Michael Haneke

Peter Brunette

UNIVERSITY
OF
ILLINOIS
PRESS
URBANA
AND
CHICAGO

Frontispiece: Michael Haneke.

2010 by Peter Brunette

All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5

c p

5 4 3 2 1

(This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Libr.uy of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brunette, Peter.
Michael Haneke I Peter Brunette.
p. em.- (Contempor.uy film directors)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-o-252-03531-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-252-07717-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1.Haneke, Michael, 1942-Criticism and interpretation.
I.Title.
PN19983H36B78

2010

79143023'3og2-dc22

To my sister Rose, who rescued me, at least twice,

And to the memory of Lynne Johnson, my wife.

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

VIOLENCE, REPRESENTATION, RESPONSIBILITY:

THE FILMS OF MICHAEL HANEKE

I 1

Introduction

The Seventh Continent

10

Benny's Video

22

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

39

Funny Games

51

Code Unknown

71

The Piano Teacher

88

Time of the Wolf

103

Cache

113

The White Ribbon

130

INTERVIEWS WITH MICHAEL HANEKE

139

Filmography

157

Bibliography

163

Index

167

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Roy Grundmann and especially Jim N aremore, the editor
of the series in which this book appears and my friend of forty years, for
their astute readings of an earlier version of the manuscript. Their sug
gestions have caused me to think more deeply about Haneke than I ever
would have been able to on my own. Responsibility for factual errors and
misreadings that remain, of course, lies solely with me. My Wake Forest
colleagues and friends, David Lubin and Dick Schneider, have provided
endless intellectual stimulation in the five years I have known them, and
I am deeply grateful for their friendship and continued support. I also
want to thank Gary Palmucci of Kino International for all his help with
various and sundry things, and my technology guru in the art department
at Wake Forest, Paul Marley, for assistance with photographs .

Michael Haneke

Violence, Representation, Responsibility

The Films of Michael Haneke

You never show reality, you only show its manipulated image.
-Michael Haneke

Introduction

Michael Haneke burst out of the festival ghetto onto the international
art-house scene in 2005 with his challenging and (to some) distressingly
open-ended French-language film Cache (Hidden) , and he solidified his
position as a major contemporary auteur by winning the Palme d'Or at
the Cannes Film Festival in zoog. He is a provocative figure who likes
to disturb people, most notably his audiences.
The overarching themes that unite Haneke's films are not especially
novel: the alienation from self and others that contemporary society rou
tinely produces, the attendant loss of our common humanity (what he has
called "our social and psychological wound") , the grinding attenuation of
human emotion, the increasingly elaborate systems of communication
that manage to communicate less and less, and the relationship between
reality and its representation. These are themes that have been around
at least since the 1g6os, in the films of the Italian master Michelangelo

Antonioni, among others, but they have been brilliantly updated through
the application of fresh and even iconoclastic cinematic techniques by
this surprisingly old-school art-film director.
Partly because these general themes are so familiar, one aspect of
Haneke's films that has garnered a great deal of attention throughout the
latter part of his career has been the "subtheme" of the specific role of
contemporary media in producing such social alienation. Most important
of all, however, has been his complex and multifaceted exploration of
violence. At his press conference at Cannes in May zoog, Haneke baldly
stated, "All my films are about violence ." Though it takes a different
form each time, probably the most controversial aspect of this ongoing
investigation has concerned what Haneke considers the "consumable"
way in which violence is represented in Hollywood movies . In this arena,
he has consistently challenged critics and film viewers, in the name of
art, to consider their own responsibility for what they watch and to ask
themselves just what it is they are really doing when they seek to be
"merely" entertained by a studio-produced Hollywood thriller.
This has placed Haneke in a somewhat anomalous position, for many
ofhis films are too intellectual and self-consciously avant-garde to attract
his presumed target audience (those viewers who actually watch violent
thrillers), yet simultaneously too graphic and upsetting to please the ma
jority of the art-film crowd-those looking for something "life-affirming,"
preferably in a foreign language with English words on the bottom of the
screen. And then there is the radicality of his formal means, including
a purposely fragmented and confusing narrative and a liberal use of the
long-take in which "nothing happens," as the proverbial criticism of this
powerful, if demanding, aesthetic would have it.
Haneke, now approaching seventy, is an extremely well-read Eu
ropean intellectual who originally came from the theater and who has
also been trained in and profoundly influenced by classical music. Many
critics have taken up this latter aspect of his films in some detail (see
especially Frey, "Cinema," "Supermodernity"; Vicari; Grundmann) ;
however, owing t o space constraints and the lack o f the requisite exper
tise on the part of the present writer, this study will largely pass over the
fascinating musical connections that obtain in his films . Rather, it will
concern itself with an elaboration of the director's recurring themes in

M ichael H a n eke

light of his formal cinematic techniques, primarily those that are visual
or (nonmusically) aural.
Michael Haneke was hom in 1942. His career is something of an
anomaly, since he had worked in Austrian and German television for
nearly two decades before making his first feature film, The Seventh
Continent (Der siebente Kontinent, 1989), for theatrical release. He has
since made eight or nine (depending on how you count them) highly
distinctive theatrical films that long ago captured the attention of festival
going critics around the world but have only relatively recently come
to the attention of the larger art-film public, especially the most recent
French-language productions starring Isabelle Huppert and Juliette
Binoche. It is these films that this book will focus upon.
The earlier, quite fascinating, and only recently unearthed televi
sion films-which, alas, are too numerous and too scarce to examine
closely here-often present themselves, surprisingly, in the guise of
somewhat old-fashioned modernist experimentation. In their formal
rigor, frank themes, and general harshness of tone, they are the polar
opposite of what in the United States would generally be considered a
"television film."1 The full frontal female nudity and the self-consciously,
resolutely downbeat Weltanschauung unashamedly expressed in these
nearly thirty-year-old television productions underscore the vast gulf that
has always separated much European television from its unrecognizable
American cousin. In terms of Haneke's career, what is important to keep
in mind, as he told the American critic Scott Foundas, was that for him
working in television "was not a matter of not having the opportunity
to make a real film. But rather, I wanted to find my own language."
The other noteworthy element in these early films (which have never
been commercially released in any country or format) is a bitter, ongo
ing sociopolitical critique of the middle class, a beloved target of most
German-speaking artists but especially, it sometimes seems, those from
Austria. His masterpiece of this period, the two-part Lemmings (Lem
minge, 1979), is a brilliant, full-scale assault on bourgeois pieties, yet its
critique is also historically specific and attempts to account for the spiri
tual emptiness of the generation-Haneke's own-whose parents' lives
were defined by the exigencies of World War II and Nazism. (He has
returned to this generational, sociohistorical vein in The White Ribbon

The Films of Michael Haneke

[Das Weisse Band, 2009] , which takes place just before the outbreak of
World War 1.) Unfortunately, what is also occasionally on display in this
film, which is set in 1959 (part I) and 1979 (part II), is the less palatable
side of the director's work and personality that occasionally comes into
view: the hectoring scold and unassailable moral arbiter.
It is probably a mistake to try to analyze Haneke's work of any period
solely in terms of the aesthetic protocols of international art-film produc
tion. Rather, the profound, never fully explained unhappiness that engulfs
many of his characters-in the television work and the later films-is
best understood in relation to the irrational violence and profound mal
aise infecting the fictional characters of his countrywoman, the Nobel
Prize-winning writer Elfriede Jelinek, and other cinematic figures, like
the younger filmmaker Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days, 200 1 ; Import/Export,
2007), both of whom also concentrate on horribly lost souls who seem to
have no overt rationale for the ultra-intensity of their frustration, violence,
and inhumanity.
At least some of this bitterness may be traced to Austria's particular
relationship to the events before, during, and after World War II, espe
cially regarding the never-resolved, little-examined dalliance with the
Nazi party and Adolf Hitler, who was born in Austria. Other countries,
like France and Italy, have had their own postwar devils to wrestle with,
in terms of the elaborate discourses of "victimhood" that have had to be
generated, retrospectively, by each society, but Austria has had particular
difficulty justifying its warm embrace of the Nazi Anschluss of 1 938
while also claiming bragging rights as Hitler's "first victims." As Haneke
himself has said, "In Austria today you still hear people proclaim that
'None of us were Nazis.' No one will admit to being a Nazi; they were
all victims of the Nazis" (Porton so).
In addition, the Austrian population and military suffered much
more immediately and severely than the French, who in effect dropped
out of the war within a few months. We see the psychological scars of
this suffering, and of the refusal to confront the compromised past, in
the work of Haneke and Jelinek and, at a further remove, Seidl and
other younger figures. (The autobiographical element has also to be
taken into account in trying to understand a film like Lemmings, given
the fact that the characters who populate the film are the same age and
live in the same town as the director who created them.)
4

M ichael Haneke

With his theatrical films, beginning with The Seventh Continent

( 1989 ) , Haneke switches gears. His general social critique about the
inhumanity of modern life is still paramount, but what now comes
more fully into view is a particular feature of that critique, his on
going exploration of the cinematic and televisual representation of
violence-a critique that is itself sometimes expressed in a violent
fashion. A family destroys all their possessions and then themselves,
graphically, in The Seventh Continent. In Benny's Video, a teenager
from a cosseted bourgeois family kills a young girl he's recently met
with a bolt gun used to slaughter hogs, while capturing the action on
video. The psychological pressures that lead a military cadet to kill
four people in a bank are explored in 71 Fragments of a Chronology
of Chance, while Funny Games presents two young men who torture
and eventually murder a father, mother, and their young son. In the
later French-language films, Haneke moves away from this focus on
violence and its representation in the media toward a more generalized
critique of contemporary, especially urban, life. The White Ribbon ap
plies the same critique, but this time to an historical period a century
in the past.
The films that focus on the representation of violence, however,
raise a perhaps unintended moral question: To what extent do these
films also participate in the "pleasures" of the violence they ostensibly
critique? An earlier model would be Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork
Orange ( 197 1 ) , which, intentionally antiviolence, has been thought by
many critics to revel in its very graphic depictions of violence.
It is perhaps appropriate here to cite some of the things that Haneke
and others have said on this subject, though the question will also be
considered on a film-by-film basis throughout this book One camp wants
to absolve Haneke of any responsibility. Christopher Sharrett has said
that one of Haneke's most notorious films, Funny Games ( 1997), does
not "participate, for all its relentlessness, in the excesses it criticizes,"
though such an arbitrary boundary is difficult to establish. The critic
Scott Foundas says that movies like Funny Games and Benny's Video
"are graphic and intense, but Haneke doesn't (as his detractors would
claim) profit from their violence. Rather, he reclaims sensitivity to vio
lence (and to human suffering) from the exploitative wastelands of Jerrys,
Bruckheimer and Springer." Others, however, like the New York Times

The Films of Michael Haneke

critic A. 0. Scott, speaking of the failed 2007 American remake of Funny

Games, has called Haneke a "fraud" who tortures not only his characters
but his audience as well.
By way of self-explanation, Haneke has said that "the society we
live in is drenched in violence. I represent it on the screen because I
am afraid of it, and I think it is important that we should reflect on it.
. . . I think that the things that are going well in society are difficult to
present dramatically. In my 20 years of working in the theater, I only
staged one comedy, and that was my single failure" (Badt).
Haneke's focus, in other words, is on the ubiquitous presence of
violence in the real world and the representation of such violence in the
media. For obvious reasons, the latter is more sharply foregrounded in
his films, since they are inevitably part of that media. Representation is
always about "showing," and thus the question that inevitably arises is
what can and cannot legitimately be shown, or "re-presented." Asked
by Foundas how he is able to treat sensational subjects in what Foun
das describes as "a non-sensational manner," the director's surprisingly
moralistic reply is that while he respects the gravity of these events, a
lot of Hollywood films simply exploit them. "For example, if you take
Schindler's List and you have that shower scene, I think it's absolutely
disgusting to show that. One must not show such things."
Instead, Haneke chooses to keep most violence offscreen: "I use your
fantasy. I think it's one of the most important things for a filmmaker. . . .
The audience has to make their pictures, and whatever I show means
diminishing the fantasy of the viewer" (Foundas). The fact that most of
the brutality in the director's films is offscreen is also used by his devotees
to exonerate Haneke of any moral failing in this regard. But just because
violence is not actually pictured, it is nevertheless always heard, and its
aftermath is seen, and thus it is always directly represented in his films
in some complex way that goes beyond the visual.
Haneke also knows that the question is more complex than merely
showing or not showing violence onscreen.
I'm trying as best I can to describe a situation as I see it without bullshit
ting or disingenuousness, but by so doing I subscribe to the notion
that communication is still possible, otherwise I wouldn't be doing

M i c h a e l H aneke

this. I cannot make comedies about these subjects, so it is true the

films are bleak.
The new technologies, of both media representation and the politi
cal world, allow greater damage with ever-increasing speed. The media
contribute to a confused consciousness through this illusion that we know
all things at all times, and always with this great sense of immediacy. We
live in this environment where we think we know more things faster,
when in fact we know nothing at all. This propels us into terrible internal
conflicts, which then creates angst, which in tum causes aggression, and
this creates violence. This is a vicious cycle. (Sharrett)

