“Film
is 24 lies per second at the service of truth”
—Michael Haneke (24 Realities per Second)
Such
a play on Jean-Luc Godard’s famous dictum as to the inherent truth of the
cinematic medium is typical of the cynical postmodernism of Michael Haneke, the
Austrian writer-director whose feature films have consistently engaged in
revealing and reassessing what he sees as the inevitable falsity of the filmed
image. Considered a realist by virtue of his often long takes, predominantly
naturalistic dialogue, and anti-sensationalist presentation of violence and
sexuality, Haneke’s work has in fact constantly pointed toward its own unreality, exposing the abstraction of
the cinematic image and the long tradition of the mechanical reproduction of
reality as, necessarily, a manipulation of truth and thereby of the spectator.
In eleven theatrical releases to date, he has repeatedly drawn attention to the
extent of this manipulation, using his films as incitements to his audiences to
re-evaluate their own relationship to reality and question the degree to which
modern media—television and the internet as much as film—has divorced them from
a meaningful connection to the truth of the world in which they exist. This
essay intends to assess Haneke’s subjugation of the cinematic apparatus to his
own self-reflexive end, and to reach—through an investigation of the manner in
which he implements and inverts typical tropes of screen realism—an
understanding of the key themes his oeuvre addresses by way of this intently
self-aware, postmodern deconstruction of filmic reality.
Perhaps
simply because it was not until 2005—when Caché
won the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, making its director’s
name synonymous with European art house cinema—that a new wave of auteurist
analyses of Haneke’s multilingual oeuvre emerged, scholarly literature on the
director outside of singular essays with limited scope remains relatively
scarce. Undoubtedly, the seminal works thus far produced on the subject are
Peter Brunette’s Michael Haneke and
Catherine Wheatley’s Michael Haneke’s
Cinema: The Ethic of the Image, two books that, though naturally reaching
similar conclusions on many of the implications of Haneke’s work, also vary
widely in their attribution of importance to the various narrative and
stylistic trends that have accompanied his evolution as a filmmaker. As we can most particularly observe from the
similarly segregated structure of the two notable collections of essays
published on Haneke, Roy Grundmann’s A
Companion to Michael Haneke and Brian Price and John David Rhodes’ On Michael Haneke, there has been a
prevailing tendency among scholars to separate the director’s work along two
primary thematic lines: those concerned with the representation of violence and
our relation thereto; and those exploring prominent social issues, be they racism,
(lack of) communication, sexuality, etc. Indeed, Haneke’s work up to and
including Caché has conveniently
seemed to facilitate this delineation: four features in German, neatly fitting
the former category; four in French, sitting—for the most part—comfortably in
the latter.
It
is interesting to note that the position a particular critic takes on Haneke’s
work seems inevitably weighted toward an appreciation of one of these
tendencies above the other, even to the exclusion of the true importance of the
other. Brunette, for instance, explores the director’s first four works in far
greater depth than that afforded his French features, save Caché, which—its self-referential characteristics considered—is far
more easily considered alongside the Austrian efforts than something like Time of the Wolf (2003), which Brunette
seems to struggle to contextualise within his own selective reading. In fact,
so evident is Brunette’s evaluation of the earlier works above the later that
he terms Code Unknown (2000), the
first French-language feature, “indistinct” in its inquisitions, which he
claims are posed “only obliquely and ambivalently” (Haneke 75-81).
Wheatley,
meanwhile, adeptly positioning Haneke’s filmography within the framework of
Kantian ethics, interprets the director’s oeuvre as an engagement with the
audience on questions of responsibility, specifically
in the French features—which, she argues, build on the less successful
experimentations of the Austrian films, “those [directly concerned] with visual
depictions of violence in cinema” (2006)—where emotional involvement is juxtaposed
with spectatorial awareness to form a tension from which important questions on
the implications of our viewership are extrapolated: “in Haneke” she claims,
“the object of this awareness is not primarily the ideology attached to the
individual film” (2009: 36). Thus the first four films, concerned as they are
to a lesser degree with wider social issues, are of less interest to Wheatley
than their French-language cousins.
