If you're going to ask me (once again) who I considered to be one of the most controversial filmmakers today, then I would name Michael Haneke (right after Lars von Trier, of course). While von Trier's movies can be overwhelming at times, Haneke's can be very daunting and just like subjecting one self to torture. If von Trier loves to portray America without touching American soil, Haneke loves to teach his viewers a dose of their own medicine - patronizing American escapist movies is like committing a crime, there will be punishment sooner or later.
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But how to begin? Perhaps a look at The White Ribbon, his latest would be a good way to start. Instead of a chronological set of events, we start from the most recent.
More about The White Ribbon, Haneke's previous movie Funny Games and some insights into the Austrian filmmaker after the jump!
About The Movie: Strange events happen in a small village in the north of Germany during the years just before World War I, which seem to be ritual punishment. The abused and suppressed children of the villagers seem to be at the heart of this mystery. This is Michael Haneke's latest film, which also won The Golden Palm at the recent Cannes. Featured review from Screen Daily's Mike Goodridge:
| When he is on top form Michael Haneke's artistry and unerring control of his material is hard to beat. And he is on top form in The White Ribbon, a meticulously constructed, precisely modulated tapestry of malice and intrigue in a rural village in pre-World War I northern Germany. It's a rich, detailed work pregnant with the sinister undertones and evil deeds for which the film-maker's work is legendary and won't disappoint Haneke fans waiting for fresh material after his experimental US remake of Funny Games.
Sony Pictures Classics pre-bought the film on the eve of Cannes, already suggesting The White Ribbon's potential as an event for arthouse distributors. Ostensibly, it's not the easiest sell - it's nearly two- and-a-half hours long, shot in black-and-white and features a plethora of vile characters - but the Haneke name, the scale of the piece and an uncharacteristically warm central character will boost its prospects, not to mention the fact that from the start the film is a whodunnit with all the mystery and taut tension that the genre entails. [ read more ]
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Michael Haneke and his Work: How can I appreciate the work of Haneke, when I already loathed Funny Games, but loved Cache? Senses of Cinema's Mattias Frey wrote a profile, while it's not updated, I find it a good introduction of the Austrian filmmaker:
| Michael Haneke is with good certainty both Austria's most esteemed and most controversial active filmmaker. 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 filmic program attempts to lay bare the coldness of European society and challenge Hollywood's blithe treatment of violence. His acknowledged influences include Kieslowski, Tarkovsky, Straub, Antonioni, Jon Jost, and above all Bresson. To date his greatest commercial success has been The Piano Teacher, which garnered three awards at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and went on to become a hit in arthouse cinemas worldwide. [ read more ] |
The Guardian's Elizabeth Day, who did an interview with the Austrian filmmaker, will continue with the profiler and this part seems so appropriate:
| Born in Munich, Haneke has lived in Austria all his life and has a distinctly European artistic sensibility. American cinema is dismissed with a wave of the hand as "cultural imperialism". How so? "I hate films that try to make me more stupid than I am, and there are a lot. But I must admit I don't go that often to the cinema. In the 60s and 70s, I went almost every day, but not anymore."
So it is perhaps ironic that in recent years Haneke has experienced considerable success in the mainstream he so dislikes. In 2005, he had a worldwide hit with Hidden, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil as Parisian intellectuals terrorised by a series of unexplained videotapes left for them by an anonymous stalker. Hidden won a clutch of awards, including best director at Cannes, and grossed more than £1m in the UK - a feat practically unheard of for an art-house film.
But Haneke's most recent work looks set to become his most acclaimed yet. The White Ribbon won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year and tells the story of a German village on the eve of the first world war beset by sporadic outbreaks of unexplained violence. Shot in black and white, with no musical soundtrack and no easy resolution, it is in many ways classic Haneke in its refusal to make concessions to the viewer. Again, his focus seems to be the dangerous nature of conventional social structures: much of the action centres on children who have antagonistic relationships with authority figures, whether it be the priest who rules over the church, the baron who rules over the village or the parents who rule over their families. Critics have theorised that Haneke is attempting to explain the genesis of Nazi Germany - the children who carry out acts of random cruelty will grow up to be the generation that spawned the barbarism of the Holocaust.