And whence comes Haneke's obsession with violence and its representa
tion, when so many other directors are content to exploit it ruthlessly? "I
think that I am someone who is creative, and sensitive to every form of
suffering," the director says, in an interview translated for this volume.
"That makes me think of Wim Wenders's ffim The End ofViolence, which
begins by trying to define violence. I myself have asked that question,
and the answer that I found is that violence is the ultimate recourse of
power against the will of others who must then be subjected to it." This
definition of violence is especially applicable to The White Ribbon .
Presiding over Haneke's aesthetics is the notion that films can be
art and that true art requires a contract with the audience. Mainstream
cinema, on the contrary, emphasizes "the commercial aspects of the
medium. . . . I think what I' m proposing is a very old contractual agree
ment-that both the producer and receiver of a work of art take each
other seriously. On the other hand, today's conventional cinema, or mass
cinema . .. sees the audience member as a bank machine, whose only
function is to spit out money. It pretends to satisfy viewers' needs, but
refuses to do so" (Porton 51). Above all, Haneke feels that audience
members must be persuaded--or forced, if necessary-to contribute
to a film's meaning themselves and to recognize their complicity in its
psychological dynamics. It is here that the director's aesthetic mission
sometimes comes perilously close to aesthetic coercion.
The director's formal techniques, especially in the earliest films of
the "theatrical" period, are complex and invigorating but simultaneously
difficult and off-putting to those with little experience with art films. In
terestingly, his use of techniques that might in another context be called

The Films of Michael Haneke

postmodernist is anything but, for much of the motivation for his trans
gressive subject matter and his distancing techniques is modernist to the
core. This modernism is linked tightly to a now rather hoary concept of art,
which, like the word "truth," is never far from his lips. Both mark him as
something of a throwback to an earlier generation, or perhaps a younger
member of the modernist group of directors that includes canonical fig
ures like Antonioni, Resnais, Godard, Bergman, and Tarkovsky.
Formal techniques, for Haneke, also carry a philosophical rationale.
If he sometimes maddeningly refuses to explain character motivation in a
conventional manner, for example, it's because "every kind of explanation
is just something that's there to make you feel better, and at the same
time it's a lie. It's a lie to calm you, because the real explanation would
be so complex, it would be impossible to have in go minutes of film or
zoo pages of a novel" (Foundas).
Similarly, many of his films rely upon a series of vignettes, fragments
that cut to black and often resist synthesis at a higher level. Again, the
result is a kind of counter-cinema that defies commercial considerations.
According to Haneke, films can never, by definition, show reality as a
whole, so fragmentation is the only honest way to proceed. One must
then "find the aesthetic means that will allow us to transfer this frag
mented look onto the screen" (Cieutat interview in this volume).
The fragments themselves often consist of a single long-take (with
the camera either stationary or panning to follow the characters), a tech
nique, originally championed by the celebrated French critic and theo
rist Andre Bazin, that is notoriously bothersome to the generation raised
on the jumpy editing of MTV-and not only to them. This technique
represents an attempt to fashion a counter-cinema that would oppose
not only Hollywood filmmaking but its nefarious ally, television, with
which, having begun there, Haneke has a paradoxical relationship:
Perhaps I can connect [the long-take] to the issue of television. Televi
sion accelerates our habits of seeing. Look, for example, at advertising
in that medium. The faster something is shown, the less able you are
to perceive it as an object occupying a space in physical reality and the
more it becomes something seductive. And the less real the image seems
to be, the quicker you buy the commodity it seems to depict.
Of course, this type of aesthetic has gamed the upper hand in com-

M i c h a e l Haneke

mercial cinema.Television accelerates experience, but one needs time

to understand what one sees, which the current media disallows. Not
just understand on an intellectual level, but emotionally. The cinema
can offer very little that is new; everything that is said has been said
a thousand times, but cinema still has the capacity, I think, to let us
experience the world anew. (Sharrett)

This capacity to reexperience the world is thus reinvigorated by

the long-take aesthetic. "Code inconnu [Code Unknown, Haneke's first
French-language film, released in zooo] consists very much of static
sequences, with each shot from only one perspective, precisely because
I don't want to patronize or manipulate the viewer, or at least to the
smallest degree possible" (Sharrett).
Nor is Haneke naive regarding the question of manipulation, a sub
ject that always entails rethinking the role of the audience, though he
does seem to believe that manipulation can be quantified: "Of course,
film is always manipulation, but if each scene is only one shot, then, I
think, there is at least less of a sense of time being manipulated when one
tries to stay close to a 'real time' framework. The reduction of montage
to a minimum also tends to shift responsibility back to the viewer in that
contemplation is required" (Sharrett).2
But if even the most careful cinema is always manipulative, why
bother? W hat kind of solution to the world's problems can filmmakers
hope to provide? "The point is that there are no solutions," Haneke
bleakly insists.
The mainstream cinema tries to feed you the idea that there are solu
tions, but that's bullshit. You can make a lot of money with these lies.
But if you take the viewer seriously as your partner, the only thing that
you can do is to put the questions strongly. In this case, maybe he will
find some answer. If you give the answer, you lie. Whatever kind of
security you try to feed somebody is an illusion.... I want to make it
clear: it's not that I hate mainstream cinema. It's perfectly fine.There
are a lot of people who need to escape, because they are in very difficult
situations.. . . But this has nothing to do with an art form.An art form
is obliged to confront reality, to try to find a little piece of the truth ... .
These questions, ''What is reality?" and ''What is reality in a movie?"
are a main part of my work. (Foundas)

The Films of Michael Haneke

An essential part of this confrontation with reality necessarily entails the

self-exploration of the artist-some of it, notably in Funny Games, of a
self-reflexive variety. It is precisely this gesture, according to Haneke,
that leads us back to art, because, to be considered an art form, film
must challenge its own existence: "The question is, is film merely en
tertainment, or is it more? If it is art, it has to be more. Art can be en
tertaining.The Passion of St. Matthew is entertaining, [but] it is more
than diversion, it is concentration, [it] focuses your thoughts" So cinema
can change the world? "No, but it can make it a less sad place than it
already is" (Badt).
The Seventh Continent (1989)
In his first feature-length film made for theatrical distribution, Michael
Haneke clearly enunciates the uncompromising, sometimes bitter cri
tique of contemporary society that will mark all of his films to come. The
rigorous formal technique that makes little or no allowance for popular
taste is also fully present in the obsessive attention to framing, composi
tion, color, and editing-as opposed to more conventional dramatic ele-

Figure 1. Birgit Doll and Dieter Berner prepare

for a take in The Seventh Continent.

10

Michael Haneke

ments, like plot, character, and dialogue-and in the sounds, sometimes

harsh and sometimes falsely soothing, that fill our everyday lives.
As is well known by anyone who has seen his films, or even read
about them, Haneke's critique of modern society often takes the form
of an exploration of violence and its representation in the media. In this
first film, however, the violence-excluding that central, outrageous, and
inescapable violence of a family committing collective suicide-seems
mostly limited to that unspectacular variety that works on us subcon
sciously, according to Haneke, in our everyday lives.
The Seventh Continent, like virtually all of the director's films, con
centrates on middle-class family life (following his model, Antonioni, he
has said that this is what he knows, hence what he makes films about),
though here the focus is obsessively on one particular family who, without
any overt thought or discussion that Haneke chooses to represent (since,
according to him, it can never be known), decide to destroy all of their
property and themselves. It is a film, and a story, so relentless in its ap
proach, and so egregious, that it would be hard to bear and even harder
to credit-literally in-credible-if we did not know beforehand that it is
based on an event that Haneke had read about in a newspaper.
Georg, Anna, and their little daughter Evi seem to have the perfect
bourgeois life. (These are the names that Haneke gives the central char
acters in virtually all his films, as if to emphasize a kind of Eisensteinian
"typage" rather than a specificity of individualized character that doesn't
really interest him.) Their days are filled with the shiny objects and
routine duties that define our contemporary existence in the developed
world, and as Haneke takes pains to point out in the interview with Serge
Toubiana included on the Kino Films DVD, it's an existence that is in
no way intended to be limited to present-day Austria, where the film is
ostensibly set. They are meant to be typical, and they represent "the"
family rather than any specific family.
According to the Toubiana interview, Haneke originally conceived of
the structure of the film as a series of flashbacks from the point of view
of the moribund Georg, who has just ingested a handful of pills, but the
director couldn't make it work. Then he hit upon the idea of showing
three different days in the life of the family, in 1987, 1988, and 1g8g,
and this frame functioned so well that he was able to write the entire
screenplay in four weeks. Clearly, the choice of this particular structure

The Films of Michael Haneke

11

further accentuates the "typicality" of what we see over the course of

the three days. Each day is a kind of synecdoche for an entire year, and
the three days put together form the history of a family.
Haneke's uncompromising decision to tell his story primarily through
visual means and sound effects, rather than with dialogue, dramatic ac
tion, or conventional character studies, is apparent from the first, even
during the credit sequence. We realize immediately that we have entered
a hyper-Hitchcockian world in which virtually everything that we see and
hear has been explicitly chosen by the filmmaker and his collaborators.
It is the essence of what has been called "closed form": graphic design
is heavily foregrounded, though we are tom, perhaps, between finding
the particular visual design of this film pleasing or alienating. Its effect is
always immensely cold and seems, in its opening moments and through
out the film, the purposefully chosen antithesis of the warm, wet viscera
of what was once considered the essence of human life. Consequently,
his own composition, like the objects found within it, is both visually
compelling and utterly frigid (whence the label "the glaciation trilogy,"
which Haneke himself disdains, for this and the two subsequent films) .
The images in the car wash (a repetitive motif in the film) are, in a
manner of speaking, violent from the first, in the harsh sounds produced
by the mechanism itself and in the alienating blasts from the soaping
agent and the brushes. The family is undertaking that most bourgeois of
tasks-the cleansing ritual of washing the family car-and are protected
from the artificial constructions that rage around them, if also isolated
by the metal frame they inhabit and that seems to hold them frozen in
place. (We can tell by the license plate that the story takes place in Linz,
a medium-sized city in Austria, but Haneke has said in the Toubiana
interview that nothing was shot in that city. There are no other refer
ences in the film to it nor to any other place, in Austria or elsewhere.)
The harshness of the mechanical cleansing seems to stand against
anything that could be construed as pertaining to the vulnerable viscer
ality of human bodies. The static, artificial, perfectly balanced framing,
along with the family's expressionless faces, conveys an impression of
death-in-life. When they drive out of the car wash, the car now all clean
and shiny, they pass a 'Welcome to Australia" billboard, which shows a
beach, the sea, and a mountain, with "Australian Travel Agency" written
in the lower left-hand comer. A version of this poster (minus the writing

12

M ichael H a n eke

but with the sea moving, accompanied by the appropriate, apparently

nondiegetic sound effects) will become a major motif in the film, ap
pearing several more times. For Haneke, the image is "calm, but it's a
frightening calmness. [Later on] it could be their memory of that image
that they saw when washing the car. An image that has become upsetting
for them, or an image of peace . It's ambiguous" (Toubiana interview) .
Australia seems to reflect the "seventh continent" of the film's title, the
"place" to which the family is emigrating, as they explain at one point
in a letter, when in fact they have actually chosen the lost continent of
destruction and death.
Part I ( 1987) begins , and from this point forward, the story will
be told in a series of vignettes , some quite short, others much longer,
that always end with a cut to black that is held relatively-some might
say pretentiously-long. Haneke told M ichel Cieutat, in an interview
that is included in this volume, that the "black shots" were intended
to "create a real sense of fragmentation. [In this film ] , their duration
corresponded to the depth of the preceding scene . If there was a lot
to think about in the sequence, I made the black last longer." It's an
open question, of course, whether viewers , while watching a black
screen, actually spend this time contemplating the previous image or
impatiently awaiting the next.
Interestingly, when Haneke does feel the occasional need to provide
some modicum of narrative logic or character motivation, it is almost al
ways via a highly conventional narrative device, the letters that Anna or
Georg write to Georg's parents , which we hear read aloud in voiceover.
Another device that feints in the direction of a revelation of character
psychology, though it (purposely) doesn't deliver, involves close-ups
of their daughter Evi. In several of the more extended scenes-for
example, the scene in which Georg sells the family car-the camera
relentlessly cuts, over and over, to a (usually blank) reaction shot on Evi,
as though filtering events, by implication, through her consciousness
or her perspective might make them more primitive and, because of
her innocence, even more violently invasive .
Most provocatively, the opening vignettes either focus on the manu
factured objects (usually extremely colorful, shiny, and new) that provide
the context for their lives or on various parts of the family members'
bodies-never their faces or their entire bodies-which are almost alThe Films of Michael H aneke