A
prevailing weakness of both critics’ arguments—though alas, by virtue of
lacking international availability that too of most arguments, my own included—is
their exclusion of an in-depth consideration of Haneke’s pre-theatrical work,
comprising some ten[1]
television films. While Wheatley fairly excuses this omission as beyond the
bounds of her inquiry, Brunette delegates his assessment of the small screen
productions to his article “Haneke and the Television Years: A Reading of Lemmings” in Grundmann’s collection, the
subtitle of which of course betrays the restriction of this study to but a
single such effort. His is one of several such essays Grundmann assembles,
which offer a valuable insight into the televisual origin of Haneke’s primary
thematic preoccupations, if necessarily an incomprehensive one given the range
of authors, and thus perspectives, thereby engaged.
Supplemented
by Grundmann and Price and Rhodes’ collections, Brunette and Wheatley’s
readings of Haneke offer a useful insight into the recurrent themes his
distinctive filmmaking style addresses. As is only proved by the troubling
presence of the television films, however, attempting to impose so convenient a
subdivision betrays the multifaceted diversity of Haneke’s oeuvre. The release
of the 2007 English-language remake of Funny
Games (1997) seems only to further problematise the linear progression
postulated as part of this dichotomy, as—to an arguably even greater degree—do
the subsequent features, The White Ribbon
(2009) and Amour (2012), both of
which diversify into thematic concerns that cannot comfortably be confined to
either of the two schools of thought most commonly associated with Haneke’s
work. We thus find ourselves in need of a new, less immediately reductive lens
through which to examine the films, and with which we can formulate a more
inclusive and comprehensive analysis of their thematic concerns.
Both
Brunette and Wheatley, and indeed most others whose interpretation of Haneke
this argument will draw upon, assess the director as a realist, a reasonable
conclusion but one not satisfactorily enough rooted in a consideration of the
contextual evolution of cinematic realism to truly appreciate the extent to
which the progression of the medium—particularly with relation to the phenomenon
of digital technology—has impacted Haneke’s exploration, and particularly
manipulation, of our respective relationships to reality and fiction. Therefore,
in implementing a more thorough contextualisation of Haneke’s particular
brand(s) of realism, I shall in this essay seek to reconcile the disparate
discourses which have encouraged and maintained the reductive subdivision of
his work. To that end, I will draw upon Christian Metz's evaluative model of
cinema as the optimal medium of artistic realism, thereafter tracing the
evolution of realist discourse from the originating arguments of André Bazin and—to
a lesser extent—Lev Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin, to the distinction made by
Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin between, to perpetuate something of a
cliché, real real and reel real. Contextualising Haneke's
films within this framework, and specifically examining the manner in which he
deliberately and subversively moves between Gregorie Currie’s three modes of
realism as a means by which to collapse the contrasting illusions of reality
the cinema purports, I will, building on the discourses of Laura Mulvey and
Jean-Louis Baudry, examine the manner in which his subversion of the
spectator's gaze and identification with the characters of his fiction reveals
the problematic psychological projections and ethical contradictions inherent
within contemporary cinema audiences. Finally, I will posit his work as an
embodiment of Jean Boudrillard's conception of the "excess of
reality", showing how this phenomenon is manipulated in Haneke’s cinema to
reflect the audience’s problematic participation in morally contentious viewing
experiences back upon them. Identification and the gaze, I will argue, is the
unifying cinematic construction that binds Haneke’s seemingly diverse thematic
strands—right from the earliest iterations of his televisual career—through
which he implements, subverts, and investigates the phenomenon of audience engagement
with the unreality of fiction and prompts us to reassess our relationship with
reality. We will conclude, thus, that his oeuvre is composed not of mutually
exclusive inquiries into the nature of screen violence and the shortcomings of
contemporary society, but rather dedicated to a masterful manipulation of
cinematic form that, above any singular socio-political or moralistic
standpoint, is the connective tissue which characterises and congeals his
filmography.