"It's not a coincidence that I chose this period of time in which to present the story," Haneke says. "This is the Nazi generation, but I didn't want the film to be reduced to this example, to this specific model. I could do a film about modern-day Iran and ask the same question: how does fanaticism start?
"That's the core of the film. In places where people are suffering, they become very receptive to ideology because they're looking for something to clutch hold of, a straw that will take them out of that misery." Does ideological belief remove the need to ask questions? "Of course. The less intelligent I am, the more easily I follow someone who is going to give me the answers."
It is partly for this reason, one assumes, that Haneke's work never offers one simple answer where several complicated enigmas will do. As a director, he believes firmly that a film should pose more problems than it solves; his ideal viewer is "one who leaves with questions". Does he find it irritating when people who have seen his films ask him what happened next? "It's not at all irritating because it's a normal question. I say: take a look at the film, let it go through your head, consider what you want to think about it. People always want answers, but only liars have the answers. Politicians have answers." Later, he confesses that the only thing he watches on television is the weather forecast, because "that's the only thing that is not a lie". [ read more ]
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Haneke's Funny Games (1997, original version) trailer, the second clip is a comparison of the original version with the US version (2008):
A Closer Look at Funny Games: Chris Justice wrote this detailed film analysis of Haneke's most controversial film, to date:
| Watching Michael Haneke's Funny Games is like driving down a dark highway punctuated by billboards posting advertisements for provocative local landmarks. You bite, follow the directions, and get lost, only to learn those landmarks are really dead-ends. Yet behind those dead-end signs you see a flickering, which is the muted light of a unique auteur struggling to manifest a complex cinematic vision. Funny Games provokes a tantalising cauldron of conflicting emotions in its audience including confusion, empathy, disgust, respect and disappointment. And we've all seen the brew before: a dash of Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972); a sprinkle of Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991) and Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971); and a final splash of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994). Throw in a smidgeon of the popular Belgian film Man Bites Dog (Rémy Belvaux, 1992), mix slowly, and you basically have Haneke's Funny Games. Well, sort of. If this film had emerged 20 years earlier, its reception would have been prodigious. As Maximilian Le Cain writes, the film “puts a naive faith in the confrontational power of the spectacle of sadistic violence, which Tarantino had already definitively tamed and thus undermined in his first two films. By the time Haneke adopted it, it was a redundant gimmick” There is no doubt Haneke was late with this instalment, but he does provide layers of contradictions and perversions that disorient the viewer's traditional genre-based conceptions of the relationship forged between spectator, director and character. And in a sick, “funny game” way, this disorientation is worth experiencing. As Kierkegaard once said, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”. Haneke freely dishes out plenty of anxiety; some of it works, and some of it doesn't, leaving Funny Games as an engaging, noble failure that awkwardly raises important questions all film viewers should regularly ask.
While Haneke's plot is profoundly simple, making sense of its meaning is not, and this is one of the first contradictions he establishes. A middle-aged Austrian family consisting of mum (Anna), dad (Georg), son, and dog begin their vacation at a posh lakeside summerhouse. While dad and son prepare the sailboat, a young, neighbourly male seeking to borrow a few eggs approaches mom in the kitchen. She gladly provides the eggs, but he refuses to leave. When dad and son return, another young male joins his partner, and after some posturing, he verbally confronts the father, who in turn smacks the young brute. The two males proceed to ruthlessly terrorise the family and torture them in various ways. The final carnage is as unrelenting as it is sadistic. [ read more ]
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In the end, he concluded that: Funny Games aggressively confronts viewers and challenges their choices as film consumers. This is perhaps Haneke's fatal flaw because it is difficult to accept criticism from someone who uses the very subject he is criticising to deliver the criticism. Most film fans simply don't like being critiqued as aggressively as this. Such discomfort is better left for reality. However, although I dislike being criticised by a stranger for almost two hours, somehow, I believe these attacks were worth experiencing. After all, these games are only for fun.
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What's on your mind? Have you seen the films of Michael Haneke? What are some of your reactions after watching the Funny Games trailer and clips? How about The White Ribbon? Let us know what you think!
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