisses girl. Instead: 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 comes only 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.

This scene might be seen as the cinematic re-working of the Baudrillard quotation
above: in the postmodern moment the myth of Narcissus is now the guiding paradigm
that structures experience and narrative, rather than the Oedipus initiation story. When
Benny rearranges the girl’s shirt so that she is “properly” covered, this lack of curiosity
further distances him from normative heterosexuality. If the Oedipal myth arcs towards
the idea that human subjectivity is sexually realised in love between partners, then the
Baudrillardian Narcissus myth enables Benny to believe 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 the potential object of desire
and retreating into the cave of video equipment, over which he commands absolute
control. (9)

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

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

– Michael Haneke

The final instalment of the trilogy transforms the (true) story of an Austrian university
student who one day runs amok into 71 discrete scenes. Chronicling the causes for a
killing spree as well as the preceding events in the lives of the victims would seem
almost necessarily melodramatic; indeed, the story stems supposedly from the
reportage of the Kurier, the best-selling tabloid and Austrian equivalent of The Sun (the
idea for The Seventh Continent supposedly came from an article in Der Stern). Haneke,
however, renders the story with little pathos. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of
Chance (1994) reads like a structuralist exegesis straight from Roland Barthes’ S/Z.
The spectator is treated to snapshots, such as four minutes of the future “killer” playing
table tennis alone, or a future 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.

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 people and cultures
from outside of the traditional Western and Central European “first world”. This
“foreigner thematic” reappears in Code Unknown, Time of the Wolf and Hidden. 71
Fragments indicates the beginning of Haneke’s transition to a wider European purview.

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

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

– Michael Haneke

Funny Games is in a sense an epilogue to Haneke’s “glaciation” trilogy: this film, like
the others that precede it, conducts an investigation of violence and spectatorship.
Here, however, the subject is more a confrontation with the shape of popular film and
cinematic genre, rather than a statement on contemporary Austrian society.

The plot is terrifying and simple. A wealthy 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-middle
classes, rather than from a rogue element at the edge of society. Innocent children and
animals are savagely destroyed in the very beginning stages of the film. (10) 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. 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 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 often repeats, “rape the spectator to
independence”. 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 toys
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 climaxes when a character
actually rewinds the proceedings in order to revise the outcome. When the mother
manages to grab a gun and shoot Paul’s accomplice, Paul grabs a remote control and
rewinds the scene, thus ensuring his success.

Funny Games‘ denial of visual access to acts of violence bespeaks central aspects of
Haneke’s theoretical programme. The director’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 the Media”, “Terror and Utopia of
Form: Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar”). There are striking parallels in Haneke’s
logic with argumentation in memory and trauma theory. Haneke’s philosophy draws,
perhaps perversely, on Holocaust depiction theory (such as that voiced 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 project attempts to correct Hollywood’s glorified
treatment of violence (or in Lanzmann’s case, the sentimentalised version of
the Holocaust as found in the mini-series Holocaust or later in Schindler’s
List): Haneke wants to concentrate on the suffering of victims and to hinder
identification with any pseudopsychological motivation of the perpetrator; he
uses a slow tempo in montage and camera to allow audience a distanced
“thinking space” and he challenges the action film’s practice of selling
violence as a consumer good (i.e. violence as spectacle, dramaturgy). 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.

Vienna-Paris-Vienna: Code Unknown and The Piano Teacher

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

– Michael Haneke

After the release of Funny Games, Haneke set to work on Wolf-Age, a script he had
written before Benny’s Video but then shelved. In his second attempt to realise the
project, Haneke fared no better – the financing ultimately collapsed at the last minute
and he found himself at a dead end in his career, ironically just after scoring his then
biggest hit, Funny Games. It was at that time that the “miracle” happened, as Haneke
terms it. Juliette Binoche contacted him and asked if he would shoot a film with her in
France. The result was Code Unknown, which debuted in competition at Cannes 2000.

In an interview with the Stuttgarter

Zeitung from 8 February 2001 Haneke revealed that if “Funny Games was the
conclusion of my Civil War trilogy, Code Inconnu (Code Unknown, 2000) could be given
the heading of ‘World War’”. With Code Unknown, Haneke’s searing vision expanded
beyond Austria and the concerns in the “Alpine Republic”. The narrative takes a cue
from 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance: it offers 27 vaguely connected scenes
from the varying perspectives of an actress, an African immigrant and a reporter who
covers the war-torn Balkans. Code Unknown, however, lacks the deadly 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 and 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 La
Pianiste (The Piano Teacher, 2001) and Le Temps du loup (Time of the Wolf, 2003)) 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” dilute
the ferocious theoretical rigour of the “glaciation theory” at the same time that they
broaden their thematic attack.

