time of the wolf (w&d haneke)

We had just arrived in London. A muggy summer afternoon in Whitechapel. Walking past the Genesis, I see that Time of the Wolf is on, re-released for some macabre reason. I contact Rob’s son, who says he’s not sure. A minute later he sends me a message saying he’s watched the trailer and it looks boring. Then he gives in and decides to come, munching popcorn through Haneke.

Is it boring? As ever with Haneke, it is a bit, but that’s kind of the point. The end of the world will be boring, interspersed with moments of sheer terror and classical music. When the daughter listens to the tape of a sympathetic survivor, I realised how much I must hace stolen from this film in the writing of Truck. My blog informs me that this is the third time I have seen the film (and the second time I have claimed to have stolen from it). It still feels fresh, unpredictable, treading a line between tedium and high tension. Rob says it’s not his greatest work, but his son seemed, in spite of the boredom factor, to have been sucked in by it. As was I and will probably watch another decade down the line, when it will feel just as novel, just as dull, just as radical. If we still have cinemas, ten years down the line. 

pd - a few weeks later Rob's son chose to go and see White Ribbon which apparently he loved.

the piano teacher (w&d haneke, w. elfriede jelinek)

The Piano Teacher was scheduled by Mariana Enriquez as a part of a ciclo she curated, very little of which I am able to watch, due to rehearsals for Birdland. Nevertheless, I caught Huppert and her funny games. The film was more savage than I remembered. It might be one of the most extreme films ever made. Sexual violence, self-mutilation, and the closest Haneke perhaps gets to really letting the handbrake off. For all his cold art, The Piano Teacher feels furiously visceral. In all the wrong ways. By which one means - in all the ways that truly disturb. Unlike, say, Titane, which for all its extremism is nevertheless kind of alluring. Haneke is the high priest of deconstructing western materialism. His uncompromising vision, allied with where Huppert is willing to go as an actress, backed up by Jelinek’s source text, makes for something that seems designed to get its audience to walk out. Or stagger out, bloodied and beaten like the film’s titular protagonist. 

71 fragments of a chronology of chance (w&d haneke)

The third of Haneke’s early films seen on consecutive nights, this was in structural terms the most ambitious, perhaps, but in narrative terms the most straightforward. A note at the front of the film informs us of a multiple murder in a bank followed by the suicide of the assassin, so we know what’s coming. The point isn’t dramatic tension, it’s to construct a societal collage, as we follow the lives of various characters whose fates will cross in the bank, just before christmas. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and like any jigsaw puzzle, the nearer you get to completion, the more apparent the design becomes. There lurks beneath the austere takes and the cold logic a strong narrative drive in Haneke’s films, and this is no exception. The frequent inclusion of news reports (Michael Jackson and the Yugoslav wars) root the film in its interrogation of what history might mean, and how much our perspectives are shaped by this consumption of a constructed idea of the present, an idea the film’s end appears to mock, with its repetition of the Jackson news story. Yet 71 Fragments is always more detached than the earlier films from his glaciation trilogy. There is a fascination with the physical process of putting a film together (also known as editing) which hints at the way we edit our own lives, perhaps, seeking to control the narrative but never knowing when the nutter is going to walk in and blow our brains out. 

benny’s video (w&d haneke)

Pub quiz question. In which Haneke film does the British queen make a cameo appearance? The answer… is Benny’s Video. A clip from Spitting Image lampoons the royal family, but this is just one of the panorama of seemingly random images which populate Benny’s screens and to which he will contribute his own devastating additions. Benny’s Video is from 1992, a time just before the internet was about to transform our lives into a restless sea of images, and in this Benny feels like a preternaturally modern character, one step ahead of his peers, right down to his savage amorality. However, this amorality perhaps has a more complex root than sheer information overload. Talking to the young girl he will soon murder, Benny tells her that the violence in the films they watch is all fakery, composed of paint and plastic. He, and perhaps even she, wants to rediscover a reality beyond the movies, to discover what real blood looks like. (Something which Haneke can paradoxically only show with fake blood, no matter how shocking it might seem.)

