A Master of Provocation

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49266

When upper-middle-class Parisian couple Georges and Anne (Auteuil and Binoche) begin to receive a series of increasingly disturbing videotapes that depict scenes and events collected from their lives, dread soon permeates every aspect of their existence. Eventually, Georges?s personal history is revealed to be influenced by France?s political history, particularly by its colonization of Algeria and its treatment of Algerian immigrants. A thriller that also touches upon issues of class and race, Caché leaves the viewer in a state of uneasy paranoia.

Two men con their way into the home of a complacent Austrian family and amuse themselves by inflicting various forms of psychological and physical torture. Haneke's most explicitly assaultive film, which he has remade in an American version starring Naomi Watts, is an investigation of the razor-thin line between obscenity and pornography. "Insofar as truth is always obscene, I hope that all of my films have at least an element of obscenity.... Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable" (Haneke)

La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher). 2001. Germany/Poland/France/Austria. Directed by Michael Haneke. Thrumming with erotic tension and as precise as a metronome, Haneke's adaptation of the novel by Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek earned three major awards at Cannes: Best Actress (Isabelle Huppert), Best Actor (Benoît Magimel), and the Grand Jury Prize. Huppert gives a courageously uninhibited performance as Erika Kohut, a cold and ruthless piano teacher by day and a voyeuristic, pornophilic, and self-mutilating fantasist by night. Upsetting this delicate dichotomy is a gifted and seductive student nearly twenty years her junior, as each of them vies for the upper hand while plunging to the lowest depths of sexual transgression and defilement. Looming over her every thought and act?and taking up one side of her bed!?is Huppert's monstrously domineering mother (Girardot), in what is perhaps the most fascinating and fearless depiction of a mother-daughter relationship since Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata, another chamber piece of high culture, repression, narcissism, and madness. Courtesy Kino International. In French; English subtitles. 131 min.

"For what possible end to these wastes where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night." - Samuel Beckett

In an age of a borderless, new European economy, the volatile encounter of four people on an anonymous Parisian street underscores the underlying social disparity inherent in any increasingly multicultural, contemporary urban society. A brash, impatient young man named Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) accosts his older brother's girlfriend, an actress named Anne (Juliette Binoche), on the street after being unable to reach her on the telephone. Attempting to gain alliance against their father (Josef Bierbichler) from his brother Georges (Thierry Neuvic), a photojournalist on assignment in the Balkans, Jean, without solicitation, begins to complain to the polite, but hurried and preoccupied Anne, of his objection to his father's unconsented plans to renovate the family's farmhouse with the expectation of apprenticing him to assume eventual responsibility for the farm. Pressed for time and unprepared to appropriately address Jean's personal issues, Anne attempts to placate him with a snack purchased from a nearby vendor and gives him the keys to the apartment, providing a terse reminder that he cannot stay indefinitely. Jean's frustrated attempts to voice his grievance leads to a thoughtless act: discarding his crumpled paper bag into the lap of an undocumented immigrant from Romania named Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu) who is panhandling near the entrance of a cornershop. A principled and tenacious music teacher of African descent, Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), witnesses the humiliating episode, and confronts Jean to demand an apology. The altercation soon draws the attention of the police who seem to quickly side with the young transgressor, duly noting Jean and an interfering, tangentially aggrieved shop owner's complaints. Eventually, the well-intentioned Amadou and inculpable Maria are officially detained.

Michael Haneke creates an intelligently constructed, compelling, provocative, and relevant observation on social inequity, the untenability of cultural assimilation, and the failure of communication in Code Inconnu. Presented as a series of dissociated (and intrinsically ethnographic) episodes on the lives of the principal characters following the fateful (though seemingly trivial) transection, Haneke examines the ingrained social divisiveness, moral complacency, and created bounds of human interaction. Chronologically indeterminate events, interrupted dialogues (often truncated in mid sentence), prolonged transitional fadeouts, and recurrent episodes of missed (and mis) communication (Jean's unsuccessful attempts to reach Georges and Anne; the mysterious letter left on Anne's door seeking help, perhaps written by an abused child living in a neighboring apartment; Georges' inability to unlock the front door of the apartment building after the access code is changed) pervade the film's fragmented narrative structure, exposing the flawed perception of cultural integration and social equality in the constantly evolving racial and socio-economic demography of a traditionally monoethnic society. The exquisitely wordless, extended final sequence, articulated solely through the consonant rhythm of an outdoor performance by Amadou's deaf music students, illustrates the innately human capacity to transcend the artificially imposed barriers of cultural perception and bias to communicate through the universal language of community and compassion. However, in the frenetic pace and ambient cacophony of a claustrophobic, modern existence, human expression is often only valued for its measured distance and tolerated silence.