The
truth is that there seems to be an optimal point, film, on either side of which
the impression of reality produced by the fiction tends to decrease. On the one
side, there is the theater, whose too real vehicle puts fiction to flight; on
the other, photography and representational painting, whose means are too poor
in their degree of reality to constitute and sustain a diegetic universe. (Metz
13)
It
is not for no reason that Code Unknown,
whose main characters are three groups of individuals whose lives in the wake
of an interconnecting event constitute the narrative, features seemingly unimportant
scenes of Anne (Juliette Binoche) auditioning for both a play and a film, and
images her photojournalist boyfriend Georges (Thierry Neuvic) has captured on
the battlefields of Kosovo and the metro trains of Paris. Haneke here seems to
very consciously embrace Metz’s idea, the way in which Anne’s play and Georges’
photographs are clearly distinct from the narrative flow but Anne’s
film-within-a-film fits alarmingly well pointing to the ease with which cinema
is able to posit itself as reality. The first scene we see from the film-within-a-film,
later revealed as an adaptation of John Fowles’ The Collector, is in fact a rehearsal tape, in which Anne addresses
the camera directly as the off-screen voice of the director-within-the-film reads
to her the dialogue of the male part. Crucially, the director-within-the-film
here is voiced by Haneke himself, an important self-reflexive point neither Brunette
nor Wheatley appears to realise. This scene, then, presents us with three
“realities” all at once: that of Frederick and Melinda, the novel’s characters;
that of Anne and the director-within-the-film, Code Unknown’s characters; and that of Binoche and Haneke, the people
in the real world. Such tripartite construction, postulating various
incarnations of “reality” between which it is impossible to discern, represents
perhaps Haneke’s most accomplished collapse of the cinematic illusion, a
recurring concern which—coupled with the identification he either encourages or
indeed forces in the viewer—demands our reinterpretation of the way we engage
with the images he, and all directors, presents us.
Before
we expand our focus toward further specific examples from Haneke’s films, let
us consider Currie’s aforementioned modes, three categorisations of cinematic
“reality” which, as well as offering a helpful overview of the progression of
representations of the real throughout the history of the medium, will prove
useful in discussing Haneke’s operation within the sphere of realism. The first
of these, labelled “transparency”,
Currie describes thus: “film, because of its use of the photographic method,
reproduces rather than merely represents the real world” (325-6). This is perhaps
confusing; Currie, of course, is not suggesting cinema as some sort of séance!
Rather, he refers to the indexicality of the photographic image, and the
supposed objectivity of the picture it presents of the world. Certainly the
most idealistic—even romantic—iteration of realism, this was the sort particularly
championed by Bazin, who explains: “The guiding myth, then, inspiring the
invention of cinema, is the accomplishment of… an integral realism, a
recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of
interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time” (21).
As
we will see later, indeed as we can almost intuitively declare, this is a
fanciful notion for cinema’s potentiality: the freedom of interpretation of an
artist is integral to capturing any image at all. Bazin was well aware of this,
as he later made clear in his appreciations of French Poetic Realism and
Italian Neorealism; it is fairer to say that he recognised the ontological
ability of cinema to capture the essence
of reality. As Kuleshov puts it: “[The quality of films] is determined (by the
way of the ideological purpose) by the material itself, especially since the
material of cinema is reality itself, life itself” (195). Currie’s second mode
then, dubbed “perceptual realism”
seems more reasonable: “the experience of film watching approximates the normal
experience of perceiving the real world” (326). This conception, less rigid in
its ideology, presents the cinema screen as a window into the world of the
movie in question, through which we can observe the diegesis as it plays out
according to a recognisable semblance of our own reality. Pudovkin described it
as such: “By the process of junction of pieces of celluloid appeared a new,
filmic space without existence in reality” (61). Perceptual realism, we thus understand, is an aesthetic presented
in the manner of the visible reality of the world around us, but necessarily
detached from it by the abstractions of the cinematic apparatus, divorced from
any true sense of objective reality by the unavoidable subjectivity of the hand
that operates the camera. We turn to Barthes for clarification: “the image is
re-presentation, which is to say ultimately resurrection, and, as we know, the
intelligible is rendered antipathetic to lived experience” (32).