13

ways covered by clothing. As Haneke explained it to Toubiana, "Only

pieces are shown in the beginning to show how we are . . . dominated by
serving daily life. They don't live; they do things . They repeat gestures.
We're stuck with these gestures, and our whole life is the sum total of
these gestures . . . . [Then] they destroy everything in their lives with the
same methodical obsessiveness . . . . That could be an act of liberation,
but the way they do it shows that it's not a liberation for them, and for
me, that's the saddest part of the film. We could have made a provoca
tive film, from the middle forward, as an act of liberation. But to me,
that would have been a lie."
What reigns above all is detail. The alarm clock in the parents' bed
room shows 6:ooA.M., and the news starts immediately, indicating again
an inhuman, mechanical precision of synchronicity. The orange and blue
colors that predominate are creepily artificial yet complementary and
beautiful at the same time. The garage door opens, the car moves out
as if driven by a robot, and the garage door closes once again. Several
shots of Georg's workplace-with its industrial equipment outside and
the huge bank of ceiling lights over an empty space inside-will remind
viewers of Antonioni's Red Desert, that earlier, equally ambiguous cri
tique of modem technological alienation.
At times, a kind of falsely soothing Muzak can be heard on the sound
track, especially when the family members, in the supermarket, are being
encouraged by an anonymous voice to consume more products. Mostly,
however, mechanical, jarring sounds reign supreme, and the quintessen
tial object (which we see in many different forms throughout the film)
becomes the adding machine or cash register-simultaneously visually
imposing objects (especially photographed, as they almost always are,
in extreme close-up) and the source of powerful and disturbing noises.
Primarily, they are objects designed to reduce human interaction to its
economic or numerical dimension. Rarely, if ever, do we see natural ob
jects such as trees or even something as normally ubiquitous as grass .
No faces are shown for an inordinately long period, a technique
that graphically demonstrates Haneke's contention that objects have
triumphed over people and, at the same time, keeps us from identifying
with them as "real people," or characters with whom we might establish
an emotional bond. Later on, when faces are shown, we almost always

14

M i chael H a n e ke

see them in artificial, strongly lighted portraitlike poses against neutral

backgrounds, which further emphasize their rigid, nonhuman quality.
Haneke's themes are not difficult to divine . It's clear that he has a
point to make, and he has no intention of using a worn-out, perhaps even
complicitous realism to make it. Thus it might be objected that presum
ably there are some happy moments in everyone's life, but Haneke has
chosen to show us little or nothing of that here . And since his intention
seems to be to make a philosophical point about contemporary life, it
doesn't matter how far the depicted events stray from versimilitude,
especially since it is precisely the tyranny of the "everyday," as he sug
gests in the Toubiana interview, that is his target.
In any case, his goal seems to be to go beyond a banal, overly familiar
critique of first-world consumerism to attack, on an almost metaphysical
level (in the technical sense of that word, as the philosophy of being) ,
the very status o f manufactured objects i n our lives. But, as i s typical
for a Haneke ffim, it is impossible to assign specific meanings, especially
since he tells Toubiana that "I tried to tell this story without giving any
answers" and, in the same interview, roundly criticizes the journalist
for attempting to fill in all the explanations in the newspaper story that
originally inspired the director: "He had debts, he couldn't pay, he had
sexual problems with his wife, et cetera. All these stupid explanations
diminished the power of the gesture." Haneke continues: "Nobody writ
ing a novel would want to write something that claimed to understand
everything that happens in the story. It's the same with film . If you want
to explain something, it can only be explained through structure . . . . But
it's always ambiguous, as opposed to narrating in a way that is always try
ing to explain. It's too talky and banal that way." Precisely what Haneke
means by "structure" here is itself ambiguous, but it seems to point to an
aesthetic construction that goes beyond the explanatory power of words
that necessarily always oversimplifY. In any case, the complexity of this
formulation indicates that Haneke has thought deeply, in this film and
elsewhere, about exactly what he is trying to do, whether or not he lets
his audience in on the secret.
Soon after the beginning of the film, the juxtaposition of the me
chanical and the visceral is pointedly reinforced. Anna is part-owner, with
her brother, of a shop that sells eyeglasses, and she is in the midst of per-

The Films of Michael Haneke

15

forming an eye examination on an older woman, who nonchalantly tells

a story about cruelty inflicted upon a classmate many decades earlier.
This motif of seeing (always complemented by a hyperactive sound track)
also ties in with what might be called the very first narrative episode of
the film, in which Evi, for no good reason and to the consternation of
her teacher and her mother, pretends to be blind.
Throughout the sequence of the eye examination, we are forced
to watch the woman's eyeball in extreme close-up, rather than in the
more usual context of her face, and thus paradoxically the effect is to
dehumanize her eyes by decontextualizing them-by removing them
from her face, via the optometry equipment and the camera. Yet the
palpitating actions of the iris and the sight of various throbbing blood
vessels, on infinitely closer display than we ever encounter them in real
life, also stand in severe contrast to the machine that is being used to
examine them.
M any short sequences seem to be almost random, purposely banal
reports on the living of daily life, while others last longer and have more
dramatic force, such as the dinner scene, which includes the immediate
family and Anna's brother. The unnatural, highly theatrical lighting and
detached, stationary camera position create, once again, a purposely
artificial and antihuman effect. Social conventions rule, as always, over
human needs, and when Anna's brother finally breaks down and begins
sobbing over the recent death of their mother, it seems to take forever
for Anna to move closer to solace him.
Later, Anna also breaks down in a moving, though quieter scene
(which ends part I I ) , once again in the car wash, but Haneke offers no
apparent explanation for her sadness at this point. It's as though the
sheer weight of life, especially the daily mechanical grind of contem
porary life, simply overwhelms her. Once again, while these humans
are "protected" inside their machines , they have to become almost
machines themselves to remain "safe." What's different this time around
is that Anna reaches her hand back to hold Evi's, then releases it, while
her husband gently touches Anna's face, though without asking her
why she is crying. The final shot before going to black is of Evi's hands
anxiously clasping each other.
After the dinner scene discussed above, the family members sit and
watch television and are completely enveloped by its ethereal yet deathly
16

M i c h a e l Haneke

blue light. It is here that Haneke's specific critique of the media (hinted
at throughout via the constant stream of bad news on the radio) begins
to develop in a fledgling way that will be greatly expanded upon in sub
sequent ffims. What they watch seems to be a program on Swiss televi
sion, in which a female "presenter" is talking in a melange of English,
French, and German, suggesting a Babel of words but little genuine
human communication, an important Hanekean topos . To complicate
these linguistic matters, a television voiceover repeats the English and
French parts in German for the Austrian audience-and, of course, non
German-speaking viewers of Haneke's film are simultaneously reading
the film's subtitles in English or some other language.
At this point, Anna's brother makes the cryptic comment, "Mom said
a few days before dying: 'Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if
we had a monitor instead of a head where we could see our thoughts."'
This bit of dialogue, which seems intended as an indictment of the "me
diatization" of all that is viscerally human (and which accords well with
the critique of mechanization and objectification) , obviously correlates
with the vision/visual theme developed through the eye examination. It
also ties in with Evi's faked blindness in school (for which she is brutally
slapped by her mother, despite her promise not to punish Evi if she
tells the truth) and a newspaper story about a little girl that we glimpse
later, whose headline reads "Blind-but Never Again Alone," while the
accompanying subhead partially explains, "After a Horrible Accident,
Anita Can Count on the Affection of Her Parents . More Than Before ."
A cinematic technique related to this motif of seeing/not seeing involves
the preponderance of"unanswered" eyeline matches in the film, as when
Evi looks up toward a place that her mother is probably occupying, yet
we don't see the mother in a reverse-angle shot that would logically
"complete" the sequence.
Part II (1g88) starts just a few minutes before part I began, but a
year later, as we witness Anna and Georg making love . There is a lot of
heavy breathing, but no talking. The radio alarm goes off at precisely
6:ooA.M. and, just like a year earlier, the radio news starts. Husband and
wife exchange "good mornings," then all of the petty details of everyday
morning life are shown almost exactly as they were in 1987-the slippers,
gathering up sheets, picking up bathrobe, opening bedroom door
though now the three toothbrushes that are lined up in the bathroom
The F i l m s of Michael Haneke

17

with military precision are different colors than before, indicating both
the passage of time and the sameness that rules their lives . One thing in
part II doesn't quite fit, however, and that's a scene of Anna in a doctor's
waiting room; only later, in part III, when she's there again, do we realize
that she is gathering the medications they will use to kill themselves.
(This later knowledge also presumably explains, in retrospect, why Anna
sobs in the car wash at the end of part II.)
Another powerful, if understated dramatic scene comes when an old
man, whom Georg is replacing as head of the department, comes in to
pick up his personal belongings . We sympathize with him, and Georg
appears to as well. The genuine affect of the moment contrasts strongly
with the selfishness of the views expressed about the same situation in
Anna's letter to Georg's parents that we have just heard in voiceover. It's
as though the very structure of modem life-and not necessarily capital
ism itself, for Haneke is never a narrowly "political" filmmaker-creates
the ground for a cruelty that might otherwise not be there, if human
relations could be allowed to retain their primordial human content.
An even more visually striking moment, now completely wordless,
comes when the family, once again "safely" ensconced in their car, en
counters an accident scene that temporarily, and to their annoyance, slows
them down. The bodies they pass are heaped up under a large piece of
plastic that lets us guess what they are but never shows us anything actually
human. The viscera are once again hidden away, as Haneke demonstrates
his mastery at revealing and hiding at the same time.
In part III ( 1989) we are inundated with close-ups of the family
leaving Georg's parents' house, without ever having seen anything of
their stay there. Strangely, we again see only objects and body parts, no
faces, as at the beginning of the film, until we are finally granted a shot
of the grandfather's face-is it too obvious that he stands in front of a
wall of organic wood shingles rather than the manufactured plastic and
metal objects we see everywhere else?-as the grandmother moves into
the frame, and both wave goodbye.
The first overt sign that something seriously untoward is about to occur
is Georg's announcement that the newspaper subscription should be can
celed. (Haneke has avoided any attempt at open foreshadowing, though
he does include situations that we can only understand retrospectively, like
Anna's visits to the doctor and the sobbing in the car wash, presumably
18

M i c h a e l Haneke

counting on us to realize that, given this environment, something awful

is eventually bound to happen. ) In the voiceover reading of a letter to the
grandparents-for once, in Georg's voice-we hear about a "decision"
that has been taken. In the next several scenes, Haneke works a clever
ambiguity concerning the meaning of their decision to "emigrate" to a
different location. We still have no idea exactly what is going to happen,
but given the general somberness of tone, we fear the worst.
The scenes of abject destruction that ensue are surely unequaled in
film history and reflect the same obsessive sense of detail that dominated
parts I and II. Even the tools that will be used to destroy their apartment
and all its contents seem particularly bright and shiny. Haneke points
out in the interview with Toubiana that two scenes especially disturbed
the audiences who first saw the film at its premiere at Cannes. The first
was the one in which the aquarium is destroyed (despite Anna crying
out "no ! " just before Georg wields the axe) , with the attendant horrifying
images of flopping, dying fish. The second was the scene in which the
family, after withdrawing their life savings from the bank, assiduously,
and at great length, flushes all the money down the toilet. As Haneke
tells Toubiana, "It's much less upsetting to show parents killing their
children than to show money being destroyed. It's a total taboo in our
society. The real people did this-I don't know whether I could have
made it up ! "
While Evi works o n her coloring book, Georg, i n his voiceover read
ing of the letter to his parents, tells them of the debate about whether
they should take her with them or leave her with Granny and Grandpa.
After speaking of Evi's assent to the words of a cantata the family has
heard in church, "I look forward to my death," he says to his parents ,
abstractly but firmly, "I believe that looking at the life we have lived
straight in the eye makes any notion of the end easy to accept. Please
don't be sad, or reproach yourselves with the situation, or consider it
as a form of critique or whatever; I am only making a statement of fact,
which has nothing to do with you."
We next see the three enjoying the fancy meal they have had catered,
while, or virtually the first time in the film, they offer delicate smiles to
each other as they chew away at their food (a favorite Haneke image in
this film, and possibly intended as a reminder of the visceral humanity
that inevitably accompanies all human images, especially of the face) .
The Films of Michael Haneke

19

Figure 2. Anna (Birgit Doll) , Georg (Dieter

Berner) , and Eva (Leni Tanzer) enjoy the1r
last meal in The Seventh Continent.

