29 September - 3 November 2009: Close-Up on Michael Haneke

Tuesday 29 September 8pm: The Seventh Continent

Addressing themes that would inform much of his later work – the breakdown of society, violence and the media – Haneke's first theatrical feature is a disturbing portrait of familial disintegration which he describes as a depiction of his native Austria's 'progressive emotional glaciation'. Set over a three year period, it documents how the mundane day to day routines of a middle class family alienate them from the world and each other until, suddenly and shockingly, their lives self-destruct.

Tuesday 6 October 8pm: Benny's Video

Michael Haneke's disturbing film portrays the alienation of a young boy, whose experience of the world is refracted through the lens of his video camera and his television screen. Arno Frisch plays the 14 year-old Benny, who brings a girl home to his parents' empty apartment where he commits a shocking act of casual violence. As with his later Funny Games, Haneke poses provocative and challenging questions about voyeurism and violence.

Tuesday 13 October 8pm: 71 Fragments Of A Chronology Of Chance

Haneke's articulate critique of the isolating effects of western society, the media and television in particular, is composed of an intricate series of unrelated scenes, culminating in an apparently motiveless act of violence. Perfectly paced and executed, Haneke's skilful weaving of these tableaux into a coherent and compelling whole is mesmerising and masterfully composed.

Tuesday 20 October 8pm: Funny Games

Arriving at their remote lakeside holiday home, a middle class family is alarmed by the unexpected arrival of two young men who soon begin to subject them to a twisted and horrifying ordeal of terror. With characteristic mastery, Haneke turns the conventions of the thriller genre upside down and directly challenges the expectations of his audience, forcing viewers to question the complacency with which they receive images of casual violence in contemporary cinema.

Tuesday 3 November 8pm: The Piano Teacher

Isabelle Huppert gives a performance of astounding intensity as Erika Kohut, a repressed woman in her late thirties who teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory and lives with her tyrannical mother, with whom she has a volatile love-hate relationship. But when one of Erika's students, the handsome and assured Walter Klemmer, attempts to seduce her, the barriers that she has carefully erected around her claustrophobic world are shattered, unleashing a previously inhibited extreme and uncontrollable desire.