In Haneke's darkest fable?a vision of apocalypse, or a harrowing glimpse of the world beyond our protected borders?humanity stands at the crossroads of annihilation and salvation. Haneke hews to a palette of sputtering flame, gunmetal, and ash?like "the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world," as Cormac McCarthy writes in his echoing novel The Road?and makes allusion, in title, imagery, and theme, to Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf (1968). "The Hour of the Wolf is the time between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palpable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. The Hour of the Wolf is also the hour when most children are born" (Bergman). Courtesy Palm Pictures. In French; English subtitles. 114 min.

A lumbering, full-grown pig, muzzled through a leash that has been tied around its snout, is led outside the barnyard doors of an unidentified farm and into a clearing where a group of apparent bystanders cavalierly await its slaughter. The skittish, herky-jerky video image taken from the handheld camera moves in relatively tight side view close-up to frame the head of the animal as the farmer places the barrel of a revolver onto its forehead between the eyes and, amidst its persistent (and disturbingly unnerving) suffocated grunts and squeals, pulls the trigger - the pig's body immediately collapsing to the ground, its limbs still involuntary twitching from the residual neurological response impulse to the bullet's fatal impact. The video image is then curiously paused and rewound in slow motion, the soundtrack audibly slowed to a cadent, monotonic bass to the point where the origin of the sound becomes strangely alien, disembodied, and haunted. The viewer of the amateur footage is revealed to be its unseen videographer, an adolescent named Benny (Arno Frisch), who shutters himself for hours in his dark, cluttered room perpetually immersed in the self-induced, often compounded stimuli of loud music, rented videos, and broadcast television, his view of the outside world paradoxically reduced to a live video feed onto a monitor from a camera that has been positioned to point out of his shade-drawn window and onto the street. His distracted, emotionally distant father (Ulrich Mühe) and equally disaffected, obliging mother (Angela Winkler) seem tolerant of Benny's hermeticism, even exploiting his estranged, sentinel-like omnipresence in the household and penchant for video surveillance to spy on their older daughter Evi's suspect activities after moving out of the family home, as she uses the well-appointed apartment to host a party designed to generate revenue through a pyramid scheme in her parents' absence. It is a convenient domestic arrangement of tacit mutualism (and mutual disregard) that soon reveals the moral crisis innate in their dysfunctional relationship when Benny befriends a seemingly bored and aimless young girl (Ingrid Stassner) who transfixedly watches the random features displayed from the shop window of a local video store each afternoon after school, and brings her home to share in his obsessive, alienated reviewing of the slaughter footage.

The second installment on the correlative effects of urban alienation and media violence in contemporary society in what would become known as Michael Haneke's trilogy of "emotional glaciation" (along with The Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance), Benny's Video is a provocative, confrontational, and indelibly haunting exposition on isolation, rootlessness, displaced turmoil, and human desolation. Using the opening sequence of the animal slaughter home video as Benny replays, hyperextends the moment of death through frame by frame pauses, or otherwise manipulates the resulting images captured on tape into increasingly indistinguishable resolution and textured, decontextualized audiovisual patterns of signal noise, Haneke illustrates the underlying process of cognitive abstraction - and consequently, systematic dissonance - that serve to not only dissociate the innate violence of the act with its logical consequence, but also blur the distinction between the experiential levels of fictional and real violence through the synthesis (and contextual anesthetization) of public information and entertainment in the creation of a commercially viable, commodified consumer media product. Moreover, through the narrative incorporation of Evi's pyramid scheme, Haneke also provides an intrinsic structural correlation to the collapse - and perversion - of the nuclear family in the absence of communication, trust, moral guidance, and emotional engagement as the ever-widening confidence game reveals an overarching socio-behavioral pattern of self-interest, a mindset that compels the individual to become progressively distanced from the initial source of the "investment" in order to realize profit, and the requirement of the participant's covert complicity (and cover-up) in the perpetuation of the scheme. It is this underlying disarticulation of moral responsibility and dissociation of cause and effect in the wake of media saturated infotainment and socially fostered, empty shell games of deflected accountability that is inevitably reflected in the film's eerie prescience on its examination of the consequence of desensitizing technology and the pervasiveness of media violence - a senseless and tragic portrait of empty privilege, alienated communication, and despiritualized bankruptcy.