Nevertheless, Haneke’s penchant for disturbing the spectator remains intact

throughout, if by other means. Anne becomes 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 Anne was synchronising her
voice for the soundtrack of a film she had appeared in. Sequences like this reward
careful spectators. In another scene, for instance, the viewer must ponder the image
produced by a static camera in order to derive its importance. At length, we watch an
airplane cabin door, before a Kosovar woman suddenly appears in police handcuffs. Our
attendance to the important narrative element occurs without traditional devices, such
as a cut or a close-up. In a later scene, like a game of “Where’s Waldo?”, we find
Amadou in a crowd of drummers nearly hidden in the frame. These moments take to an
extreme what Bazin writes about neorealism in “An Aesthetic of Reality”: rather than
using montage to fix the viewer’s attention, “it is the mind of the spectator which is
forced to discern . . . the dramatic spectrum proper to the scene”. (11)

Code Unknown contains some of Haneke’s most intricate uses of stationary camera and
long takes. One such sustained shot captures Anne ironing in her living room.
Postcards, presumably from Georges’ travels, fill the wall. The TV-image reflects in the
glass door, providing the spectator with a flat composition of the apartment space and
the action of the sequence, without the need to cut. On the soundtrack we hear the TV
news, then the sounds of domestic abuse in a neighbour’s flat and then, with the aid of
the remote control, the TV once again. Anne overwrites the “noise” of the beating with
the remote control, Haneke’s privileged media device. This scene implies an off-screen
space and indeed larger forms of culture, even while the shot itself is cramped. Formal
“limitation” becomes in fact a scene of invention. Haneke’s flat, painterly composition is
in fact a highly evocative prospect of a world beyond in which every piece of
information does not contribute to a neat whole. Despite the film’s use of parallel
narrative, Code Unknown is—like 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance—in fact anti-
Altman, anti-Kieslowski and unlike vulgar examples such as Magnolia (1999)
and Crash (2004).

At Cannes 2000, Haneke addressed the difficulties of transferring Elfriede Jelinek’s

writing to the screen. “The hard part about The Piano Teacher”, he foresaw, “is to make
an obscene film but not a pornographic one”. The following year Haneke returned to the
festival with the finished adaptation and left with three major awards. The Cannes jury,
at least, deemed the picture less a porn flick than a magnum opus.

Haneke brings Jelinek’s story of a virtuoso piano teacher and her sadomasochistic
sexuality into the present time and into the French language (although still staged in
Vienna). Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory and lives with her
mother (played by Annie Girardot). The two have an abusive, symbiotic dependency
that contains sexual elements; otherwise, Erika has no other romantic attachments. Her
sex life is solitary and voyeuristic. She retrieves disposed semen in shopping-mall porn
shops and urinates while watching coupling teens at a drive-in movie theatre. Her
unconventional behaviour includes permanently scarring her student’s playing hands,
genital self-mutilation and a destructive liaison with Walter Klemmer, a talented student
who first pursues her—and then is pursued by her. The protagonist’s extraordinarily
odd comportment and explicit rape and bondage scenes are never fully explained nor
justified.

Haneke’s initial feature films had been subsidised predominantly by public Austrian
funds: The Seventh Continentwas a solely Austrian production and Benny’s
Video and 71 Fragments remained co-productions with Switzerland and Germany that
included one or two production partners. Code Unknown and The Piano Teacher, on the
contrary, were financed from an alphabet soup of sources that included public and
private channels from Austria, Germany and France, local funding boards, EU monies
and private capital. The multinational funding structures persisted and became more
complex in subsequent projects.

Apocalyptic Allusionism: Time of the Wolf

Although not necessarily his richest film, the arthouse success (12) of 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. Accordingly, many channels of
funding (above all in France, but also in Italy and elsewhere) became options for
Haneke. In 2003 his follow-up, Time of the Wolf, debuted out of competition at
Cannes. Time of the Wolf represents a revision of the Wolf-Age project from the pre-
Code Unknown days. It is post-apocalyptic science fiction.

The point of departure recalls Haneke’s earlier Austrian features: a couple and their two
children drive to their vacation house and begin to unload the car. A first-time viewer
might think we are back in Funny Games, or on the way to Egypt with Benny and his
mother. Once inside the house, however, they find another family that apparently has
been squatting in the home. Without warning or explanation, the squatter-father shoots
his counterpart, Georges, and Anne, the mother (played by Isabelle Huppert), and the
two children Anne and Ben find themselves alone in the wilderness.