Benny’s quest for the real, which doesn’t seem to change him at all, also ties in with his parents post-Nazi amorality, driven by petty bourgeois greed and fear (to be revisited in White Ribbon). Like so many post-war austro-german auteurs, Haneke is also a captive of his nation’s past, and aware of the fact. What this means is that there are multiple factors which contribute to the listless amorality in which Haneke’s film is apparently immersed. The absence of value is only of them, even if within a world of images, this is the one that comes to the foreground. The extended and seemingly irrelevant Egypt section, which goes on for perhaps ten minutes, feels like another manifestation of this: if all images are of equal import, from the killing of a pig to a Spitting Image clip to a  camera view of the street outside, why shouldn’t a film just be composed of arbitrary images, which have no relevance to plot or character? Except that there has been a key development in this sequence, which is that the mother has picked up the camera herself, she has become one for whom the production of images is a way of fending off their meaninglessness, as has been the case with Benny. Two of the videos he has made, one of the killing of the girl, the other of his parents’ acknowledgement of their complicity in his crime, will determine everything that occurs, and in so doing, Benny becomes actor/ director in his own drama, rather than mere passive recipient. It’s not a comfortable space, it’s fucked up, but it affirms the fact that, for better or for worse, he is alive.

The echo into the 21st century of this philosophy is chilling: a world where people only come to life through the manipulation of their image, a manipulation that goes beyond good or evil, transforming the subject into a kind of aestheticised zombie, seemingly in control of their image/fate, but actually atomised, all at sea, lost in a maze of empty referents. 

the seventh continent (w&d haneke; w johanna teicht)

Haneke’s first film, supposedly, which deals with the true story of a family who decided to drop out in the most merciless fashion possible. A few thoughts:

1 - Nostalgia. Weirdly, given that this is a film set in Austria about nihilism, one of the first sensations watching it was one of nostalgia. For an era of middle class, pre-digital living, where phones lived on walls and people read newspapers.

2 - Schopenhauer. I might be wrong but I believe that Schopenhauer had a standpoint wherein he suggested that the rational thing to do in life was basically starve yourself to death. I had also been thinking about Michael Landy’s Break Down. As the family in The Seventh Continent enter into the third phase of the movie, that of unexplained auto-annihalation, it strangely felt as though they were both participating in a hermetic tradition but also were at the vanguard of what would become a 21st century credo, the idea of anti-materialism, even if that credo goes hand in hand with its countermeasure, the worship of materialism.

3 - True Stories can never be realised on screen. Haneke seems to aspire towards an objective neutrality, shorn of any directorial adornment, but this doesn’t preclude the film from seeming, with the benefit of our retrospective perspective, completely and utterly Hanekesque. The attention to seemingly irrelevant details (the breakfast, a door opening, a tap running), whose later destruction will be key to the film, also helps to define a certain atonal style which would become a hallmark, over the years. These details serve to make the contemporary viewer feel that there is nothing neutral or objective about the film; rather it is the start of the director's visceral critique of a system he will continue to confront from his clearly marked standpoint over the course of the next thirty years. 

caché (w&d haneke)