On Christmas Eve, 1993, a nineteen-year-old university student entered a Viennese bank and killed three people before turning the gun on himself. But why should we care? We rationalize away the presence of evil and the pain of others, paraded daily on the evening news, with trite psychological or sociological explanations. Haneke describes this condition in hypnotic and foreboding detail in 71 Fragments, which depicts the random, or fateful, convergence of strangers that day at the bank as a puzzle that will remain unresolved, mysterious, and deeply disturbing.

Set in 1959 in Wiener Neustadt, the provincial city of Haneke's adolescent years, Lemmings - Part 1 is a dramatic and withering portrait of Austria's second "lost generation": teenagers who grew up in monstrously repressive bourgeois families, forbidden to speak of wartime collaboration and defeat, indoctrinated with an unquestioning obedience to family, state, and God, and taught that kindness is weakness and their own sexuality is shameful and abject. Contemptuous of their parents' impotence and hypocrisy, they rebel in destructive and self-destructive ways.

With his penchant for open-ended narratives that are subject to infinite interpretations, Haneke fittingly chose to adapt Franz Kafka's unfinished masterpiece, The Castle, which abandons the reader, midsentence, in uncertainty and expectation. Ulrich Mü:he (The Lives of Others) stars as K, a land surveyor whose attempts to reach the Castle are endlessly thwarted by petty bureaucratic machinations, suspicious and prying townsfolk, a labyrinthine topography, and a relationship with a woman (...or are they merely using each other?)

With his penchant for open-ended narratives that are subject to infinite interpretations, Haneke fittingly chose to adapt Franz Kafka's unfinished masterpiece, The Castle, which abandons the reader, midsentence, in uncertainty and expectation. Ulrich Mü:he (The Lives of Others) stars as K, a land surveyor whose attempts to reach the Castle are endlessly thwarted by petty bureaucratic machinations, suspicious and prying townsfolk, a labyrinthine topography, and a relationship with a woman (...or are they merely using each other?)

Based on the novel by noted Austrian writer Peter Rosei, who draws on Poe's themes of doubling, shadowing, and the uncanny, this atmospheric mystery, set in Venice over four distinct seasons, follows a German art student suffering from some unnamed illness, existential or otherwise. He is befriended by a shady and secretive German American gentleman, "Edgar Allan," who seems intent on driving him mad by dogging his every move. Haneke's Venice is a figment of the (paranoid) imagination, where strange characters make unwanted intrusions and clues are laid out like pieces of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle.

"The story of an adulterous romance between a teacher and a journalist that has been described by Haneke himself as being closer to John Cassavetes than Hollywood melodrama" (Roy Grundmann, Cineaste). Though his characters are paralyzed by tragic indecision, Haneke handles their intricate comings and goings with a light touch, and in the end, as scholar Alexander Horwath observes, "the utopia of love remains."

In this Sophoclean tragedy, the sins of fathers and mothers?depicted with such frightening clarity in Lemmings - Part 1?have been passed on to their children, now living in loveless marriages and bringing unwanted children of their own into the world. It is a world in which despair and longing are met with cold indifference, disdain, or enfeebled gestures of kindness, and the fleeting comforts of prayer, pills, alcohol, illicit affairs, television, and misdirected rage only lead to further injury.

The Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann?whose introspective, distillate style is suited to Haneke's own?was enormously influential in Europe for her fiction, poems, and essays on feminism, philosophy, language, and postwar politics. In this adaptation one of her celebrated stories, a successful photojournalist visits her father's home and looks back on her life and loves, only to find the paths to illumination blocked. Many of the story's themes?photography, memory, and ethics; the indeterminacy of language; the loss of intimacy and self?would resurface in Haneke's Code Unknown and Caché. "[Bachmann's] great quality as an artist is precisely this: that she cannot find it within herself to suppress, in her art, her experience as a woman" (Christa Wolf, The Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics, 1983).

62nd Cannes Film Festival.

Extraordinary.

Haneke, no stranger to cautionary tales, is a philosophy graduate interested in the bigger questions of life.