The remainder of the film involves the

family’s search for shelter in the dark and foggy countryside, the disappearance of Ben
and the days at an abandoned train station, where a “civilisation” of multinational
refugees is divided into strategic gangs (e.g., “The Just”), waiting for “the train” to
arrive. Even if the setting diverges starkly from previous efforts, familiar stylistic
devices persist. Sequences are often staged in a long take; a few dramatic tracking
shots punctuate generally static camera work. The aesthetic is spare and favours dark
spaces: when Anne and Eva notice that Ben is missing, minutes transpire in total
darkness. Starkly lit scenes of fires against the otherwise black night foreground the
lost accoutrements of modern society. We are a universe away from the
busy Autobahn in Benny’s Vienna, the bustling Parisian streets or the carefully
electronic Linz home. (If anything, this is a vile version of The Seventh Continent’s
mythical and empty Australia.) Although the main characters are native French, there
are never any specific clues to their whereabouts or background; one speaks of “the
city”. Even in the virtual absence of modern technology, however, Haneke’s media
critique remains conspicuous. In this post-apocalyptic order, the “necessities” of
modern culture have instantly lost all value. The purpose and relative worth of space
and material objects have been mercilessly readjusted; a lighter is extraordinarily
valuable, while an watch is worthless. Similarly, emotional economies undergo extreme
fluctuations. In Haneke’s most sentimental film until The White Ribbon, feelings change
in an instant, as if the characters are relearning them in the absence of modern
society’s distractions and inhibitions. Early in the film, Anne coldly breaks off her
daughter’s embrace. Shortly thereafter, subsequent to Ben’s disappearance, she
reminds Eva that she loves her, only (once the small fire grows into a conflagration) to
yell at her for being stupid. In a parallel way, the supporting characters serve
alternating and morally criss-crossed roles. A rapist is also a saviour; murder is no
repugnant crime.

Time of the Wolf meditates on the failure of Enlightenment ideas of civilisation and
progress; in this way it picks up on the themes of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986).
Beyond auteurist genealogies, moreover, it is surely part of a series of more
mainstream disaster movies and novels which proliferated around the millennium and
then in the years following the 9/11 attacks and the climate-change, including The
Postman (1997), The Day After Tomorrow(2004) and The Road (2009). The essential
difference to these projects—and perhaps even more important than any facile divisions
between Hollywood and European arthouse—is the aesthetic and moral status of the
apocalypse. In Time of the Wolf, panoramas in which the built and above all natural
landscape dwarf the human characters transmit graphically a setting in which nature
rules. The compositions produce a somewhat ambiguous mood, however. Post-
ecological disaster France is figuratively rendered Romantic. Even as the figures starve,
die, and kill each other, the surrounding nature retains—or assumes for the first time—
a pastoral beauty and majesty. The transformation of these hitherto “civilised”
Europeans into feral primitives is presented as both natural as well as terrible. Despite
the filmmaker’s criticism of Quentin Tarantino or Oliver Stone for their aestheticised
violence, (13)Haneke’s films celebrate a certain beauty of destruction. -SUBLIMNO

Another clear formal difference to other disaster movies is the elliptical narrative
and its extreme restraint with information. Wide stretches feature little or no dialogue
and silence generally abounds; a rigorous editing scheme interrupts this reticence with
sudden bursts of dialogue and screaming, especially in the Babel of a train station.
There is little explicit background to these characters, almost no history in this place.
Whatever massive disaster has occurred—surely the focal point for any action “disaster”
picture—we do not see it. The moral question—natural or man-made?—is also elided.
Although generally episodic, the narrative features the odd exceptional device, most
notably a montage sequence in which Eva narrates in voice-over a letter she writes to
her dead father. Haneke used a nearly identical device in The Seventh Continent, when
Anna writes to Georg’s parents and (more or less) suggests their psychological
situation. Similarly, Eva’s letter economically offers news about daily life at the camp
and insight into the family’s mental state. More importantly, like in The Seventh
Continent, the juxtaposition of the voice-over soundtrack and the montage is tense
rather than redundant. In the sequence, an image of the pastoral outside precedes
several shots of now superfluous interiors: disused pipes, an empty refrigerator. Finally,
there is a series of photos: a picture of a moustached man in front of a cathedral in
Italy and a family perhaps having a picnic in the countryside, an obscured photo of a
snow-capped mountain and two pin-ups of buxom women. These are presumably the
remains of whoever worked in the railway office, found objects meant to communicate
the lost existence of some subject with social, familial and sexual connections and
geographical mobility.