The next morning, a lovely breakfast is produced, a scene that is crosscut

in perfect, relentless harmony with the preparation of the tools of de
struction. Here Haneke, through the mechanical precision of his editing,
almost seems to abet or echo Georg's sick idea, just after beginning his
nasty work, that "we can only do this if we do it systematically. "
The colors of the destroying and the destroyed objects continue to be
ultravibrant-for example, the bright blue gloves being worn to tear up
the gold-yellow sweater. The actions are rigorous and crisp, and in that,
they parallel the earlier (albeit more peaceful) activities of their everyday
lives. A definite, powerful rhythm accompanies the destruction, as we
move from shirts ripped up by hand to chain saws cutting furniture in
half, with the sound volume increasing dramatically. As Haneke says to
Toubiana, "Whatever story you tell, there's already been one like it. So
how do you have a deeper impact on the viewer? One of the possibilities
is the rhythm, which is what film is actually all about. It's much closer
to music than to literature . "

20

M i chael Haneke

Late in the saga of destruction, several employees from the tele

phone company come to check on the status of the family's telephone,
which, according to Austrian law, must be either operational or immedi
ately removed. Now that we have been absorbed totally by the isolated
and warped consciousness of the family-as we saw earlier, Haneke
makes it clear that he regards all of this destruction as sad and tragic,
hardly a healthy response to the alienation of contemporary life-it's
completely logical and emotionally appropriate that we see these men
only as blurry outlines through the translucent glass of the front door.
To see them in any other manner would reinsert the recognizably hu
man into a scene that has become utterly inhuman.
The family sits in a dark room watching pop singers on the television
as Anna gives Evi a little drink, presumably to put her to sleep so that
she won't feel the poison-filled syringe going into her arm . The juxta
position of this immensely tragic situation and the frivolous program on
television is powerful. Evi says her night prayer one last time. We watch
Meatloaf singing on the television, while the still hand of Evi and the
nearby syringe wordlessly indicate that she is dead.
At this point, the camera cuts once more to the "Australia" image,
with the sea moving, but this time it produces no sound of the waves.
Anna struggles to take the overdose of pills, and in an extraordinary and
upsetting acting tour-de-force she manages to choke them all down,
before beginning to keen over her dead daughter. Next we see Georg,
leaning up against the wall as though half-dead, as we listen to Anna's
death rattle. In one of the most powerful images in the film, we see him
scrawling "Anna 12. 1 .89 2h" (meaning that she has died at 2:ooA.M. on
January 12, 1g8g), while just above , we see that he has already written
"Evi 1 1 . 1 .89 22h" ( 10:oo P . M. on January 1 1 ) . He finally adds "Georg?"
as the screen once again goes to black.
As Georg lays dying in front of another screen, the television screen
filled with visual static, he has a series of flashbacks on earlier, usually
more neutral visual images in the film (perhaps an aesthetic error on
Haneke's part at this emotional juncture?) , which primarily seem to focus
on Evi, as well as the now iconic image of "Australia." The final thing we
see is a close-up on the television static. The technical means of commu
nication is present, perhaps ubiquitous, but no communication is taking

The Films of Michael Haneke

21

place (and wouldn't be, even if something were visible on the screen) .
Along with the incessant news presented o n the radio throughout the
film, ending on this image is a strong inkling of the media critique that
will become a staple of many of Haneke's subsequent films.
The screen goes black for the last time, and we read this crawl: "The
S. family was found on February 17, 1g8g. Because of the wife's brother's
concerns, the house was broken into. The family was buried on February
20. Georg S.'s parents, despite the farewell letter he left behind, did not
believe that it was suicide, and filed a murder complaint against 'unknown
persons' with the police. The investigation which the police undertook
because of this complaint yielded no results . The case was placed in the
Unresolved Files section."
In this efficient way, Haneke seems to call upon the dry and su
premely scant legal facts to countersign for the essential veracity of the
event we have just witnessed, if not for the exactitude of the imagined
details . He is telling us, once again, that nothing can ever be fully ex
plained or understood.

Benny 's Video (1992)

In vivid contrast to the bright colors and cool compositions of The Sev
enth Continent, Benny's Video , Haneke's second feature film, begins
with a jerky, grainy, out-of-focus "home video" of a hog being dragged
into a killing pen and shot through the head with a bolt from a gun
designed especially for slaughtering animals. As with many of the films
made by Haneke's aesthetic mentor Antonioni, it's as though this opening
sequence were intended to serve as an interpretive key, teaching us how
to watch what will follow. Not surprisingly, it is a powerful, even shocking
scene-especially since we have no context for discerning who shot the
footage, for whom, and who is watching. It doesn't lose its intensity after
many viewings, or after all these questions have been answered.
Nor does the video ever seem to lose its interest for Benny (Arno
Frisch) , the teenaged boy, presumably from Vienna, who seems to have
shot the footage and around whose troubled life Haneke's film revolves.
An unseen dog barks furiously, and disturbingly, on the sound track of
the video, demonstrating once again that Haneke's most chilling effects
are achieved through aural means at least as often as through visual
22

M i c h a e l Haneke

ones-and that violence can be heard as well as seen. Shot in the head,
the pig falls suddenly in a heap. At this point, rapid rewind, indicated
by lines in the image, is employed by unknown hands (a gesture that
looks forward to Cache), and the shot is replayed in slow motion, with
the attendant otherworldly elongation of the sound effects, which lend
a solemnity, or perhaps a pregnant enormity, to the proceedings.
Artificially slowed down, the shot that kills the animal now sounds
like an elongated clap of rolling thunder, while intermittent snowflakes
add a bizarre touch. As Haneke tells Serge Toubiana in the interview that
accompanies the Kino DVD of the film, the scene with the pig essentially
becomes "playable." "It's a good image for the whole system of the film,"
he continues, "to make reality into something 'playable.' The danger, of
course, is to approach reality that way." At this point, visual static suddenly
takes over the screen-Haneke's universal signifier for the medium as
such, as pure form-and in bright red letters we read " BENNY ' s VIDEO, "
followed by an identification of Haneke as screenwriter and director-the
complete artist, in other words, behind this work of art .
Throughout the film, the image often changes, without warning, from
an obviously professional one shot by a thirty-five-millimeter studio cam
era to amateurish video footage. One effect of this visual instability is
to make us rethink the relation of "reality" to the image-making device,
especially since the home video (usually assumed to be somehow closer
to reality) is itself always embedded within the larger, more-encompassing
professional framework of the Haneke film called Benny's Video. In other
words, we always see Benny's homemade video footage via Haneke's
thirty-five-millimeter film, and therefore in its context. Any fixed notion
of what constitutes realism immediately goes out the window amid these
self-reflexive balls within hollow balls, an image that is made materially
explicit when we see balls of this sort taken from the purse of the un
named girl Benny murders. This destabilization of the image and its
source will become a major motif in several of Haneke's films.
We next watch video of Benny's sister (whose identity and relation to
Benny we only discover later-a favorite Hanekean delaying device) as
she tries to sell her friends, at a party, on the idea of "the pilot's game,"
which appears to be some sort of Ponzi or pyramid scheme. A regular
"studio" shot reveals that we are watching this footage on a television
in Benny's well-appointed room, and his mother (Angela Winkler) asks

The F i l m s of Michael Haneke

23

him to switch back to commercial television. There we watch a news

announcer reporting a story about football hooligans beating up asylum
seekers . Dad (Ulrich Miihe) enters, and what ensues seems at first like
the noncommunication typical between teenagers and their parents .
However, as they watch, mesmerized by the medium, and the father asks
if anything has happened, the mother responds in a monotone voice, "I
don't know. Nothing." As such, her response seems meant as part of a
developing Haneke critique of the empty form of television news that
endlessly repeats itself with apparently different content each time, but
whose fixed formal structure prevents any real difference-and thus,
real communication-from appearing.
We next see Benny among his classmates in a locker room and at
a McDonald's restaurant, which, when the film was made, would have
registered as a more powerful critique of American global commer
cial imperialism than it does now, when most contemporary European
teenagers reportedly don't even realize that McDonald's is an American
corporation, regarding it simply as a neutral part of the indigenous local
commercial landscape they've always known. As in The Seventh Con
tinent, an extreme close-up focuses on the cash register, the amount,
and then, shot from above , the brightly colored "Guten Appetit" of
the paper tray liner, which is presumably intended to international
ize the various standardized (American) products . However, this par
ticular similarity-the intense focus on objects-to Haneke's previous
film makes us realize, precisely because it is so infrequent in Benny's
Video, that the director's interests and critique have shifted firmly in
the direction of images-toward representation, in other words, rather
than remaining with the three-dimensional manufactured objects, so
ubiquitous in The Seventh Continent.
Next we cut suddenly--once again, without any framing context-to
a violent video of a car chase in a B-grade American action movie from
the 1970s . This seems to be Haneke's standard pattern : the image first
exists on its own, and we gather what meaning and associations, on an
immediate, presumably more visceral level-and yet more abstract,
because unidentified, level as well-that we can from it. It is only after
ward that we discover that Benny is in a video store sampling the wares,
knowledge that contextualizes the clip narratively in terms of the outer
film called Benny's Video , giving it a more particularized meaning in
24

M i c h a e l Haneke

terms of Benny's character, his individual psychology, and the story he's
involved in. Haneke produces his usual overhead, impersonal close-ups
on the financial transaction, and it is here that Benny first spots the un
named girl (Ingrid Stassner)-whom he will later invite to his family's
apartment for an innocent encounter that turns deadly-as she intently
watches an unseen video from outside the store.
The apartment that Benny and his well-to-do family occupy is filled
with the kind of bright breakfast service that we saw in The Seventh
Continent. The kitchen is ultramodern, silvery, metallic, and shiny, as
are the main glass doors, leading to the street, through which these af
fluent people come and go. The dining room is filled with images, largely
taken from Old Master prints, which Benny often glances at, briefly but
perhaps pointedly, throughout the film. This could be an unsophisticated
attempt by Haneke to produce a (perhaps rather facile) comparison
between older, more organic images from high art and newer, vacuous
commercial images, but it may also be a comment on the ways in which
these venerable artistic images, presumably originally produced for more
purely aesthetic reasons, have also been commercialized.
Related to this critique of present-day society in light of the past is
the classical choral music we hear while Benny traverses the noisy city
streets-a glorious Baroque piece that produces a contrapuntal clash
between visuals and aural track, which turns out to be an unusually
long sound bridge to the next scene, of a chorale group rehearsing in
Benny's school. Extending the critical juxtaposition, Haneke cuts con
stantly from the cherubic faces singing this aesthetically powerful music
to the anonymous exchange of money among the older choristers that
seems to be part of the never-explained "pilot game" that is a running
but incomprehensible motif throughout.
What follows is the central scene of the film . It begins with Benny
inviting the girl up to his family's apartment. Interestingly, we first see
them talking through the video store's front window, but we can't hear
what Benny is saying-it's as though Haneke knows that the content of
the exchange can be nothing more than banal, with no real communica
tive content, and wants, as he often says, for us to use our imagination
instead. Once in the apartment, she is entranced by all the "cool" video
equipment that Benny's wealthy parents have bought for him, and when
she explains that her commute into the city is at least an hour each way,
The F i l m s of Michael Haneke

25

via several different means of transportation, we feel Haneke nodding

gently but not really too seriously in the direction of a more traditional
leftist critique of class relations. In any case, her plight seems to hold
little interest for Benny, and the subject is changed.
She is especially impressed by the camera that Benny has trained
on the street below, which shows simply what is happening in real time.
Haneke tells Toubiana that "Benny thinks he can control things by in
corporating them into video, for example, with the camera on the street.
Of course, it's an illusion, even a dangerous illusion. Why do people film
their vacations? I've never done that, nor even taken pictures. I find that
totally perverse. [I think the idea they have is that] if I have an image
of that, I possess it. Naturally, that's ridiculous. It's a very strong desire,
caused, I think, by the media. We see the world via the media, so we're
in danger of thinking that only through the media is there a reality. But
it's exactly the opposite."
Benny shows off in front of his new friend with traditional, mildly
rebellious adolescent behavior such as smoking, and Haneke seems to

Figure 3. The Girl ( Ingrid Stassner)

enters Benny's (Arno Frisch) world
of video in Benny's Video.