Finally,
Currie posits as the third form of screen realism something which is not,
strictly, a realism at all. Declaring it “illusionism”,
he defines it as “the idea that film induces the illusion that fictional events
are real and that the viewer is directly witnessing them” (331). This, we know,
is the means of cinematic engagement attempted by the Hollywood blockbuster,
which—with its evolution of technologies such as widescreen, CGI, and 3D
throughout the years—seeks to immerse us in the world of the film, by no means
comparable to our own existence. Lev Manovich provides a useful definition:
“The result: a new kind of realism, which can be described as "something
which looks exactly as if it could have happened, although it really could
not."” (301). Though inevitably advancing yet further from tangible
reality with each new advancement in computer graphics and the unreal creatures
and environments they permit us to make appear
real—these are, says Stephen Prince, “tremendous changes that are affecting the
role and function of… the viewer’s perception of the nature of cinema” (26)—this
illusionism is not a new phenomenon,
as Tom Gunning is keen to clarify: “The new ease of manipulation of the image
that digital processes offer can at points seem to attenuate the indexically
based truth claim of the photograph, but this threat of deceit has always been
an aspect of photographic practice” (48). Digital cinema, then, while making
all the easier the deception of illusionism,
is merely a continuation of a trend that has existed since the birth of the
medium. Such a claim is certainly given weight by the words of Benjamin who,
writing in 1936, says: “The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the
masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for
perception” (220).
If
these remarks are at all correct, the photograph must be related to a pure
spectatorial consciousness and not to the more projective, more ‘magical’
fictional consciousness on which film by and large depends. This would lend
authority to the view that the distinction between film and photograph is not a
simple difference of degree but a radical opposition. Film can no longer be
seen as animated photographs: the having-been-there
gives way before a being-there of the
thing; which omission would explain how there can be a history of the cinema,
without any real break with the previous arts of fiction, whereas the
photograph can in some sense elude history (despite the evolution of the
techniques and ambitions of the photographic art) and represent a ‘flat’
anthropological fact, at once absolutely new and definitively unsurpassable,
humanity encountering for the first time in its history messages without a code. (Barthes 45)
Given
the perspicacious manner in which Haneke foregrounds the distinctions between
photography and film—along with theatre—in Code
Unknown, it seems highly unlikely that the emphasis of Barthes’ words—the
italics are his own—only coincidentally fits the film’s title so well. It is,
as we have discussed, one of the director’s most overt complications of the
cinema’s presentation of reality, deliberately confusing the promise of transparency with perceptual realism and illusionism.
While rarely on so many levels all at once, Haneke constantly confronts his
audience with such confluences of seemingly incorrigible realisms, thus
exposing the inherent falsity of the filmed image and provoking a consideration
of the reasons we engage, and the problems associated with doing so
absent-mindedly. This would never function as effectively as it has in Haneke’s
cinema without him first inciting such engagement. We turn now to an
exploration of the means by which he attains our attention: in coming to
understand this aspect of his spectatorial manipulation, we can fully
appreciate the effect of its combination with the deconstructive treatises on
cinematic realism we have already seen.
It
is strange to think that from a film as provocative and intentionally repulsive
as Funny Games[2]
can come any reflection of the viewer, yet this is precisely the intent and
impact of its disturbingly self-reflexive form, Haneke employing the generic
conventions of the horror film—specifically “torture porn”, to borrow the
problematic but, for our purposes, serviceable appellation—to insist of the
audience an admission of their own responsibility for the pain and suffering
inflicted in the narrative. Witnessing a bourgeois family as they are held
hostage in their holiday home and made to play a series of growingly morbid
games by two psychopathic young men, the film manipulates the viewer’s gaze,
questioning who in this drama they are rooting for, and more importantly why.
We turn to Mulvey for context: “As the spectator identifies with the main male
protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate,
so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with
the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of
omnipotence” (Mulvey 838). Such identification is overwhelmingly encouraged,
the young men regularly turning to the camera to wink at the audience or
suggest they place their bets as to the family’s chance of survival. The sole
significant difference between Haneke’s two iterations of Funny Games, and a particularly striking one in the context of
Mulvey’s words, is that Ann (Naomi Watts) is stripped to her underwear far
sooner than Anna (Susanne Lothar). The implications are obvious: Ann’s more
immediate nudity renders her visually subordinate to her torturers’ gaze—and
thus, by implication of Haneke’s techniques, the audience’s gaze—all the
sooner, emphasising our own cruel power over her. Of course, as empathetic
humans, we should identify with Ann, and herein lies the spectatorial dilemma:
“Haneke puts audience identification into play,
as it were, like so much else in this film, oscillating between the various
poles of empathy and attachment that are being offered, simply to problematize
the whole notion of identification and to make viewers understand just what is
happening when they make the apparently simple decision to watch a movie,
especially a violent one” (Brunette, Haneke
56).