The last image in the montage is a rendering of a blue-black explosion that seems to
rain over a field: a reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s 1525 watercolour “Traumgesicht”
(literally: “Dream Face”). Dürer created the apocalyptic vision and accompanying text
supposedly after seeing the image in a dream; the historical context was the Peasants’
War (1524-1525), the largest and bloodiest popular European uprising until the French
Revolution. Of course, the Dürer vision of a mushroom cloud functions as the visual link
to the film’s unspoken history. Indeed, (Germanic) cultural allusions fill the missing
space of dialogue, intertitles or direct visual depictions in representing the “event”. In
the station, Béa sings “Maikäfer flieg,” a German folk song that describes the
destruction of Pomerania during the Thirty Years’ War and, in particular, the need to
flee from the burning towns. In addition, the title Time of the Wolf derives from a verse
from the visionary poem “Voluspá”, from the Old Icelandic saga Edda. The poem
describes the progress of civilization, battles of the gods and the destruction of the
world by war. The 44thstanza describes one stage in the apocalypse thus:

Brothers will fight and kill each other,

sisters’ children will defile kinship.
It is harsh in the world, whoredom rife
—an axe age, a sword age—shields are riven—
a wind age, a wolf age—before the world goes headlong.
No man will have mercy on another. (14)

Taken together, these allusions connect the film to previous imaginings of the
apocalypse, but also to other European wars. With a script written at a time when the
Balkan wars were still fresh, and shot in the midst of military operations in Afghanistan
and the looming invasion of Iraq, Time of the Wolf is both a disaster film and a
comment on the civilian experience of war. Let us not forget that for Germans and
Austrians of Haneke’s birth year, the ferocious Allied bombings and childrens’ forced
relocations to the countryside (often without their parents) made war a primal and
formative memory.

By eschewing visual depictions of disaster for references to war and catastrophe via
visual subjective memories (the photos; Dürer’s watercolour) and collective memories
encapsulated in the oral tradition (Edda; “Maikäfer flieg”), Time of the Wolf risks a
spare narrative economy. – Pusen rarite.

Indeed, by obscuring the explicit stakes of conflict into intertextuality (à la Kluge), the
film has fewer avenues for identification than Benny’s Video or Code Unknown. This
dictated a largely cool reception and meagre box office, even for auteurist standards.
Some (apparently including the Cannes selection committee, which placed it out of
competition) found it disappointing, arguing that it returns to themes that Haneke
treated better before.

Hidden
If critics on the Croisette had been lukewarm about Time of the Wolf, Haneke’s next
French-language feature proved a red-hot hit. Set in Paris and starring Juliette Binoche
and Daniel Auteuil, Hidden won three major Cannes awards, including Best Director,
and went on to earn a host of recognitions, from European Film Awards to the César.
After flopping with Time of the Wolf, Haneke had delivered by far his highest-grossing
and most critically acclaimed film.

Drawing on the conventions of the thriller, Hidden evokes David Lynch’s Lost
Highway (1997) in the way that it introduces anonymous missives as springboards for
epistemological conundrums. Georges is a television literary critic and his wife Anne is a
book editor. Together with their teenage son Pierrot, they live in a handsome
townhouse in a tony neighbourhood. The family receives a series of disquieting
drawings and videotapes; after the police are powerless to help, Georges pursues the
man he suspects is sending the unsolicited post, Majid (played by Maurice Benichou), a
French-Algerian who had lived with Georges’ family as a child. Both Majid and his son
deny any involvement, but when recordings of Georges’ encounter end up at his boss’
office and Pierrot goes missing, Georges’ suspicions increase. In a subsequent meeting,
Majid kills himself; the film ends after Majid’s son confronts Georges at work and
speaks with Pierrot outside of the school.

Numerous critics have written persuasively about the levels of personal and collective
guilt at work in the story and on the cultural legacy of Franco-Algerian relations and the
massacre of approximately 200 Algerian protestors by Paris police on 17 October
1961. (15) Here, however, I want to focus on the critique of the image. More precisely,
the film interrogates the belief in images to provide truth—and uses images and image
technologies to perform this critique.

If the first scene of Time of the Wolf riffed on Funny Games, Hidden begins with a nod
to Benny’s Video: images from a hidden surveillance camera that the first-time viewer
mistakes for the actual film. (16) For five minutes a long shot captures a quiet street in
the 13th arrondissement called “rue des Iris,” during which the credits superimpose and
fill the frame. Yet, the shock in this sequence derives not from any sudden graphic
violence; it is an ontological surprise. As a male and female voice begin to argue from
off-screen and fast-forward lines blur the frame, the spectator realises that the
characters are watching this image along with him or her, that his or her perspective is
aligned with theirs. The film itself has not quite begun.