26

M ichael H a neke

be establishing a kind of line between "normal " teenage nonconformity

and the much sicker variety that Benny will soon rather haphazardly
undertake. She decides to stay "just because, " as she vaguely puts it,
and they eat pizza (an operation to which Haneke devotes close atten
tion, as he does to the transactions in stores, as though these mundane
gestures might somehow become revelatory), and then Benny begins
to act out a series of jokes about people on the subway. Suddenly, he
violently grabs her, ostensibly miming the vignette that he calls "cop
on the U-Bahn, " but the suddenness of the aggressive gesture, which
will become an important Haneke signature in some of the later films,
constitutes a minor but unnerving surprise to the viewer and hints of
worse to come.
This uncomfortably personal, one-on-one encounter seems painfully
awkward to both parties, even beyond the obvious explanation of their
youth. One of the things being demonstrated here is that we do act dif
ferently before others than we do before a recorded image . As Haneke
explains to Toubiana: ''We allow ourselves feelings when facing an image,
but not a person, because it's more dangerous, since the image can no
longer react. The image is finished, so you can be relaxed. In principle,
that's where all horror films come from, because you can take pleasure
in the horror because you can be sure that it can't do anything to you . . . .
But if we try to do that with the things in our life, obviously it's extremely
dangerous. And that's sort of the story that's told in Benny's Video."
The teenagers examine the video of the slaughtered hog, once again
"playing " with the represented reality-making it "playable, " in Haneke's
phrase-as at the beginning of the film, by rewinding, running it in slow
motion, distorting the sound, and so on. It's so similar to the opening
sequence that the earlier clip may even have been, we suddenly realize,
a flash-forward to what we're seeing now.
When the girl asks Benny "what it was like with the pig, " a question
that Haneke believes is central to the meaning of the film when applied
to the death of the girl, Benny just shrugs and says, "It was only a pig. "
The relation of reality and its media representation is further thema
tized when Benny strangely begins talking about the tricks of plastic
and ketchup that are used in action films to represent violence. Each of
them admits that neither has seen death "in reality, " and Benny recounts
the story of being hoisted up by his father to see his dead grandfather in
The Films of Michael Haneke

27

his casket. "Ich habe die Augen zugemacht," Benny says; "I closed my
eyes." The reality of death is obviously more difficult to deal with than
its cinematic representation.
At this point, Benny offers to show her something, the fetishized
"thing" he has stolen, the special gun used to slaughter the pig. He gives
it to her to shoot him (we see all this in "reality," that is, in Haneke's film
through his thirty-five-millimeter camera, and on the monitor behind
them), and when she doesn't, he playfully calls her a coward. She hands
it back to him, then says, "You press it," and calls him "coward," again
playfully, in turn . At that point, he nonchalantly points and fires the
gun,winces at the report, and the girl falls with the sudden heaviness
of the pig.
Haneke's camera shows us this scene on the monitor as well, then
slowly pans left so that we see most of everything that follows on the
video monitor alone, as though the mediatized representation has re
placed the too-difficult "reality." Of course, this reality would in any case
come to us via Haneke's film called Benny's Video, and thus would re
main always a mediatized representation. Nevertheless, within theframe
of the fiction of Haneke's film, we too have now become implicated in
the substitution of the representation of violence for the "real" violence,
especially if we find ourselves wanting to see the "real thing" yet having
to content ourselves with its video representation on Benny's monitor.
The girl struggles, and at first he tries to help her as she screams like a
wounded animal-in a manner guaranteed to upset any audience-and
the entire scene then moves off the monitor as well. Suddenly we are
reduced to "reading" the sound alone, yet the power of the scene seems
enhanced rather than diminished.
Yelling "quiet! " we hear him begin to hit her, and we see him run
across the monitor screen to reload the gun. Another blast, more scream
ing, and more shouts of "quiet! " (He also says "bitte, bitte"-please,
please-which would seem to indicate that he is panicking and thus not
totally culpable of cold-blooded murder. ) He runs across the monitor
and reloads yet again, with the girl's sobs and cries continuing, until a
third loud bang suddenly stops all noise, and we know, through the sound
alone (or, rather, its complete absence) that she is dead. The camera
remains on the empty monitor for a while as we hear the gun dropping,

28

M ichael Haneke

and then finally, on the lower left-hand comer of the monitor, we see
Benny leaning, exhausted, against the wall.
Haneke explains the complexity of this scene in some detail to Toubi
ana. "Of course, the idea is to make the viewer aware that he's watching
an artifact and not reality, because it's a double screen-he's watching
the screen, and in the image, there's another screen. That's a way of
making the viewer aware of where he is, especially in the scenes where
there's the danger that he will be totally manipulated by the feelings
that are aroused. There we're practically obligated to make him aware
of his role." An important topos for Haneke is sounded here for the first
time: the ethics of filmmaking, certainly ("we're practically obligated") ,
but also the interconnectedness o f artistic manipulation and viewer re
sponsibility, conveyed through an almost Brechtian Verfremdungs-Effekt
("alienation effect" is the usual, though misleading, translation) that
occurs via the doubling of the visual image.
The sound track is at least as crucial to this whole process as the visual
track, and they work in perfect counterpoint. "In this case," Haneke
continues, "it's the image that is distancing, and it is the sound that is the
manipulation. And with these two means, it gives an impression that's
complex enough to destabilize the viewer. With the image, you cut the
imagination short. With the image, you see what you see, and it's 'real
ity.' With sound, as with words, you incite the imagination. That's why
it's more useful for me, if I want to touch someone emotionally, to use
sound rather than image. We always know the image is manipulated, and
[ Benny] even speaks of it in the film: he says, 'I saw something about
cinema,' and 'it's all ketchup,' et cetera."
But a question arises . As long as the sound has such a powerful,
manipulative effect on us, as the director puts it, is it still possible to
maintain that the violence in Haneke's films is always "offscreen" and
therefore "nonexploitative"? A definitive answer to this question is im
possible, but it's clear that sound constitutes much more than an "in
citement to the imagination," for it too is a representation-in fact, it
is a kind of "immediate" representation (in semiotic terms, an indexical
rather than a conventional sign-and an extremely powerful one) that
doesn't rely on codes or signs as much as visual images do .
What follows in the film is a series of gestures that indicate either

The F i l m s of M i chael Haneke

29

Benny's lack of concern or his state of shock--depending, Haneke would

undoubtedly say, on how an individual viewer wants to interpret it. He
drinks some water, in a deliberate fashion, and slowly eats his yogurt. He
brutally goes through the girl's belongings, one of the gestures that, for
this viewer at least, most powerfully signals his culpability-but other
gestures lead toward an opposite conclusion. He does his homework,
to the sounds of heavy metal rock music, and then nonchalantly spends
some time cleaning up the girl's blood. Haneke extracts the maximum
horror from this action by showing her body being violently pulled across
the floor trailing a smear of blood, but without showing anyone actually
pulling her; the bloody image, emptied of a visual causal explanation
for her movement, seems even more disturbing. Presumably we are
being made to use our imagination once again, because we can't fully
see what's happening.
So is Benny truly culpable, or was it merely an accident, and he
simply panicked? In short, why did he do it? Haneke explains to Tou
biana, "I always want to leave open the answer to the question, 'Why
did someone do something?' In this case, [any] answer is only there to
reassure and to calm the viewer. To say, 'His mommy didn't love her
little boy enough,' is ridiculous . That's not it. I think the reason for a
crime or an accident is always much more complex than what you can
describe in seventy minutes."
In an apparent desire for some form of spiritual or perhaps merely
physical purgation, Benny takes off every bit of his clothing and con
tinues to clean up the girl's blood. The camera cuts, without narrative
motivation, to the high-art images along the dining room wall and then,
possibly implying a link, back to Benny, who discovers a smear of blood
on his naked side, in the exact spot that traditional Christian iconog
raphy shows the spear wound on Christ's crucified body. A close-up of
a video image of him wiping the blood from his side follows, and he
also modestly pulls down the dead girl's skirt before turning her over
to videotape her, still covered in blood: a delicate gesture, in short, fol
lowed by another horrifYing one. The image is suddenly rewound at high
speed, as he did with the video of the pig, and we realize that the time
period has shifted, and Benny is studying the images later, as though he
were editing a film or video, making reality "playable"-and keeping us
guessing-in the same manner as Haneke's later film, Cache.
30

M i c hael Haneke

At some point after the girl's death, Benny pours himself a glass of
milk, and the frame is saturated with blue and white hues. When he
wipes up some spilled milk, the gesture reminds us of the blood he has
just wiped up. This barrage of various hues makes us aware of a kind of
muted symphony of color that Haneke constructs in the film, composed
especially in blue and black.
After Toubiana comments that "there's no warmth at all in the im
age . It's important for it to be icy," Haneke replies, "The whole trilogy
is like that. It's a little colder than reality. That's because, especially on
TV, everything is a little warmer than in reality, so it was an artificial
means by which to create more distance and also more clarity. Because
if an image is bluer, it seems sharper. If it's more red or yellow, it seems
more blurred, more pleasant. And the 'surgical' view that some have
reproached me for may come partly from this. The frames always seem
very sharp, as though you're looking at them from a distance. By contrast,
the videos in Benny's Video aren't as cold as that."
After a quick trip to a rock club with his friend Ricci, followed by
a sleepover at Ricci's parents' apartment, he goes to visit his sister. He
seems to want to discuss what has happened, but for various reasons he
is unable to. His next striking if ambiguous gesture is to have his head
shaved in a barber shop located in the subway, which results in an image
with contradictory interpretive possibilities. He seems to have become
both skinhead and Auschwitz victim.
His father is not pleased with what he calls Benny's new "concen
tration camp" look (yet, abetting the ambiguity, he also castigates him
for "protesting") , and, as Haneke's example of the ultra-bourgeois so
typically despised by most Austrian writers and artists, he tells Benny,
"Seriously, don't give me that teenage stuff about not being loved. People
have to agree on certain things . Provided one is reasonably intelligent,
which you won't deny you are, one sticks to the rules, if one wants others
to stick to them too, particularly when it takes so little effort."
After talking with (or rather listening to) his father, Benny finally
asks, "Can I go now?"-the same bored-teenager question he will ask
at the police station at the end of the film, after he has betrayed his
parents. For Haneke, the head-shaving gesture is purposely ambiguous
and intended to foreground the role of the audience in constructing
meaning: "You can interpret that in several ways: as self-punishment to
The F 1 l m s of M ichael Haneke

31

make himself like a prisoner, it's a sort of public self-declaration of guilt.

You can also see it as a protest. The viewer has to decide . I'm always
looking for a way to tell the story where I put the questions back to the
viewer. I don't want to tell him, 'Now you must think this. Now the boy
thinks that.' It's up to the viewer to decide" (Toubiana interview) . Some
viewers, of course, may, legitimately or not, be dismayed by Haneke's
constant, principled abdication of the artist's traditional responsibility
to create (specific) meaning(s ) .
More images-a Donald Duck comic book i n German and some
television news clips about Serbian troops-lead to another crucial
moment in the film, when Benny's parents find him watching his video
of the girl's death and demand to see it for themselves. While replaying
it, Benny's eyes blink, as before, when the first shot is fired. Haneke's
camera alternates among Benny's downcast looks , the monitor, and
his parents watching raptly (but always separately, never in a two
shot ) , simultaneously horrified and entranced. When the tape ends
and Haneke has the monitor switch automatically and j arringly back
to regular TV and its usual vapid images, he seems to be proposing
a purposely obscene equivalence between the killing of the girl and
a newscast. In so doing, he once again criticizes a media form that
transforms all reality before it into its mere representation, where
all images have equal force , value , and truth. In this fashion, Haneke
might say, all reality can be transmuted into its harmless, apparently
equivalent simulacrum that we can easily control because it is already
fixed in place, at least in our present-day mediatized society. Even if
the specific content seems to change, in other words , media form is
itself so powerful that all differences in content are ultimately canceled
out, and any truth disappears .
Haneke spells out his larger intentions to Christopher Sharrett in a
remarkably direct fashion:
I am most concerned With television as the key symbol primarily of
the media representation of violence [especially in Benny 's Video and

Funny Games] , and more generally of a greater crisis, which I see as

our collective loss of reality and social disonentation. Alienahon is a very
complex problem, but television is certainly implicated in it.
We don't, of course, anymore perceive reality, but instead the rep-

32

M ichael H a n e k e

resentation of reality in teleVIsion. Our experiential horizon is very

limited. What we know of the world is little more than the mediated
world, the image We have no reality, but a derivative of reality, which
is extremely dangerous, most certainly from a political standpoint but
in a larger sense to our ability to have a palpable sense of the truth of
everyday experience.

Haneke's argument is compelling, but it also seems to rely upon the

notion that reality, even the everyday variety, is or was ever available to
us or our forebears in some kind of direct and unmediated form. In this
respect, Haneke's views smack of the theories of Guy DeBord, in The
Society of the Spectacle, and Jean Baudrillard more generally, both of
whom attack the "simulacrum" of reality that has supposedly displaced
our putative, prior direct apprehension of reality.
However, many other theorists, hke Jacques Derrida, to cite one ex
ample, seriously doubt that such direct access to reality is or has ever
been available. Technology of some sort, no matter how primitive, must
always intervene, and any reality must also always be framed to be per
ceived. Haneke's apparent naivete in longing for a lost, golden, im-mediate
world-a longing that remains common-is seen even more clearly in
one of the interviews translated for this volume: "I belong to a generation
that was able to grow up without the continuous presence of television. I
was thus able to apprehend the world directly, without an intermediary.
Today, on the other hand, children learn to know reahty through films, and
reahty is presented on television in two different ways: there is the reality
of documentary shows and the reality of fictional images. I think that the
media has played an important role in this loss of a sense of reality."
But what about films that were made before television's arrival? What
about radio, and the "you-are-there," supposedly direct presentations of
reality in the reports by Edward R. Murrow during the Battle of Britain?
We have always processed (and must always process) raw reality, or what
the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would call the Real, through
a host of filtering devices (including language, ideology, religion, ideas
about visual perspective developed during the Renaissance, and so on),
and contemporary media are only more sophisticated, more technologi
cally advanced versions of these "filters," without which we would be
unable to see anything.