Watching Caché on the big screen reminded me of how important his film was in the development of our film, Censor. No-one really believes us when we reference Haneke, or they think we’re being pretentious, because UK films aren’t supposed to do that kind of thing, but the director’s use of video has echoes in ours, the rewinding of tape, the whirr of the video machine, the hidden messages that may or may not lurk. This is not to compare the films, just to note its influence. After watching Caché, C & I met up with Santiago and Flamia in the Imperial, and Flamia noted that in the first interview I gave him, a decade ago, I referenced the Austrian. I am not sure if that strand has sustained itself in my personal creative process, which seems disappointingly slight when measured against the achievements of Haneke and his ilk. How, one wonders, watching Caché for the umpteenth time, did he get to make this film? Although the answer is that once you have succeeded in convincing the right people of your genius, you can start to control your destiny, (only don’t tell Orson), and make the films you want to make. Caché is remarkable in so many ways. On the one hand, it is a taught psychological thriller. The film sets up a mystery with its opening shot, one that the viewer and the characters will seek to resolve as the film goes on. It’s reminiscent, in this sense, of Bolaño’s love of cheap detective thrillers. Secondly, it is a coruscating slap across the cheeks of the bourgeois literati. Auteuil’s character, Georges, hosts a literature program where guests slag of Rimbaud’s girlfriend. In a lovely little scene, Binoche’s Anne speaks on the phone at a literary soiree whilst a figure who never reappears just barks names in the background: “Baudrillard, Wittgenstein…” The couple’s lives collapse under the stress of an unknown truth. Thirdly, Haneke’s use of the camera is forensic. Just like the camera of whoever is making the videos which upset Auteuil and Binoche’s apple cart, it is an inert, threatening presence, allowing the viewer to analyse the image for clues. The very opening shot, for example, of their home, shows a pretty little house, screened by an unlikely hedge, set against a backdrop of highrises which rear up behind. The house wants to cut itself off from the outside world, turn its back on the poor dwellings that are a stone’s throw away, but the camera doesn’t permit the viewer to forget. Perhaps I am over-reading the image, but the director’s use of the camera invites this kind of engagement from its viewer, compels one to be active, rather than passive. You could easily write a thesis on the detail which is disclosed in each and every shot, so much so that I found myself wondering about the art direction and how much Haneke himself would have participated in this. Lastly, for now, as I could evidently spend hours writing about Caché, but have work to do, the script itself, in spite of what might otherwise have been a languid pacing, is brilliantly constructed, fuelled by the dramatic tension of the mystery. The film contains key narrative beats: the appearance of the tapes themselves, the tape in the door, the disappearance of the son, and of course, its one moment of shocking violence. (The effectiveness of this was apparent in the cinema, as one or two who had clearly never seen the film before cried out in dismay when it occurred.) In this sense, it feels as though Haneke is engaging with a classical script diagnostic, as determined by the gurus and the quacks. His mastery of the rhythm of filmmaking ensures that the viewer remains constantly hooked (to use a word), whilst never permitting him or her to become passive. 

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I note that this is the first film that has been written about twice on this blog. Normally if I see a film for a second time, a rare event, I don’t get round to writing anything, but in this instance, the urge would have appeared to have overtaken me.

amour (w&d haneke)

This was not perhaps the wisest of weeks to finally catch Haneke’s paean to old age and death. At a time when I have recently witnessed how fast decay can take hold of the body, Haneke’s splenetic description of Emmanuelle Riva’s demise was a gruelling watch. As ever, he goes about the task of charting this demise with rigorous efficiency. Although it might be that the trope of the sudden moment of extreme shock, witnessed in so many of his films, was beginning to lose its edge here. When Piccoli articulates his love in an act of brutal kindness, it comes as no real surprise. There is also a curious dream sequence, with its bona fide jump scare, which seems somehow coarse for this most frostbitten of directors. Haneke’s lingering camera always invites reflection. Watching Amour, a film that engages with the realities of dying in a way that cinema almost never does, one can see why death in cinema veers towards the cartoonish or the symbolic. The awareness of death is not something we cannot bear too much of. One can applaud the director for having the courage to confront the issue, but one is also relieved that one doesn’t have to face it all that often. 

caché (w&d haneke)

Don’t trust what your eyes are telling you. Look beneath the surface. The title tells us this. The opening sequence spells it out. And the closing sequence repeats the message with a dose of painstaking subtlety.

