Close-Up on Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke has established himself as one of cinema's most original, daring and controversial filmmakers. "Haneke’s films all deal in one way or another with modern society’s descent into lovelessness, alienation, and lethal coldness that get passed on from one generation to the next and amplified in the process. He conveys these themes through highly restrained cinematic forms and an austerely mesmerizing spectatorial address.” – Roy Grundmann. This season brings together eleven of his acclaimed works.

“My films are intended as polemical statements against the American “barrel down” cinema and its disempowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.” – Michael Haneke

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71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
Michael Haneke, 1984, 99 min

“The simultaneously random and interconnected nature of modern existence comes into harrowing focus in the despairing final instalment of Michael Haneke’s trilogy. Seventy-one intricate, puzzlelike scenes survey the routines of a handful of seemingly unrelated people – including an undocumented Romanian boy living on the streets of Vienna, a couple who are desperate to adopt a child, and a college student on the edge – whose stories collide in a devastating encounter at a bank. The omnipresent drone of television news broadcasts in 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance underscores Haneke’s vision of a numb, dehumanizing world in which emotional estrangement can be punctured only by the shock of sudden violence.” – Janus Films

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The Seventh Continent
Michael Haneke, 1989, 108 min

“The day-to-day routines of a seemingly ordinary Austrian family begin to take on a sinister complexion in Michael Haneke’s chilling portrait of bourgeois anomie giving way to shocking self-destruction. Inspired by a true story, the director’s first theatrical feature finds him fully in command of his style, observing with clinical detachment the spiritual emptiness of consumer culture – and the horror that lurks beneath its placid surfaces. The Seventh Continent builds to an annihilating encounter with the televisual void that powerfully synthesizes Haneke’s ideas about the link between violence and our culture of manufactured emotion.” – Janus Films

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Benny’s Video
Michael Haneke, 1992, 110 min 

“Michael Haneke turns the unflinching gaze of the camera back on itself in this provocative, profoundly disturbing study of emotional disconnection in the age of mass-media saturation. Benny (a frighteningly affectless Arno Frisch), the teenage son of wealthy, disengaged parents, finds release in the world of violent videos – an obsession that leads him to create his own monstrous work of real-life horror. Layering screens within screens and frames within the filmic frame, Benny’s Video is a coolly postmodern, metacinematic labyrinth in which the boundaries between actual and mediated violence become terrifyingly indistinguishable.” – Janus Films

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Code Unknown
Michael Haneke, 2000, 117 min

“Michael Haneke diagnoses the social maladies of contemporary Europe with devastating precision and artistry. His drama Code Unknown, the first of his many films made in France, may be his most inspired work. Composed almost entirely of brilliantly shot, single-take vignettes focusing on characters connected to one seemingly minor incident on a Paris street, Haneke’s film – with an outstanding international cast headlined by Juliette Binoche – is a revelatory examination of racial inequality and the failure of communication in an increasingly diverse modern landscape.” – Janus Films

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Funny Games
Michael Haneke, 1997, 109 min

“Michael Haneke’s most notorious provocation, Funny Games spares no detail in its depiction of the agony of a bourgeois family held captive at their vacation home by a pair of white-gloved young men. In a series of escalating “games,” the sadistic duo subjects their victims to unspeakable physical and psychological torture over the course of a night. A home-invasion thriller in which the genre’s threat of bloodshed is made stomach-churningly real, the film ratchets up shocks even as its executioners interrupt the action to address the audience, drawing queasy attention to the way that cinema milks pleasure from pain and stokes our appetite for atrocity. With this controversial treatise on violence and entertainment, Haneke issued a summation of his cinematic philosophy, implicating his audience in a spectacle of unbearable cruelty.” – Janus Films

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The Piano Teacher
Michael Haneke, 2001, 130 min

“In this riveting study of the dynamics of control, Michael Haneke takes on Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s controversial 1983 novel about perverse female sexuality and the world of classical music. Haneke finds his match in Isabelle Huppert, who delivers an icy but quietly seething performance as Erika, a piano professor at a Viennese conservatory who lives with her mother in a claustrophobically codepen­dent relation­ship. Severely repressed, she satisfies her mas­ochistic urges only voyeuristically until she meets Walter (Benoît Magimel), a student whose desire for Erika leads to a destructive infatuation that upsets the careful equilibrium of her life. A critical breakthrough for Haneke, The Piano Teacher – which won the Grand Prix as well as dual acting awards for its stars at Cannes – is a formalist masterwork that remains a shocking sensation.” – Janus Films