The Films of M ichael Haneke

33

Moving back to the specific events of Benny's Video, Haneke tells

Toubiana that Benny's decision to show the film to his parents has, once
again, several possible motivations. "On the one hand, perhaps it's out
of fear, an inability to speak about it, but at the same time it's a gigantic
provocation. . . . How do you react if your child shows you this act? That
makes it more real [to the audience] than when [we] saw the act itself.
. . . You're shocked the first time, but I was much more upset the second
time, when the parents watch it."
At this point, the father takes over and attempts to buck up the failing
spirits of his tremulous wife. Like any good, optimistic bourgeois, he is
filled with a kind of can-do, ultra-rational spirit, which-though he claims
several times that he too is doubtful about what course they should take
never considers ethical or moral issues and sees everything in practical,
purely technical terms. In this way, it's similar to the Pentagon Papers that
were leaked to the New York Times during the Vietnam War. As with these
papers that considered strategies for conducting the war, Benny's father's
only thought is, "How can we most expeditiously deal with this situation
that confronts us?" It's clear that Haneke is also offering a disguised but
real critique of the kind of technocratic thinking that could eventuate in
the unthinkable-the Holocaust, and, in more specific terms, Austria's
ongoing refusal to confront its part in that immense tragedy.
Haneke tells Toubiana that when the film premiered in Vienna, peo
ple asked only mundane technical questions. "At one point, I said, 'Don't
you want to talk about this Austrian habit of sweeping unpleasant things
under the carpet?' Total silence. After a very long pause, they started
to ask me nonsense questions again. Everywhere else, the first question
wasn't about the video and all that, it was about Austria's past. That was
strange, and it surprised me a great deal. Or, rather, it confirmed for me
that I was right to talk about it."
The parents' discussion about the proper course of action is shot in
separate close-ups, never in a two-shot. The father says, "Do you realize
he'll be ruined for life? Not to mention all the other consequences." "It
would do wonders for our reputations!" he adds sarcastically (in the Ger
man dialogue, significantly, the word translated as "reputations" in the
subtitles also means "image"). Though more emotionally upset, the wife
also considers only the practical aspects of the matter and wonders how
her husband will get the body out of the apartment. We could bum her

34

M i chael Haneke

things, he says, and his wife helpfully, ghoulishly, brings up the question
of dismemberment and how the bones might be dealt with. They do
realize at some level the gravity of what they are discussing (if not their
own moral responsibility) , and she asks her husband whether he is really
serious about all this. He replies that he doesn't know and asks, "Do you
have another alternative?" She shrugs her shoulders and suggests that
they get some sleep. The husband asks again, "Can you cope? Will you
be able to stomach it? The pieces will have to be very small, and I have
no idea how long it will take."
It is apparently decided that Mom and Benny will head off to a
holiday in Egypt while Dad stays home and does the dirty work. Before
they depart, Dad confronts Benny about having tried to see his sister
Evi, which could have compromised their situation. Violently grabbing
Benny's face, he shouts, "You must not lie ! " because Benny has said
nothing about the attempted visit. Haneke's irony is at its peak during
this display of middle-class hypocrisy.
When Benny and his mother get to Egypt, almost everything we
see is from inside the tour bus , Haneke's camera shooting through
the window past Benny, onto the "reality" that is being commercially
transformed into a packaged "experience" for tourists. The exotic other
becomes processed image, safely on the other side of the "screen"
constituted by the window. As an image it comes prepackaged and,
like genre movies, is expected to follow certain clear rules (like staying
on the other side of the window) .
Benny continues his own videotaping of the various people and things
he encounters in Egypt, including a man flying in a large kite pulled by
a boat, the market and its exotic denizens, and several mosques, all to
the accompaniment of strange classical organ music on the sound track.
His mother tapes the inhabitants of a primitive village, and the sound of
a dog barking offscreen recalls to us the disturbing braying of the dog in
the video of the hog's slaughter. (Again, Haneke achieves an important
effect through aleatory sound.) They play backgammon, swim, and Benny
at one point even attempts to videotape his mother while she's urinating.
He manages to send a desultory video greeting back to his father. Inter
estingly, the contrast ratio is so extreme that the image is barely visible;
in fact, it's not completely clear that this video is really addressed to his
father at all.
The F i l m s of M ichael Haneke

35

All of this organized recreation, we soon realize, is meant to block

out the reality that is presumably going on back home as Dad, piece by
piece, gets rid of the girl's body. At one point, Haneke's camera holds on
mother and son lying on adjoining single beds, side by side, as they watch
Egyptian television for what seems like a very long time. Imperceptibly
this is the dramatic purpose of the brilliant extended long-take-the
mother begins to break down emotionally and ends up sobbing violently.
Benny wants to do something to help her, and even reaches out to try to
touch her. He seems upset over the intensity of her emotional response.
This is perhaps the moment of his own prise de conscience, his first full
realization of the enormity ofwhat has happened, and thus the point that
leads him finally to decide to denounce his parents to the police, which he
does at the end of the film. (As usual, though, this can only be surmised,
and there is no overt textual information to support such a reading. )
Haneke tells Toubiana that "in principle, that's the theme of all my
films: guilt. How do you deal with this, your own sense of becoming
guilty, no matter what the topic? I come from a Judea-Christian culture,
so it's normal to speak of that. And the passage in Egypt is a kind of sign
of that: he runs away to avoid responsibility, but he becomes guiltier
by doing it. The mother knows what the father is going to do. [ Benny]
knows more than his parents what it's all about, what his father is doing.
But at the same time, he wants to deny his own guilt, because he says,
'I didn't want to. It was a moment.' The scene of the murder is filmed
in such a way that it's left open. Even he seems to be surprised. Did he
really want to do that? I always try [to show that] the act that makes us
feel guilty is ambiguous ."
When they arrive home, Benny opens the door and seems over
whelmed by the artificial light and the harshly reflective surfaces all
around him. Is this a response to his recent sojourn in the desert, where
all was different, perhaps more organic and premodern? Mom is chipper
again, though Dad seems extremely grave. "''m glad you're home," he
says. "Me, too," Benny responds noncommittally. Dad then says, "Good,
I love you," but he gets no response. "Sleep well, then, everything's okay.
You don't have anything to worry about." What comes next, according
to Haneke, is one of the most important exchanges in the film . Father:
"I wanted to ask you something. Why did you do it?" Benny: 'What? I

36

M ichaei H a neke

don't lmow. I wanted probably to see what it is like." Father: "How what
is?" Benny shrugs.
Haneke tells Toubiana that something similar he read in the news
paper originally led him to make the film . "I started collecting stories
like this, and the sentence kept reappearing: 'I wanted to lmow what it
was like.' Only someone who is out of contact with reality could say that.
One only learns about life and reality [nowadays] by means of the media,
and you have the sense that you are missing something, that you lack
the feeling of reality. When you see only images, even a documentary,
you're always outside. And [these people were saying] I wanted at least
one time to find out what it was like to be inside. That's what got me
interested in making the film."
The obvious question, though, is why this desire to lmow, for ex
ample, what murdering someone is like was never much in evidence
before the advent of modern media. Is it perhaps not so much that the
media has substituted itself for reality but that it represents violent,
nonordina ry reality in such a tantalizing way that makes people want to
experience it? This is not at all the same thing.
Life seems to quickly get back to normal for Benny, and we soon see
him with his friend Ricci, listening to heavy metal in his room (now the
doors partially block our view) and watching videos of his sister's pilot
game with which the film began. Shots of what seems to be a rather
stupid party are overlaid with the baroque choral music we heard ear
lier (making the contrast between the two eras deeply and perhaps a
bit too earnestly ironic) , with the choral music serving once again as an
extended sound bridge. We cut to individual shots of children's singing
faces, bathed in light, as Benny's family listens to the concert.
We then cut to a video of the corner of Benny's bed, and we are
surprised to discover that he had earlier recorded his mother's and his
father's voices, from his room, as they plotted what to do with the girl's
body. Suddenly the voices get louder and somewhat different in sound
quality, while we still see the same unchanging video image. We realize
that this new video is being played for the benefit of the police, whose
questions, very similar to the earlier grilling Benny had undergone at
the hands of his father, now take over the sound track. 'Why did you
come to us?" they demand, and he replies with the same noncommittal

The Films of Michael Haneke

37

phrase used by the murdered girl, explaining why she has decided to
stay in Benny's apartment: "Just because." After he tells them where his
parents can be found, he asks, "Can I go now?"
In his interview with Toubiana, Han eke refuses to spell out the mean
ing of Benny's gesture. "Is he naive? Is it cynicism? You can take it as you
like." And beyond this particular scene, there is also a practical reason,
according to the director, why he refuses to explain. Toubiana theorizes
that "in place of psychology in your films, people do things . And that
takes the place of an explanation." Haneke responds, "Yes, because film
is visual. Explanation is all right with words in a book, where you can
explain a lot. In film you have to show things ."
We next cut to video shots of the trip to Egypt; perhaps Haneke
wants to underline, once again, as with the city streets and the ba
roque music, the obvious contrasts between the world of the past and
the world of the present, between the third world that Benny and his
mother have glimpsed and the advanced, inauthentic industrial society
in which they live. We see mother, father, and son in individual close-ups
outside the police office, and Benny says merely "Entschuldigung" to

Figure 4. Benny (Arno Frisch)

i n his element i n Benny's Video.

38

M ichael Haneke

his parents on his way out, which is the kind of banal phrase ("excuse
me") used in German when someone is accidentally bumped, but hardly
an expression of real sorrow.
The film closes with a long-take of a central monitor, which shows the
parents, in a high-angle shot, as they are led into a room for questioning,
with parts of two other monitors visible on either side and the radio news
telling us more about the war in Bosnia and about some people who have
been killed in a tram disaster in Sweden. Reality, even as we watch, is being
turned into spectacle and representation and thus made unreal. Suddenly,
the words " BENNY ' s VIDEO " appear in bright red letters on the central
monitor, just as they did at the start of the film. The credits roll, and the
film, rather than sharply concluding, gradually peters out-significantly,
on the monitors--once there is nothing left to see.

71

Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)

For the third film in what Haneke has called a trilogy that represents "my
portrait of the society in which I live" and whose topic is "communica
tion which doesn't communicate" (Toubiana interview on 71 Fragments
DVD ) , the director expands his lens beyond the narrow, even obsessive
focus on individual, if typical, families that occupied the first two films
to take up "a cross-section of society." The film is about "coldness," ac
cording to the director, and this noncommunicating communication "is
my strongest feeling, and I always try to deal with it in my films . We talk
and talk, but we don't communicate. And the closer you get, the worse
it is." This non- or countercommunication, in other words, goes beyond
the media to infect individuals and society as a whole.
Like The Seventh Continent and, in a more general sense, Benny's
Video, 71 Fragments is based on a real event, an "inexplicable" murder
ous rampage in a bank by a Viennese military cadet on December 23,
1 993 . Looked at from a typical Haneke viewpoint, the film is a kind of
amorphous, fragmentary, and highly abstract "nonexplanation" of the
tragedy. Han eke has the usual suspects in mind-the media above all
but as is his wont, he seeks (though he doesn't always succeed) to present
viewers with the maximum ambiguity so that they will be required to
construct and make sense of the fragments of understanding on their
own, rather than have it done for them. Unlike The Seventh Continent,
The Films of Michael Haneke

39

the factual information underlying this story is presented in an intertitle

before the film proper begins. The opening, sober black-and-white title
reads : "On 12-23---9 3, Maximilian B . , a 19-year-old student, shot three
people in a Viennese bank and killed himself with a shot in the head
shortly afterward."
This intertitle seems to perform two related functions. First, it guar
antees the non-frivolousness of what we are about to see. The events
with which the film culminates actually took place, Han eke insists more
clearly than ever, and this connection to "reality" profoundly orients our
way ofwatching the film and the terms upon which we accept or reject it.
Second, 71 Fragments is by far Haneke's most overtly "experimental" and
least explicitly narrative film , at least among those made for theatrical
release, in that it does indeed consist of exactly seventy-one fragments,
some long, some ultrashort, and some medium length, whose relevance
or "glue" is only barely recognizable in the context of the factual infor
mation with which the film begins, and only with considerable effort on
the part of the viewer as it proceeds.
One element emphasized in the film's title is chronology, which pro
vides another organizing device-besides the gradual coming together
of an inchoate, virtual narrative sense-that structures the film . The
seventy-one fragments are thus divided into five different days, all from
1993: October 12, October 26, October 30, November 17, and, finally,
December 23, the day on which the "inexplicable" slaughter occurs. One
of the few quasi-reliable ways of looking at and organizing reality, or at
least its temporal or durational aspect, Haneke seems to be saying, is
through the fixity of dates, even if this forward-marching, apparently logi
cal organization of life ultimately leads to little more than utter chance,
that other foregrounded word that sits at the title's end.
In this contradictory, fragmentarily experienced and ultimately un
knowable world, nothing does finally add up, hence whatever does hap
pen can only be a result of chance. (A Hollywood film like Signs [ dir.
M . Night Shyamalan, 2002] takes the opposite position: while all seems
inexplicable and random, actually everything has a hidden purpose, and
if we only properly read the "signs" that have been lavished upon us by
a deity or other unknown entity, we can understand everything.) For
Haneke, as for many modernists, our sole recourse against the debilitating
randomness of the universe is the self-conscious chosenness and delib40

Michael H a n eke

erateness of art, so much on display in 71 Fragments. Thus, one specific

force structurally working against, or in constant tension with, the idea
of chance in this film is the number, length, and placement of Haneke's
carefully chosen fragments, all neatly arranged in chronological order.
The title of the film and the opening credits do not appear until frag
ment 4, as we follow an unknown truck through the familiar Hanekean
blue-black night into an unknown city. The truck contains a young boy;
we later find out he is a Romanian national who has illegally crossed
the border into Austria. Many fragments after that, we learn that his
name is Marian Radu. (We have also seen him crossing a river at night
in fragment 2, which contains three shots, and ensconcing himself in
the truck, which is delivering washing machines to Vienna, in fragment
3, comprised of only one shot.)
All of the important "characters"-important only because they end
up, by chance, being at the bank on the fateful day of the student's killing
spree, or are connected to someone who is-thus begin to appear, one
by one . Throughout the film, little of this-for example, who the main

Figure 5. The Romanian boy (Gabriel Cosmin

Urdes) adrift in Vienna in 71 Fragments
of a Chronology of Chance.