Auteuil’s Georges and Binoche’s Anne inhabit a strange, attractive Parisian property. Most of their life seems to take place in the sitting room/ diner downstairs. This contains hundreds of books, a mighty television set, the desk at which Auteuil works and some comfy sofas. This is the vortex of the family home, although the family rarely congregate here. Instead, it becomes the space of anxiety where Georges and Anne watch the mysterious videos which document their lives. Then there’s upstairs, the bedrooms. Their son’s bedroom is normal. Posters for Eminem. A computer with a games console attached. But his parent’s bedroom is like a cave. Dark, bare, sparse. It’s a space dedicated to sleep. No hint of pleasure. The seeming normality of their lives is not sustained in the bedroom. Instead, the room reveals the emptiness of their marriage.

When Caché came out the world and his wife revelled in the film’s blend of Hitchcockian mystery and rigorous austerity. Overlooking the way the filmmaker offers moments where he foregoes subtlety in favour of a broader satirical tone. As Georges edits his TV discussion about Rimbaud, he urges the editor to skip the conceptual stuff and get to the bit about his homosexuality. His colleagues are congenial media types who tell outlandish stories and exude a breezy self-confidence. These are the taste-makers, the very people who are no doubt lauding Haneke’s work to the skies, praising his rarefied critique of modern morals. At the same time, the TV shows Italian troops in Iraq, as though to emphasise the way in which the real barbarities of Western ‘Civilisation’ continue to occur under our noses. Will history judge the intervention in Iraq any differently from the French misadventures in Algeria? The ironies lurk beneath the surface in a world where the comfort of those-who-have shrouds the suffering of those-who-do-not.

Watching the film a second time, nearly ten years later, the shock effect of Majid’s suicide is no longer present. Instead, perhaps, it becomes easier to dwell on the curious intimacy of his relationship with Georges. A friendship formed at the age of 5 retains more power than any created in adulthood. The two men have already learnt almost all the lessons that life will have to teach them when still in childhood. The cliff that divides people from different social and political backgrounds as well as, one assumes, the pain of loss. Perhaps it’s because he’s sought to repress so much of his childhood that Georges cannot relate to his own child. Georges emerges as a pathetic figure, metropolitan man stripped bare. For all his intelligence he has no idea how to cope when the going gets tough, he’s soon out of his league. Which puts him in the same category as the father in Funny Games and the other in Time of the Wolf, whose good natured intentions are blown away before he can even start the negotiations. There’s something Nietzchean about Haneke’s critique of modern masculinity (which recurs again with the White Ribbon’s narrator). Apart from its commentary on the value he places on life, Majid’s suicide is the kind of carnal act of which Georges would be incapable. Modern Europeans might wear black but beneath the pseudo-existential veneer there’s pastel-coloured underwear. They don’t know how to kill goats and their primary response to any kind of threat is to get stressed out and discuss it with their partners.

The irony in all this is that Haneke is a man who makes intellectually provocative films. He values the intellect as a weapon with which he seeks to skewer the society he inhabits. And he does so successfully. The neurotic chattering classes lap up their medicine. March against the war or the dictaduras. Meanwhile, the men and women of action launch wars and dismiss art as a symptom of weakness. They would walk out of Caché before they had had the time to realise the director was subverting the artform with his opening shot. Which is why Haneke’s cinema is one of the the most definitive examplars of the crisis of Western society, intellectual or otherwise. Post-existentialism, we don’t know whether we should be reading Zizek, watching football, speculating on the stock exchange or the property market, or fighting for a cause we don’t believe in. Going to the cinema and watching a film by Haneke allows us to both indulge our Western decadence and suffer barbed criticisms for our indulgences at the same time. It’s a modern church, where our souls are allowed to engage in the struggle for meaning for a couple of hours before we head back towards our humdrum, DIY normality. Where risk is something that occurs on television, in a land far removed from our own.

time of the wolf (w&d michael haneke)

There’s a moment in Time of the Wolf where Eva, the daughter, asks to listen to some music a man is playing on a tinny tape recorder. Beethoven. I suppose I must have stolen that moment. And many others as well. Although I was never particularly aware of the impact the film must have had on me. Until I saw it for the second time, last night. The first time, if memory serves me well, and I’m far from convinced that it does, was in the flat of Mr C, when he still owned the flat in Kilburn, before he moved to Archway and then headed East. It was always a pleasure to work in that flat, with it’s kitchen/ living room and marble worksurface. It was a productive space, from within whose walls emerged the first film we made, a blend of Cortazar, Woman of the Dunes and other random influences.