This opening both re-visits and transposes

devices employed in previous works. The introductory sequence to Benny’s Video, for
instance, provided a model for this VCR logic. Indeed, already in Code Unknown Haneke
toyed with the spectator by employing a film within his film. In these earlier works,
however, the joke is easier to perceive visually. The amateur camcorder images make
Benny’s video legible as a different aesthetic and phenomenological layer. A careful
viewer would detect the high-rise death scene in Code Unknown as a fake: whereas
Haneke shoots all other sequences in long takes, this scene deploys conventional
continuity editing. Hidden’s different layers disappear, unlike in prior films, because of
the uninterrupted use of HD digital video. Benny’s Video functioned by maintaining a
strict division of camcorders, surveillance monitors, TV news and commercials and the
35mm “film”—modes of viewing that the spectator could differentiate and that Benny
somehow could not. Hidden depends on the seamlessness of all these forms on the
same digital medium, which destabilises the spectator with a desubstantiated
image. (17)

The initial sequence in Hidden is the first of many instances in which Haneke
destabilizes point-of-view. Later, a car trip to a public housing project on the outskirts
of Paris—following sequentially Georges’ departure from his mother’s house—turns out
to be another video. A variation comes after Georges’ TV show. What appears to be the
camera taping the show for televisual broadcast (or what might in fact be television
itself) seamlessly tracks Georges receiving a phone call off-set. What might be the
providence of one camera-eye is revealed as omniscient. Even the tapes that Georges
receives are sometimes shot from positions illogical within the fiction (the rue de Iris
would have to have been outfitted with a crane).

As ever, a critique of bourgeois hubris appears as a function of media. In spite of

Georges and Anne’s education, privileged social status and careers in television and
publishing, their relation to media is fantastic. Georges tells his editor to cut footage
where the guest becomes too “theoretical”; in order to escape his bad conscience, he
goes to the cinema to clear his mind. This hypocrisy is realised most powerfully in the
mise en scène. With television scenes of the Iraq war in background, Georges and Anne
blame each other for a lack of communication. Shelving systems stylise compositions
and echo across the film. Books line Georges and Anne’s house in imposing rows from
floor to ceiling as badges of their educated bourgeois status. This serves as a contrast
to Majid’s flat, which bears neither books nor videos, although apparently a hidden
camera. The compositions of shelving at Georges and Anne’s highlight their pretensions
as competent and authoritative parents and socialites. These compositional forms recur
once again at Anne’s work—in the background during the telephone conversation at the
party—and in Georges’ boss’s office—not only in the books in the foreground of the
two-shot between Georges and his boss, but also in the clear lines of the neighbouring
building’s architecture in the background. The fake books behind Georges on the set of
his TV show are the most painterly in this series. Georges figures as a Wizard of Oz
before panels of simulated knowledge.

Hidden seems to require a DVD viewing after one or multiple viewings on the big
screen. Built into the film is on the one hand a need to stop, rewind and repeat—in
other words, to manipulate cinema’s traditional time values. Viewing Hidden for the
second time, for instance, the spectator searches in vain along Majid’s cluttered wall in
the effort to discern the hidden camera filming the action. On the other hand there is a
virtual requirement to see the film in a theatrical format. The final image, in which
Pierrot converses with Majid’s son, has the potential to alter dramatically the
spectator’s sense of narrative cause and effect: that is, if he or she actually detects the
inconspicuous meeting in the corner of the frame just before the credit titles.
Nevertheless, in Haneke, impossibility is always built-in: no matter often we watch the
film, blow it up or slow it down, we can always speculate, but never know.

The Language of Casting: Funny Games U.S.

Haneke’s English-language remake treads very closely to the original, and many scenes
are shot-for-shot copies of the Austrian version. Of course the switch in language, and,
in particular, the casting choices and actors’ performances make the experience
resonate differently. In the original, deploying Ulrich Mühe (who grew up in the GDR)
and Susanne Lothar (a native of Hamburg) in the roles of Georg and Anna produced a
neo-colonial aspect to the brutal killings: parallel to the generic rules
of Deliverance (1972) and many horror films, urbane, middle-class German owners of
an Austrian summer house must die at the hands of provincials because of their
“invasion” of foreign territory. Mühe and Arno Frisch revised their father-son roles
in Benny’s Video and subtly played out a sinister continuation of the earlier film’s
Oedipal rebellion. To be sure, the British-Australian Naomi Watts and London-born Tim
Roth pose a similar “foreign” element to Ann and George in the Hamptons; these
backgrounds, however, remain as part of the spectator’s foreknowledge and do not play
significantly into their performances. Watts and Roth did, however, bring a very
different quality to their roles. In particular, Watts’ turn as Ann introduced much more
sexual tension than did Lothar’s slight body and neurotic, slightly bitchy interpretation.