The F i l m s of M ichael Haneke

41

characters are-is signaled in any direct fashion. In fact, much of what

we can be said to lmow about this story comes only in retrospect, after
the film has concluded. If occasionally annoying, this is very much part
of Haneke's theme of the final and irrevocable unlmowability of events
and other human beings, including the reasons behind the "inexplicable"
slaughter at the bank, as the television news will describe it at the end
of the film.
Besides the Romanian boy and the young military cadet who turns
killer, Maximilian B . , the fragments follow a kind, deeply feeling woman
and her husband, who are moved by the Romanian boy's plight, which
they've witnessed on television, to become temporary foster parents
for him. Another person whom we follow is a middle-aged bank guard,
Hans Nohal (a name we learn only from an ID card flashed near the
end of the film), who is married and has a baby.
We also, in a manner of speaking, follow the story-a "story," like the
others, which consists of little more than banal episodes of daily life
of an elderly and disgruntled gentleman who has emotional difficulties
with his daughter, who works in the same bank. (When we initially see
them interact at her counter in the bank, we have no idea that they are
related.) Since, by the end of the film, we lmow that all three of these
people whose mundane lives we trace-the kind woman, the bank guard,
and the old man-happen to be in the bank on the day of the killings,
and since we lmow from the opening explanatory titles that Maximilian
B. kills three people before killing himself, we surmise, since we've been
following them, that these are the three who will be killed.
Yet, with the exception of the guard-a small comer of whose life
less body we see lying on the floor, a body that we are able to identify
solely through the color of the uniform, which is now steadily emitting a
fatal stream of blood-Haneke gives us no direct evidence that the kind
woman and the old man are also killed. He thus continues to demand of
his audience, as in his two earlier films, a great deal of epistemological
work and cognitive speculation for little immediate payoff. On another
level, of course, he offers much more.
Another important theme that can be found in the film's title lies in
the word "fragments ." Like most poststructuralist theorists, especially
perhaps the French literary critic Roland Barthes, Haneke clearly be
lieves that any truth about the world, about reality, is only lmowable, if
42

M i chael Haneke

at all, in the form of fragments . His film, like poststructuralist theory, is

anti-totalizing in the sense that nothing-no person, no idea, no event
can ever be finally understandable and completely explicable . There
is always some important connection missing, some "inconsequential"
evidence that it is suppressed because otherwise it would contradict
any overarching hypothesis . Haneke is thus saying that, if this is the
case for reality itself, then it is a lie to make a film that purports to fully
explain anything.
As he tells Toubiana in the interview on the DVD, 'We have access
to reality only through fragments because it's our day-to-day experi
ence. We see very little; we understand even less . But in mainstream
cinema we pretend that we know everything. That bothers me . . . . Only
in fragmentation can we tell a story honestly. Showing the little pieces
and the sum of these little pieces opens up a little bit the chance for the
spectator to choose and to work with his own experiences ."
But just as we can only experience "reality" or the "world" or "truth"
as a series of fragments, our experience of other people is incomplete
and fragmentary as well. Haneke tells Toubiana that we claim that "the
character is like this . But the character is also like this and this, and all
these alsos are often contradictory. That's what makes life so rich and
so irritating. It's irritating in a work because we're used to always having
the answer as to why a person is like this or that, but we never know
why in real life. You can suspect or have an idea, but this idea could be
completely wrong."
Another important aspect of the film's ambiguous structure is its
division into an unpredictable series of fragments (why seventy-one?) of
wildly varying length (some last only a few seconds, while others go on
for several minutes) , each ending in a cut to black that lasts precisely two
seconds (unlike the cuts to black in The Seventh Continent, which vary
in length) . Haneke's recourse for an explanation is to the art of music:
"You have a theme and a countertheme, and it's through this structure
that you open up the world of the sonata" (DVD interview) . One also
senses that Haneke has worked out an elaborate musical rhythm tied
to the varying length of the fragments , though this would be difficult
to chart or verify.
In any case, this conscious structuration or composition can also
tell us something about character: "If you show a person in a situation,
The Films of M ichael Haneke

43

you don't know about anything except the situation, not the person .
For example, this is an interview. But you don't know why the person
is there, why he is speaking the way he is, and so on. It's the role of the
construction [of the film] to make that contradictory enough to create
the illusion of the richness of life" (Toubiana interview) .
Yet the director is never interested in structure for its own sake .
As always, its functioning must take into account the reactions of the
viewer. Haneke may be the contemporary art-film director who is most
interested in viewer reaction (in a way that resembles, oddly enough,
horror-film directors) and, by extension, exploring the viewer's moral
responsibility for his or her reactions and pleasures. "How is the viewer
going to react? When you make a film, you always have to keep this in
mind. I wanted to create typical and recognizable fragments [that were]
not necessarily understandable, but recognizable. That's something else"
( DVD interview) .
The distinction that Haneke makes here is useful because each frag
ment is recognizable as an action or gesture in and of itself (a couple is
talking in bed; a boy is riding in a car with a woman; a man eats dinner
with his wife, then slaps her) but not understandable overall in more
than a hazy sense until the ending of the film draws them together. This
is also the method of the well-known Mexican film Anwres Perras (dir.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, zooo) , which followed 71 Fragments six
years later: a series of seemingly unrelated stories (told, however, in a
much less fragmented style, and with more clarity and coherence in
each individual storyline ) only comes together in the final scene, when
we understand the nature of the event toward which all their lives have
been unconsciously-and randomly-aiming.
Both films, at any rate, as well as Haneke's later film Code Unknown,
can be contrasted with what have been called "ensemble films," or what
Michel Cieutat, in an interview translated in this volume, calls "the cho
ral film ." In this interview, Haneke draws a sharp distinction between
these two methods : " 71 Fragments and Code Unknown are different
from Short Cuts, American Beauty , or Magnolia, a genre that's cur
rently in vogue. These films have a tendency to tie up the strings of all
their stories at the end. After finishing 71 Fragments, I tried to do the
opposite, or something much more complicated. I prefer to follow all

44

M i chael Haneke

the strings, in perfect continuity, without losing them, but without ever
having to come back to them to tie them up in an explicating way."
In 71 Fragments, the first overt narrative link between any of the
internal stories comes in fragment 34, which opens the third section,
October 30, 1993 . Here we see a television interview with the Romanian
boy, who has turned himself in to the police, and then we cut to the old
man (whose daughter works in the bank) watching the interview. This is
the first cut within a single fragment to another location, though of course
the interview with the Romanian boy could have been showing on the
television in the old man's room. Nevertheless, the shift oflocation-and
an extremely tentative hint by Haneke that the media might also possibly
help unite us and thus be beneficial to society-is confirmed when we
cut, still within the same fragment, to a shot of the couple watching the
same interview, which leads them to want to do something to help the
Romanian boy (unfortunately, this also seems to mean that they reject a
young girl they had earlier chosen for adoption) .
While most o f the fragments emphasize the banality o f everyday
life , in which "nothing happens," some sequences are striking and
even unforgettable . In fragment 19, for example , Haneke employs
an extended long-take showing M aximilian B . practicing ping-pong
against an automatic machine. H aneke himself has explained (and
in the process provided an excellent justification for the sometimes
reviled long-take aesthetic) how the viewer goes through several stages
watching this ultra-repetitious shot-boredom , anger, laughter-be
fore finally starting to actually look at what is going on. ''We could have
shown the information (that a guy is playing against a machine) in one
minute, but because it lasts so long, you understand it differently. The
secret is to find the right length in imagining how I as a viewer would
react to that. You say okay, then you get bored, then you get angry,
you say cut, then after a certain time you start to watch it and feel its
pulse. That's the right length, and it's hard to find . . . . That's always
the secret, and it's a question of music" (Toubiana interview) . Note
the ongoing concern with the viewer's reaction. Even more important,
the numbing repetition is also clearly meant to emphasize the bore
dom and repetitiveness of our everyday lives, which is , once again,
the method of the film . The most uncanny moments in this fragment

The Films of M ichael Haneke

45

come when Maximilian continues to swing like an automaton, even

when the machine occasionally fails to deliver a ball.
Two other striking scenes concern the older man and his daughter,
Frau Tomek, who works in the bank. In the first one (fragment 12), we
can't at first understand why she is using the familiar pronoun "du" with
this customer until she later in the fragment addresses him as "father,"
finally getting rid of him with a promise to call. This sets up fragment 36,
in which she does call two weeks later, and which provides perhaps the
most overtly emotional moment of the film. Breaking into the middle of
this telephone conversation between the old man and his daughter (and
occasionally his granddaughter), Haneke never moves the camera for
nine long minutes, as the television continues to spew its banalities and
the old man whines and wheedles and plays on the daughter's obvious
guilt feelings, though we can't make out what she is saying in reply. ''I'm
sorry for existing," he angrily tells her at one point. The most amazing
thing about the fragment is that, according to the director, every word
in the father's telephone monologue was scripted in advance, despite
its hyper-realistic, improvisational feeling.
One other particularly powerful sequence comes when the bank
guard is wordlessly eating dinner with his wife in fragment 38 and is
suddenly moved, perhaps owing to the alcohol he has consumed, to
whisper "I love you." When she questions him sharply as to why he
would say something like that, something he never says, he slaps her
in the face. The timing of the two actors is impeccable. Neither says a
word after the slap, and eventually she puts her hand on his arm and
they quietly resume eating. M aximilian Le Cain has insightfully called
the scene "so starkly eloquent in its depiction of true feeling desperately
seeking a means of expression that it could stand up as a brilliant short
film in its own right." It also provides one of those jump-out-of-your-seat
moments that has subsequently become (in Code Unknown, Cache, and
other films) a signature Haneke gesture .
The cold, mechanistic images of The Seventh Continent, which es
chew faces to concentrate instead on the sheer facticity of the ubiquitous,
bright, and shiny objects in our lives, reappear here in relation to the
internal workings of the bank, especially in the emotionless, anonymous
exchanges of large sums of money by the bank guard Hans N ohal and
others . Nor does Han eke give us much time to identify with the princi46

M i c h ael Haneke

pal characters, just as in The Seventh Continent, since, especially in the

beginning, we see them only as hands and feet surrounded by domestic
appliances, and also because they are rarely onscreen for extended peri
ods of time. ( Fragment 7, which shows the bank guard getting dressed
in the morning, is almost identical in its anonymity to a sequence from
the earlier film . )
Fragment 9 introduces the important motif o f the game o f correctly
putting various pieces (fragments ) of a paper cross together-in other
words, solving a puzzle, a neat bit of Antonionian instruction in how
Haneke expects us to watch the film . It's also a game, of course, which
will become the overarching motif in Haneke's next film, Funny Games.
In fragment 23, one of the students again fails to put the fragments of
the paper cross together correctly. This sequence is also notable in that
it shows M aximilian (in a reverse shot that breaks the 18o-degree rule,
which forbids cutting to a shot from the opposite direction) suddenly
getting angry, upsetting the table, then quickly apologizing. No expla
nation for this outburst, reductive or otherwise, is offered. In a later
fragment (35), we hear him being berated mercilessly by his unseen
table-tennis coach while they watch the video of his practice match with
the machine . (Perhaps Haneke is indirectly giving us more explanation
for Maximilian's final "inexplicable" act than he lets on. )
The final appearance of the fragmented cross motif comes i n frag
ment 48, when we see its solution being attempted on a computer screen.
The students then play pick-up sticks, which we watch in a beautiful
overhead shot that emphasizes the sticks as a kind of abstract art image,
and the other student explains to M aximilian B . that it is an example of
skill against chance-"Geschicklichkeit" against "Zufall." This opposition
seems intended to replicate or mirror that of Haneke's artistic "skill" in
this film, which is being employed as a counter to the random "chance"
of the universe.
The final section of the film, which begins, significantly, with the
newscast of December 23, 1993, moves very quickly indeed, and most of
the fragments are quite short. The kind woman, trying to teach German
words to the Romanian boy, is juxtaposed with the inhuman technology
that now seems ubiquitous in the film and is in fact found everywhere in
contemporary society. This juxtaposition may have originally occurred to
Haneke during his youthful studies of the German philosopher Martin
The F i l m s of M ichael Haneke