Funny Games
is a black sheep of sorts in Haneke’s filmography: while most of his films
emphasise the role of audience expectations and desires in inflicting violence
upon the characters, it is the only example where the viewer is directly implicated. What Mulvey terms
“this contradiction between libido and ego” (837) is similarly—though much more
implicitly—set in motion in Benny’s Video
(1992), when our gaze is immediately aligned to that of the seemingly transparent camera-within-the-film as
its images are the first to be seen on the screen, and through them that of the
eponymous operator (Arno Frisch). Shackled to his perspective as the narrative
progresses, we are made to bear witness as he brutally kills a young girl for
no reason more than to satisfy his curiosity, yet his very deliberate movement
of her skirt downward to cover her exposed underwear enforces an important
desexualisation of the scene: he is not aroused by the violence; rather,
he—like us—is simply desensitised to it, and surprised to find it has
real-world implications. Sexualised violence, often a threat in Haneke’s films,
is the primary concern of The Piano
Teacher, which again manipulates us as per Mulvey’s principles, equating
our position to that of Walter (Benoît Magimel) as he pursues and eventually
rapes Erika (Isabelle Huppert), whose masochistic and voyeuristic actions
throughout the film have communicated both a society-imposed sexual repression
and a reflection of our own perverse presence as spectators into this world; as
Luisa Rivi notes: “Haneke calls to attention the spectator’s status as a voyeur
who is consistently acknowledged and compelled to share in what is taking place
on the screen so as to take responsibility for it” (130). Equally identified
with, and repulsed by, Erika and Walter, we are left with an irreconcilable spectatorial
tension that serves chiefly to point to the perversity of our engagement with
narrative presentations of such sexual violence.
More
subtle—arguably more effective—are the other means by which Haneke evokes
involvement with his characters, for instance those relatively rare occasions
where he elects to implement sequences of dreams and memory. These immersions
within the subjective perceptual reality
of his characters, much more impactful than in the films of most other
directors by their stark contrast with the realist aesthetic Haneke has lulled
us into expecting of his cinema, serve to align us with their internal
viewpoints and encourage our identification. Seen most effectively in Caché and Amour, perhaps slightly less so in The Seventh Continent[3],
these are implemented to differing but no less effective ends: the former,
tying us to the guilt-ridden nightmares of Georges (Daniel Auteuil), equates
him—and thus his guilt—with us; the latter, first in a surrealistic horror
dream sequence, later in a series of recollections Georges (Jean-Louis
Trintignant) has of his by-then-deceased wife Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), take us
gradually further from lived reality for reasons we will return to later.
An
important factor of Haneke’s films, and one we have not yet considered, is his
aesthetic collaborations: he has maintained a number of long-standing artistic
relationships, most notably with cinematographer Christian Berger and
production designer Christoph Kanter, both of whom have facilitated the
meticulous control of mise-en-scène that characterises his compositions. This
was deployed to demonstrable effect in 71
Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), where Berger’s tight framing
and Kanter’s minimalistic design allow us to ascertain[4],
and thereafter sympathise with, the emotionally empty existences of its central
cast of characters who, like those of Code
Unknown, weave through each other’s lives unnoticed, unable to connect.
Perhaps
the most important manner by which Haneke prompts identification with his
characters, more effective even perhaps than his forceful manipulation of such,
is his use—beginning with Code Unknown—of
stars. Binoche had, of course, by this time already won an Academy Award,
making her precisely the sort of international actress who could not only
elicit viewer sympathy almost immediately, but who also acted as an incitement
to viewership, another device employed by Haneke to question the spectatorial
relationship to the filmed image. As Wheatley notes: “For using a star like
Binoche within his film allows Haneke to operate certain strategies of
seduction, strategies not unlike those which genre opens up to him, strategies
that are both intra- and extra-cinematic” (2009: 126). Figures like Binoche,
Huppert, and Auteuil—and more prominently Watts, Tim Roth, and Michael Pitt—are
yet more tools put to use by Haneke in constructing an illusionism which he will subsequently deconstruct.