Beyond the casting, the most interesting aspects of the remake involve the authorial or
economic reasons for its existence. Commentators and admirers, accustomed to the
director’s screeds against American popular cinema, were nothing short of
flabbergasted when advance notices for the project appeared. Why would Haneke
remake Funny Games and why would he choose make a “Hollywood” film? When posed
this question, he responded that Funny Games was meant as an experiment about
America and an English-language version would actually reach his target audience. He
also indicated his long-held desire to collaborate with Naomi Watts. In these interviews,
Haneke rarely failed to emphasise how much he despised making a studio picture and
the American trade unions came up for particular excoriation: to get a cup of tea on
set, he claimed to have had to ask an assistant to ask an assistant to ask an assistant
to fetch it for him. These comments might provide some insight into the reasons for the
film; financial remuneration surely played another (unacknowledged) role.
Regardless, Funny Games U.S.flopped and received only measured critical plaudits.
Even more troubling for those who had previously appreciated Haneke’s principled
stance against the “barrel-down” American cinema, Haneke confirmed that Ron Howard
had declared his interest in remaking Hidden. (18)

Morality Detective Story: The White Ribbon

Winner of the 2009 Palme d’Or at Cannes and nominee for Best Foreign Language Film
Academy Award, The White Ribbon seems to be thoroughly out of the past. Shot in
sharp, high-definition digital (cinematographer Christian Berger earned an Oscar
nomination for his work) and converted into black and white during post-production,
the pre-World War I historical reconstruction in many ways feels like a throwback to
Haneke’s television adaptations The Rebellion and The Castle. The language is
anachronistic; it evokes the rhythms and, partly, the milieu of 19th-century bourgeois
realism, epitomized by authors such as Theodor Fontane. The overdub narrator—who,
in the first dialogue of the film unreliably suggests that “I don’t know if the story that I
will tell you corresponds to the truth in every detail”, gestures towards the ornate frame
structure of Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter or a much more recent play on this
tradition, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

The plot documents the “strange events” that afflict a Northern German village and its
principal characters: the Baron’s family, the Pastor’s family, the Farmer, the Steward,
the Midwife and the village Doctor. The Schoolteacher, who is also the retrospective
storyteller, narrates the proceedings, intercut with the subplot of his courtship of the
Baroness’ nanny, Eva: the Doctor’s horse is felled by a wire; the Farmer’s wife dies in
an accident at the mill; the harvest is destroyed and a barn goes up in flames; Baron’s
son, Sigi, is kidnapped and beaten; Karli, the Midwife’s handicapped son, is attacked so
severely that he can hardly see.

The narrative form is episodic and the larger political background—we find out only
near the end—is the beginning of the First World War. Above all, however, this is a
milieu study hidden in a mystery that will never be solved: character sketches in
physical and sexual abuse and passive-aggressive emotional cruelty. The rigid social
hierarchies and rituals of the Protestant village are examined from a distinctly 21st-
century perspective. This includes the courtship between and the Schoolteacher and
Eva, the gender dynamics of the Baron and the Baroness and, in particular, the
atmosphere at the Pastor’s house. The children address their parents as “Mr. Father”
and “Mrs. Mother” and with the formal word for “you” (“Sie”); they curtsey and kiss
their parents’ hand as valediction. The Pastor and his wife employ (based on today’s
standards) draconian disciplinary measures; when the father suspects Martin of self-
exploration, he has his son’s hands bound to the bed at night to prevent impropriety.
Besides beatings and violating sex, there is little physical human contact. Echoing Time
of the Wolf’s Anne, the Pastor snaps “don’t touch me” to his children; the Doctor, in
particularly vicious scenes, is repulsed by his lover, the Midwife. The title “White
Ribbon” is an armband that Martin and his sister must wear, a sign of their purity and a
reminder to save them from falling into the temptation to sin again.