Haneke’s film must have made its points. It was, as ever, far preferable to see it on the  big screen in Cinemateca. Haneke’s films are like way stations. Each one defining in their pared back austerity the state of the world and the state of your life. Last night, there were no more than half a dozen people in the cinema. They don’t know what they’re missing. An old man at the end said, as we left, that the film grabbed you from the start. He was right. The start which seems like a homage to Funny Games, as a middle-class people-carrier noses its way through the countryside with no idea of what it is about to confront.

However, in spite of the film’s savage opening, this is a gentler, more humane piece of storytelling than Funny Games. We assume that everything’s going to go all Cormac McCarthy on us (ie The Road) with horses eating one another and humans too. But somehow the savagery is kept in check. It’s internal, even, curiously for Haneke, poeticised. There remains the suggestion that beneath it all he’s a  repressed Romantic, searching out the humane within the disjointed chaos of a world which has, more or less, forgotten what it means to be humane. There’s something about the messianic figures who arrive bearing torches which suggests that Haneke believes there might be hope after all; that one way or another once we rid ourselves of all the junk that weighs us down we’ll remember what it means to belong to a community. And learn to breathe again.  

the white ribbon (d. haneke)

My mind is a little blunted by the return of insomnia, and perhaps also the crunching, megalithic nature of Haneke's latest offering.

As a result of which I have only one observation of any note about The White Ribbon. First, however, the observations of little note. Which include the fact that, in spite of hints of narrative, the film in fact appears to be another impressively gruelling example of Haneke's slightly obsessive reluctance to favour an audience with anything in the way of what they expect or (so he might argue) have been lead to subliminally desire. As in Funny Games (and perhaps Hidden), the evil kids walk away unpunished, most of them implicitly destined to become successful members of the National Socialist party. As well as its reluctance to bestow any kind of Grecian notions of justice, the film is also a whodunnit whose detective, the engagingly buffoonish teacher, spends a year putting clues together and then fails to act on them. The unnamed school teacher is no Poirot, and in spite of an implicit decency, it seems unlikely that, having survived the first world war, he will put up much resistance to the rise of Hitler. Brecht wrote, unlucky the land in need of heroes, but Haneke appears to offer a bleak counterpoint: cursed is the land lacking in heroes. Firstly it will suffer the persecution of the evil children, then it will run the risk of fascism; finally it will fall prey to the moral vacuum of modern consumerism.

Having noted all of Haneke's usual barbed contrariness and general cassandrism, my one point of real note relates to his aesthetics. With The White Ribbon the director has followed up on his success d'estime with Hidden (and ridden the strange hurdle of his misjudged US remake of Funny Games), with a film that, in spite of its inherent audience antagonism, has been hailed as a masterpiece, and lauded with the Palme D'Or. Part of the film's success is probably attributable to its inordinately beautiful cinematography, composed on a stark black and white print. Haneke has always been a secret stylist, and here he gives this vice free rein. Given this, no matter how stringent he is in his adherence to his narrative principles, there's something about The White Ribbon's production values that gives it the feel of a weighty classic, redolent of a great European literary tradition, something enhanced by the unusually wordy narration. Perhaps this is part of another game within a game, but it's not hard to see how the lofty aesthetics allow critics to drool; and have helped The White Ribbon to have generated a contrarily eulogistic response, which somehow doesn't seem in keeping with Haneke's aspirations. As ever, with cinema, the production values themselves contribute and in some way seem to impose their own set of values, irrespective of the filmmakers' own intentions.