Interesting
in this regard is The White Ribbon,
Haneke’s first feature in black and white and one which makes use of voiceover,
which Brunette claims as “a technique unheard of in Haneke’s previous work” (Haneke 130). The claim is untrue: Brunette
forgets the television film Three Paths
to the Lake (1976), in which observations on the unfolding drama are
evinced by way of an unseen narrator, existing outside of the narrative sphere
and offering commentary rooted in an omniscient view of the story. The
voiceover of The White Ribbon, while
explained as that of a character within the diegesis, attains—through his
retrospective retelling—a similar sense of all-knowingness. In his narration,
granting us his perspective, there is again a clear incitement to specific
engagement, though this is again reflexively questioned by Haneke. On the
digital (de)colourisation by which Haneke rendered the captured footage
monochrome, Paul Cooke—referring particularly to the wheat fields, robbed of
their goldenness—has this to say: “In the process they form part of the film’s
overall strategy of Verfremdung
(distanciation), a deliberately modernist gesture preventing identification
with the characters, forcing the audience to reflect on the story as it
unfolds” (257).
Each
of Haneke’s films—or at least those of the theatrical era—we thus see, concern
themselves just as much with creating and subverting their own illusionism as they do with establishing
and collapsing a perceptual realism.
But is this just, as Wheatley claims, a case of “[prompting] the spectator to
think about their own participation in the cinematic institution” (2009: 44)? I
contest that it is not: Haneke is deeply concerned with inciting us to quiz our
own relationship to fiction and its disconnection from reality but, I believe,
he does so for more noble purposes than simply to lecture us on our failings.
Let us return to 71 Fragments of a
Chronology of Chance, which—despite its clear statement of the conclusion
toward which it will work, the shooting of three people in a bank and the
shooter’s subsequent suicide, at the very beginning of the film—provides one of
the most shattering climactic realisations of any of the director’s works. Its
titular fragments comprise both scenes from the lives of its characters as they
go about their unconnected days and television newsreels interspersed,
seemingly at random, throughout. These arbitrary images of death and disaster,
presented in easily digestible chunks alongside reports of celebrity news,
attain a harrowing new reality when the murder of those same characters about
whom we have come to care is presented in the same manner, reduced to a mere
thirty seconds of apathetic journalism. Consider Baudrillard, as he defines his
media concept of the “excess of reality”:
In
this case, then, the real is superadded to the image like a bonus of terror,
like an additional frisson: not only
is it terrifying, but, what is more, it is real. Rather than the violence of
the real being there first, and the frisson
of the image being added to it, the image is there first, and the frisson of the real is added. Something
like an additional fiction, a fiction surpassing fiction. (39)
Haneke,
having successfully enveloped us in his illusionism,
finally brings just such an excess of reality to bear, sharply reminding us
that behind every similar news segment we passively observe in our own lives,
there is tragedy of equal magnitude. The trap has been set, the bait has been
laid, and we—Haneke’s prey—have been firmly ensnared. The observant reader will
have made note of the recurring use of the names Georges and Anne throughout
Haneke’s narratives. These—or indeed the English/German equivalent, as
appropriate—are employed repeatedly to describe a couple in all his feature
films save 71 Fragments, The Piano Teacher, and The White Ribbon. This can be seen as
yet another device deployed to draw attention to the construction of fiction
and its abstraction from reality: these, Haneke states intently, are not real
people. If we are able to compare ourselves to the suicidal family of The Seventh Continent, framed through
their windscreen, against their television screen, and upon our cinema screen;
if we are able to relate to the characters of Benny’s Video and Caché,
caught against the false realities of their videotapes; if we can connect to
the disparate souls of Code Unknown
and 71 Fragments; if we can identify
with the twisted creations of Funny Games
and The Piano Teacher: if we can be
so easily led to forge a bond with characters so far removed from the real
world and indeed all those in the warped illusionism
of cinema, why then do we struggle so hopelessly to connect to one another?