The social construction of violence—how it is

passed down in families, in schools and by religion—is always at issue in this film,
subtitled “A German Children’s Story”. The Doctor’s sexual abuse of his daughter, the
general severity and hypocrisy of the village adults and class tensions are played out in
the children’s increasing aggressions and it is implied that they are also responsible for
the “strange events”. One of the final scenes—when the Midwife inexplicably needs to
leave town and a tracking shot reveals that the children are trying to gain access to the
Midwife’s house, where the battered Karli had been convalescing—recalls Funny
Games’s sinister dénouement, when we realise that the killers will strike again and
again. (This effect is only heightened by the casting of Susanne Lothar as the Midwife.)
In this tale, children mobilise for a generational struggle not by rebelling, but
by overlearning their lessons and taking the adults’ moralism literally. These are young
people who have internalised their parents’ pressures (cf. The Seventh
Continent, Benny’s Video and Time of the Wolf) and project them as violence they inflict
among and upon themselves. Martin, who nearly kills himself, suffers like a real author
contemporary to the fiction; the Austrian author Robert Musil, of the immediately
previous generation, allegedly tried to take his own life before he was a teenager. The
children’s sadism, a perversion of the supposedly innocent that has been a persistent
motif in Haneke, places The White Ribbon into the tradition of Village of the
Damned (1960, 1995). The casting of real siblings and the careful selection (Haneke
claimed to have examined 7,000 head shots and child actors) of certain physiognomies
and body types, certainly contributes to the eerie mood. This is a film about the
generation that will become, if not the architects, then the executors of Nazism in
Germany. Historians pinpoint precisely that children of this age, too young to be
enlisted in the Great War and thus see horrors of armed conflict firsthand, became the
instruments of Hitler and the most enthusiastic National Socialists.

The White Ribbon employs some classically Hanekean stylistics. In some scenes, the
camera pursues a character, a style of surveillance featured most rigorously and
prominently in Hidden; at the village dance, a kinetic camera encircles the
Schoolteacher and Eva à la Michael Ballhaus. More frequent, however, are long takes
using a stationary camera, such as a sustained shot of the Farmer’s wife lying in wake,
or the shot of a hallway and closed door as Martin is beaten; we are only allowed
access to the boy’s faint cries. Nevertheless, these techniques reappear less self-
consciously and less rigorously than in previous films. The latter scene, for example,
recalls, but is much shorter (and therefore more palatable) than previous sequences in
which Haneke substitutes sounds for the visuals of violence.

Disturbingly, for a project that wants to explain the roots of fascism or the fallacy of
moral rigidity, and for a filmmaker who follows Bresson’s doctrine on the unity of
content and form, who once claimed “beautiful pictures are boring”, the aesthetic could
hardly be more sumptuous. Some compositions, like the deep focus shot of the
Farmer’s family eating at the table, quote North European genre painting’s idealised
peasants. Glorious long shots show farmhands who cut wheat in precise, synchronized
movements; the attention to setting and costume is loving and exact. (Haneke
supposedly had the fields sown precisely according to 1914 agricultural customs and
with seeds from the era; he had just one take to capture their threshing, which the
actors rehearsed for weeks). Panorama shots reveal an almost ridiculously flat
landscape; not only the sharp High German makes it abundantly clear that we are a
long way from Austrian Gemütlichkeit. For keen observers of German cinema, the
casting of stars and familiar character actors irritates: Ulrich Tukur, Burghart Klaußner,
Gabriele Schmiede, Steffi Kühnert, Brigitte Minichmayer. Detlev Buck (Eva’s father) and
Josef Bierbichler (the Steward), two actors who often appear in comedic roles, were
especially complex choices. Indeed, a small war launched on the pages of German arts
pages between eminent critics Ekkehard Knörer and Wolfram Schütte about whether it
was legitimate to treat such a dark subject with such beautiful images.

In the end, however, The White Ribbon is as much thriller as history lesson or morality
tale. The Schoolteacher is essentially a detective figure whose efforts to solve the
crimes are frustrated by the townspeople’s instincts to protect their children and
thereby, most importantly, their social status. The narrative form, and our superior
access to information, produces a certain suspense: typically for Haneke, episodes
begin in medias res, which, coupled with a rigorous editing scheme creates surprising
and initially misleading transitions. For instance, after the Doctor tells the Midwife to
“die already” there is a cut to a funeral procession; only later do we understand that we
have seen the coffin of the Farmer and that the Midwife is still alive. Similarly, after the
Pastor has awkwardly disciplined his son for alleged masturbation, there is a disturbing
cut that implies that the Pastor is sodomising Martin. (It turns out to be the Doctor and
the Midwife.) This editing programme deludes and foreshadows at the same time.

***

When I first wrote this article in the spring and summer of 2003—in social
accommodation in Berlin and on the shores of Altavilla Milicia, I re-viewed rented
videocassettes and typed on a black-and-white screen without internet access. The
world was a different place. At the time I enjoyed the thrill and challenge of writing on
a director who had received only piecemeal attention. In the years that followed and
with Haneke’s increasing visibility, this prospect changed. Critics and scholars lavished
him with ever greater attention and appraised his work through a whole host of
perspectives and methodologies.