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Time of the Wolf
Michael Haneke, 2003, 110 min

“Set somewhere in Europe in what appears to be the near future, Haneke's apocalyptic fable takes a rigorously realistic approach to material all too often compromised by hackneyed spectacle and sensationalism, simply tracing a family's attempts to survive in a countryside deprived (for reasons wisely left unexplained) of electricity and clean water. Darkness is the film's dominant metaphor, underlining not only the uncertainty felt by Isabelle Huppert, her two kids, and those they encounter on their travels in search of food, safety and something resembling normal civilisation but also the terrifying threat of absolute solitude. Since Haneke refuses to provide the usual dramatic climaxes, the film demands an attentive curiosity from the viewer not required by more conventionally generic fare, but the strategy has its rewards, not least in the unexpected emotional force of the final two scenes.” – Geoff Andrew

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Hidden
Michael Haneke, 2005, 118 min

This compelling psychological thriller stars Daniel Auteuil as Georges, a television presenter who begins to receive mysterious and alarming packages containing covertly filmed videos of himself and his family. To the mounting consternation of Georges and his wife (Juliette Binoche) the footage on the tapes – which arrive wrapped in drawings of disturbingly violent images – becomes increasingly personal, and sinister anonymous phone calls are made. In Hidden, Haneke probes the pride, class-consciousness, and racial enmity of a man whose happy, comfortable, middle class family life is turned upside down by a series of intrusive and upsetting events that undermine his life.

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The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke, 2009, 144 min

From its startling opening image of a horse tumbling over a trip wire and violently dislodging its rider, The White Ribbon traces a series of increasingly sinister "accidents" that befall the residents of a rural German village in the days preceding the start of the First World War. The young son of a wealthy baron is caned and hung upside down in a sawmill. Another boy, the mentally disabled son of a midwife, is nearly blinded; an anonymous note strung around his neck states that the children are being punished for the sins of their parents. Gradually, one schoolteacher’s suspicions begin to fall on the children themselves. In its broadest sense a portrait of the formative years of the Nazi generation, Michael Haneke’s meticulous social drama – shot in stunning black-and-white and featuring an extraordinary cast of nonprofessional child actors – continues its maker’s career-spanning fascination with the brutality lurking beneath society’s placid facades, while taking his artistry to a new level of accomplishment.

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Amour
Michael Haneke, 2012, 127 min

""I was so young once!" cries the unnamed woman played by Emmanuelle Riva in Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour. More than a half century later, the octogenarian Riva first appears in Michael Haneke's Amour as a corpse, ceremoniously laid out on a bed in her Paris apartment in a long, dark dress, her head wreathed with desiccated flower petals. Her body has, apparently, remained in the sealed room for days, the smell of decay repelling the pompiers who force the door in the film's cataclysmic opening shot. Violent incursion into domestic sanctum has long been a trope in Haneke's cinema, but the trespass that initiates Amour differs from the invasions the Austrian master has previously manufactured as metaphors for an ever-threatening universe. Here the intruders breach asylum not as harbingers of torture, but as witnesses to the end of a protracted tragedy." – James Quandt

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Happy End
Michael Haneke, 2017, 107 min

“Michael Haneke ingeniously reworks and updates the enduringly relevant themes of all his previous films in one brief, brilliant, sometimes slyly satirical gem. Though set in Calais, Happy End never shows “the Jungle”, focusing instead on a construction dynasty seemingly blind to the unfortunates across town. Anne (Huppert) oversees the business now that her embittered father Georges (Trintignant) is unable to cope; her doctor brother Thomas (Kassovitz), meanwhile, is getting reacquainted with his teenage daughter since his ex-wife’s overdose. Indeed, everyone in the family seems frustrated or lonely… Haneke’s dark, sardonic yet quietly compassionate picture of contemporary life as experienced by complacently well-off Europeans is as formally inventive, morally relevant and psychologically astute as ever, yet its wholly compelling drama is here leavened by bracing moments of absurdist humour. The refugees and poor? Seldom seen, constantly there… Superbly performed, this is formidably intelligent filmmaking.” – Geoff Andrew