The
“reality” mined by the cinema is thus first of all that of a “self.” But,
because the reflected image is not that of the body itself but that of a world
already given as meaning, one can distinguish two levels of identification. The
first, attached to the image itself, derives from the character portrayed as a
center of secondary identifications, carrying an identity which constantly must
be seized and reestablished. The second level permits the appearance of the
first and places it “in action”—this is the transcendental subject whose place
is taken by the camera which constitutes and rules the objects in this “world.”
(Baudry 45)
The
simple love story which constitutes Amour,
Haneke’s most recent film at the time of writing, has drawn surprise from critics
accustomed to the director’s austere reservations, much as the historical
abstraction of The White Ribbon—for
all its similarities of style—seemed for him a new sort of film entirely. But
neither is much of a departure, really, rather a movement toward exploring new
truths through the lie that is cinema. Haneke continues with these films to
manipulate the falsity of the cinematic apparatus toward a collapse of the illusionistic “reality” cinema feeds
audiences, pairing the engagement he forces with the world of the film and the
awareness he insists upon of the real world in an attempt to make us embrace
the truth all around us. Indeed, two strikingly similar shots in the respective
films serve to prominently evidence just how well they conform to the overview
of Haneke’s oeuvre this essay has offered. With The White Ribbon, Haneke’s final implication that the fascistic
upbringing of the children whom it follows may have been the root of Nazism is
followed by the image of the community facing us in the church as we occupy the
position of the preacher—who, crucially, takes a seat within the congregation—to
remind us that we must engage with the reality of history, lest we doom
ourselves to repeat it. And with Amour,
for which just such a reversion of spectatorship is one of the very first
images, he encourages us from the film’s beginning to accept and face the
reality of death. If we do not, he seems to caution, we may find ourselves like
Anne and Georges’ daughter Eva (Huppert) as she wanders through her parents’
once-vibrant apartment at the film’s conclusion: meandering through a space so
familiar, unable to identify with the lives and love that once resided within.
Bibliography
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New York: Hill & Wang, 1978. Print.
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Rivi, Luisa. European Cinema After 1989: Cultural
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Filmography
24
Realities per Second. Dir. Nina Kusturica and Eva Testor. Mobilefilm Produktion, 2005.
71
Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. Dir. Michael Haneke.
Wega Film, 1994.
Amour.
Dir. Michael Haneke. Les Films du Losange, 2012.
Benny’s
Video. Dir. Michael Haneke. Wega Film, 1992.
Caché.
Dir. Michael Haneke. Les Films du Losange, 2005.
Code
Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys. Dir. Michael
Haneke. Canal+, 2000.
Funny
Games. Dir. Michael Haneke. Wega Film, 1997.
Funny
Games. Dir. Michael Haneke. Halcyon Pictures, 2007.
Lemmings.
Dir. Michael Haneke. Österreichischer Rundfunk, 1979.
The
Piano Teacher. Dir. Michael Haneke. MK2, 2001.
The
Seventh Continent. Dir. Michael Haneke. Wega Film, 1989.
Three
Paths to the Lake. Dir. Michael Haneke. Österreichischer
Rundfunk, 1976.
Time
of the Wolf. Dir. Michael Haneke. Les Films du
Losange, 2003.
The White Ribbon. Dir. Michael Haneke. Les Films du Losange, 2009.
[1] For the purpose of this essay we
will consider Lemmings, broadcast in
two separate parts on sequential nights in 1979, a single film. Das Schloß (1997), though exhibited
theatrically in some countries in the wake of Funny Games’ success, was originally made for television and shall
thus be treated as such.
[2] I refer here to both films,
identical in intent as they are.
[3] The titular conceit, a recurring
image of an artificial beach from a billboard, represents the characters’
romantic visualisation of their own impending death, and may thus be seen as
either an abstract visual metaphor on Haneke’s part or a POV shot from within
the characters’ minds, as it were. The flashback scenes which conclude the
film, however, are inarguably the subjective recollections of a dying Georg.
[4] For an in-depth exploration of
this, see my essay in Strange
Enlightenments.
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