Why has there been so much interest in Haneke? One explanation might begin by
quoting Jonathan Jones from The Guardian, who recently wrote that Haneke “has put
European cinema back into the premier league”. (19) One might be puzzled by this
generalisation, but what Jones really means to say is that Haneke puts a certain kind of
European cinema back into view. The “last modernist” recuperates the hermeneutic
circuses of Bergman and Antonioni and Tarkovsky and Janscó, he returns us to a time
when the primary function of film criticism, but also film studies and cinephilia, was to
figure out: What did I just watch? What was that film about? Haneke’s practice, for all
of its invocations of voguish 80s and 90s media theory and its shocking portraits of
contemporary life, is a cinema out of time. This is partly because of the director’s
physical age: he is a contemporary of Werner Herzog and was born three
years before Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; yet, he directed his first
theatrical feature in 1989 at the age of 47, a good 20 years after Fassbinder garnered
acclaim with Love Is Colder Than Death (Die Liebe ist kälter als der Tod, 1969).
Although by birth a member of the generation of 1968, Haneke somehow belongs to
the cutting edge of European cinema.

In turn, the great interest in Haneke has to do also with his classical artistic affinities,
which include Bresson, Antonioni and Pasolini. These similarities feed both on a lack
and surfeit of critics’ imaginations. Schooled in the concerns and techniques of those
canonical directors, we can reliably apply trusted paradigms to Haneke: from themes of
guilt, memory, national identity or the broken modern life, to violence and image
critique, to open-ended narratives and difficult forms of spectatorship. But, perhaps on
a more hopeful note, watching Haneke and what he is achieving in the current history
of technology can also be a utopian and nostalgic exercise. He lets us imagine what
Bergman, Tarkovsky or Fassbinder might be delivering if they were alive and active in
the age of complex multinational co-productions, the digital and the increasing
systemisation of film festivals. How might these filmmakers have reacted to the
internet? Perhaps in the manner of Haneke, who reports he will make a film on the
subject, due for release in 2012.

The great critical interest in Haneke pertains also to his sophistication. Let us remember
that he holds professoriate at the University for Music and Visual Arts, Vienna; in
conversation with journalists he cites Adorno, recites Brecht, quotes Godard and alludes
to Baudrillard and Jean-Louis Baudry. His published statements on media violence, the
role of television and the films of Bresson may not be ground-breaking pieces of
scholarship, but they certainly evince a man who thinks deeply about cinema and
contemporary theoretical debates. As I have elaborated in regard to his Austrian
trilogy, these ideas often find expression—and sometimes parody—in his films. (Think
of Anne’s book-release party in Hidden and the drunken critic who drops the names of
Proust, Baudrillard and others).

The engagement with theory and, in particular, Haneke’s analyses of his own work in
interviews and appearances have roused critics’ ire. Writing on a filmmaker always
must go through certain stages, the first being the “discovery mode”, which, by
definition, often resembles promotion. (Imagine approaching an editor and pitching an
article about an unknown director whose work is terrible). In this initial stage, the
enterprising critic has the task to decode and categorise the director’s oeuvre.
Subsequent writers then make their mark by revising or rejecting the findings of the
“discoverers” or by devising new approaches. Finally, the next wave needs to criticise
the entire process. In many ways, this is the current, middle stage of Haneke
scholarship. Critics find the need to position themselves for Haneke or against him.
They do so by comparing his statements to his films and proceeding to point out every
way in which, in fact, the two differ. These reactions reveal the fundamental anxiety of
the critic, whose very existence rests on a simple, yet terrifying premise: that he or she
knows more about a film than its maker, or anyone else. (Full disclosure: I do not deny
participating in all of these stages in some form).

The often scathing and ad hominem attacks made against Haneke by otherwise civil
writers seem to exceed those criticisms of filmmakers dealing with similar themes.
(Besides general castigations of middle-brow meaninglessness levelled by the likes of
Manny Farber and Pauline Kael, I don’t recall Antonioni, for example, earning the rants
that Haneke regularly receives.) As preeminent critic Wolfram Schütte has claimed, “no
other director—with the possible exception of the Straubs—has been so persistently
persecuted by German critics with more hate and spite than Michael
Haneke”. (20) Criticising the director as elitist and racist and yet banal and trite, the
cynical, blasé (but nonetheless outraged) attitude of the pundits is, not unironically,
often the very stance that they so deplore in Haneke. These reactions, if nothing else,
reveal that Haneke’s cinema of disturbance has succeeded in its purpose. Haneke has
won.