47

Heidegger (see Heidegger's important essay "The Question Concern

ing Technology") . There are quite immediate causes of M aximilian's
immense frustration-when he is unable to pay for his gasoline because
the cashier will only accept cash, yet the bank's ATM doesn't work and
no one will allow him to go to the front of the bank line, even though
his car is blocking traffic-yet the suggestion stands that a more general
overreliance on the technology that has replaced human communication
is equally, and more globally, to blame.
Throughout the film, the media, as the chief purveyor of noncom
munication in our dysfunctional society, comes in for its usual richly
deserved drubbing. Each of the five dates in the chronology commences
with a televised news report, usually of some atrocity or another, often
one connected with the war in Bosnia. Sometimes a critique of American
foreign policy is strongly implied, but this may be a subjective judgment
on this critic's part. As in the earlier films, the empty, repetitive forms of
the news flatten everything out, and Haneke underlines this operation
by almost always ending a news fragment in the middle of a sentence,
a choice that implies , among other things, that the news has no end
and that its form can accept and transform any content. What is also
implicitly criticized is the moral relativity that allows the worst human
atrocity (Serbian ethnic cleansing, for example) to hold the same news
value and command the same amount of attention as the event that
follows on the newscast, the trial of the entertainer Michael Jackson.
Interestingly, we see this "same" news sequence again at the end of
the film, though this time the news of the bank slaughter in Vienna is
effortlessly folded into the space between the reporting on the horrors
of Sarajevo and the frivolity of Michael Jackson.
But it is not only the media that is at fault here, because even if the
media produces this flattening effect in its representations, the atroci
ties being reported on have also actually occurred. In other words, an
obvious point that Haneke is making here-but no less telling for being
obvious-is that we have somehow ended up in a world in which torture,
murder, and depravity are commonplace. (In fragment 26, which begins
the chronological section of the film dated October 26, 1993, the news
program expressly reports on stories in which unknown gunmen have
entered various places and murdered random victims, at one point the
Irish I RA, and at another the Kurdish PKK operating in Turkey. ) If
48

M i c h a e l H a n eke

this is the way the world is now, the director also seems to be implying,
then why are we so shocked when an anonymous middle-class student
from a military academy suddenly breaks down and kills three innocent
people and himself in a bank? After all, this same meaningless, random
violence (perhaps "justified" by one political discourse or another) is
simultaneously happening all over the world. Nevertheless, the news
program at the end of the film, in its short report on the killings at the
bank, once again labels them "inexplicable," shakes its head, and then
moves on, without missing a beat, to Michael Jackson. Thus, while any
human motivation is finally unknowable, a quick look around at our
violent, often heartless and antihuman society, Haneke is suggesting,
may give ample grounds for expecting the worst.
Haneke's most specific political critique, and apparently the genesis
of the film, concerns the Romanian boy, who is followed from the very
beginning (the second fragment) to the very end (the penultimate frag
ment), when we see him left alone in his foster mother's car while she
enters the bank. In various fragments throughout the film, we see him
eat out of garbage cans (in fragment 8, to the disdainful astonishment
of some bourgeois Viennese) , attempt to connect in fragment 32 with
another apparently homeless boy playing on the opposite side of the
tracks in the U-Bahn (while the anonymous voice of an unseen enforcer
blares on the subway's PA system), inexpertly beg on a street full of
luxury shops in fragment 27, and so on.
The director tells Toubiana that "this actually happened in Austria.
There was a boy of that age who crossed the border illegally, alone .
. . . It ended well because he got so much publicity that the authori
ties were forced to let a family adopt him so that he could stay. But we
didn't talk about the hundreds who've been caught and sent back. This
boy's story . . . is what gave me the idea to make this film ." (He says in
a later interview that the Romanian boy was also the origin of his next
film, Code Unknown, which deals largely with the problems of living
in a pluralistic society. ) Toubiana then astutely points out that the boy
steals a comic book, which is naturally full of images, and then a camera,
with which he makes more images. Haneke replies, "He's learned that
in this society there's only the beauty of false images. It's only natural
for him to adapt to that, to participate in this fantastic lie."
But these images, while perhaps false, can also be gorgeous, espeThe Films of M ichael Haneke

49

cially the ones that Haneke constructs in his role as filmmaker. Like
Antonioni, Haneke often invests his energies in the creation of a formal
visual beauty, apparently for its own sake, that relies on abstraction rather
than figuration for its power. Thus, some of the opening fragments (z
and 3) use the familiar blue-black of his earlier films to offer an abstract
aesthetic vision that is not (yet) tied to a narrative chain or a chronology.
The most visually powerful fragment is 43, when the bank guard, alone
in his bedroom at night, is plunged into the blue-black darkness , while
the camera lovingly embraces the abstract patterns found on the win
dow and the light fixture. Other beautiful, equally abstract shots occur
with the pick-up sticks in fragment 48 and, more problematically, with
the exquisitely seeping blood from the body of the dying or dead bank
guard, accompanied by total silence, in fragment 68 .
This apparently purposeful emphasis on the beauty of these images
could put Haneke into a moral-aesthetic bind, for is he not merely adding
to the exaltation of the image over reality? But his argument is not with
images per se, since the world's greatest art, which he reveres, is itself
composed of images. In our society, most images, especially of violence,
have been constructed to be consumable rather than arresting objects
of contemplation or irritation that resist easy acceptance . This is why
he calls them "lies" and why he objects to mainstream cinema: "Even
the most detestable side of things is made consumable. You see very
violent films, and the violence is shown in a way that is very enjoyable .
I find that disgusting" (Toubiana interview) .
In any case, Haneke's final take on what he is about may be sur
prising to some, especially those who have subjected him to simplistic
attacks . For it turns out that the (in)famous indirection of his method
is a conscious strategy that leads to a rather touchingly old-fashioned
exaltation of the redemptive power of art. Nevertheless, despite his
usually convincing placement among the modernists, who still believed
in high art, there is a decided streak of postmodernist sensibility in his
thinking as well, one that has not been stressed enough, especially about
the final impossibility of encountering truth. He seems to be expressing
a fear about all image making and representation in general, including
his own. Han eke's remarks to Toubiana on this subject deserve quoting
at length, because they apply equally well to all of his films:

50

M i c h a e l H a n eke

I think you also feel beauty and grace or what you will in the way you
avoid showmg it.There's a metaphysical side: today, if I tried to show
beauty, it would immediately become a lie.By avoiding showing it, we
can provoke it in the viewer's reactions.
There's a phrase from Adorno that I love."Art is magic without the
lie of being true." ... I often wonder why I feel so happy when I'm
confronted by a work of art. Especially with music, but also With litera
ture or a film. Life without art is unimaginable to me. And what is it
that makes you so happy? That's a difficult question to answer because
in an age when God no longer exists, the desire for another world is
still there.I don't mean desire for heaven, but for another image of the
world.And I think you can only evoke it in avoiding showing it, because
[otherwise] it immediately becomes banal.
If you force the desire toward that [on the viewer] by pointing your
finger at all the false points, that's the best way to evoke it.... I'm not
religious-but what is religion? I'm not a practicing Catholic, but natu
rally my films are the expression of a desire for a better world. That's
normal, I think.
The showable part of the world is very dark.You can't show the mysteri
ous side.Only in the spaces between realities.The moment you take hold
of beauty, it disappears.Beauty is a grace; it happens.It's the concretiza
hon of the spirit. It's only in these spaces left by reality that it can find a
concrete expression.The duty of art, in all forms, is to cultivate the desire
for that, which is the most beautiful thing that exists.

Funny Games (1997)

The first, German-language version of Funny Games begins with a sig
nature Haneke shot: a totally symmetrical, overhead, exceptionally dis
tanced view of an unknown car on a nondescript freeway. On the sound
track, an operatic aria can be heard at full volume. Then clearly middle
class voices-belonging to as yet unseen individuals-start, anonymously,
guessing at the names of the singers. From the very beginning, Haneke
employs opera as a symbolic shorthand for what the French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu would call "cultural capital": those intellectual and ar
tistic accoutrements that mark the upper middle class.
The voices continue to guess the identities of the singers, establish
ing the idea of the game, which will become a central motif in the film

The Films of M ichael Haneke

51

(as we saw in 71 Fragments, a game is a confluence of skill and chance) ,

while the camera cuts t o a closer, angled shot o f the car o n a two-lane
road. No faces have yet appeared, allowing Haneke to withhold and thus
play (his own little game) with audience identification, which will turn
out to be one of his central concerns in this film.
The next cut is to another overhead shot, but this time it's much
tighter, a close-up on the CD jewel cases of the operas these people
carry in their car-a shot similar to those we have seen, especially of
cash registers, in the three previous films. The camera then moves back
to the overhead shot on the two-lane road, but we still see no faces and
continue to hear only their guessing game being played. Then a side shot,
closer to the car, which is pulling a boat, and finally we are rewarded with
a frontal three-shot of the nuclear family, emphasizing its life-in-death
artificiality, as in The Seventh Continent.
They are all benevolently smiling at one another, soundless and se
rene, and then suddenly the title " FUNNY GAMES " appears in giant red
letters, like " BENNY ' s VIDEO " at the beginning of that film . Now, how
ever, the screamingly red title is accompanied by surprisingly bombastic,
aggressive punk music by John Zorn that destroys all traces of the fragile
opera arias the family and we have been listening to . It is as though this
innocent bourgeois family-and we innocents in the audience-have
suddenly been taken over, dominated, and even raped by a violence
that lurks just outside, or just below, the comfortable world we think
we inhabit.
Importantly, the music that cacophonously accompanies the title
and that will appear twice more in the film-in the middle and at the
end-is not only loud and assaultive, like a lot of punk rock, but nearly
berserk, even insane. As such, it provides a complete counterpoint to all
that we have heard and, by implication, what we have seen throughout
the credits thus far.3 It is the psychological, geometrical opposite of the
operatic arias in a hundred different ways, and it is brilliantly juxtaposed
with the simple faces that remain before us. This music-and a whole
lot more-is going to "happen" to them, as it were, and these innocents
haven't a clue.
The credits continue to roll against another side shot of the car and
the close-up of the CD player, with accompanying close-ups on each of
their smiling, contented faces. The juxtaposition of the peaceful visual
52

M i chael H a neke

track and the ultra-intense sound track is a powerful one . After Michael
Haneke's name disappears at the end of the credits, the music suddenly
stops, and this unnamed middle-class family quietly pulls up in front of
a locked gate-a gate intended to protect and isolate the bourgeoisie
from life's terrors , but which later becomes an obstacle to escape from
these very terrors .
Things seem out of kilter to this family, and to us, from the very
beginning, but nothing definite presents itself. Haneke again shows how
well he could make a straightforward Hollywood genre film if that's what
he wanted to do, as a deliberate, growing sense of dread and anxiety is
masterfully established.
Even though we have already seen the faces of this upstanding family,
unlike in the earlier films, much of the busy work of the putting away of
food and so on is done in the usual Haneke manner of the close-up on
the material object that simultaneously emphasizes its anonymity and
its intense facticity as commodity, in the M arxist sense in which the hu
man aspect of its production is erased. In other words, things as things
predominate .
The imposition of power over the family, through a gradual insinu
ation of terror, begins with the apparently innocent desire of Peter, or
"Fatty " (Frank Giering; he is called by various names in the film-yet
one more little game), to borrow some eggs for the next-door neigh
bors whom he and his friend Paul (Amo Frisch) are ostensibly staying
with. Paul has come over to help Georg ( Ulrich Mtihe; another lead
character generically named Georg, and there will be more to come) ,
the just-arrived husband, put his boat i n the water. I n a self-conscious
nod to genre convention, the family's dog begins barking immediately,
since pets and other animals are not bound by the polite niceties of
social rules and obligations and, as the movies have taught us, have an
instinctive sense of evil. Despite the bucolic scenes of the sailboat being
put into the lake, the sense of dread, originally aroused by the violent
punk music, lingers .
The eggs, especially when they are broken in several different scenes
in the film, introduce a motif of viscera that also occasionally appears in
The Seventh Continent (the eye exam) , despite its primary emphasis,
shared with 7 1 Fragments, on a cold and color-drenched objecthood.
Even in the very beginning, Anna (Susanne Lothar, in a magnificent,
The Films of M i c hael Haneke

53

self-sacrificing performance) is seen cutting up an improbably large

piece of meat-while talking on the telephone-that can't help but call
attention to the guts and blood of our lives that usually remain carefully
concealed from delicate middle-class sensibilities. This meat is not really
a symbol of anything specific but rather signifies the gross presence of
what Jacques Lacan might call the Real, the substratum that underlies
the symbolic coding that is understood as reality in any given culture.
Similarly, the victims are soon reduced to the abject level of cunning
animals, intent solely on survival, the polar opposite of their refined life
that the film opens with.
A related and equally important motif of communication first appears
when Peter intentionally drops Anna's mobile phone into the water, and
a great deal of time, now and later in the film, is spent trying to dry it in
order to establish contact with the outside world. Obviously, this works
first and foremost on the level of the genre plot-it's perhaps the modem
equivalent of cutting the telephone wires leading to the house-but
it also has implications for a favorite Haneke theme, the attenuation
of the authenticity and humanity of modem life caused by increasing
technology, especially that relating to the contemporary media and its
promise of "enhanced" communication.
Slowly Paul and Peter insinuate themselves into the house by relying
on the family's reluctance to be impolite. Hearing the dog continuing to
bark, Anna says that it merely wants to play, and Peter remarks, "Nice
funny game !" Paul then rudely pushes himself forward and begins play
ing with the golf clubs ('Would it be cheeky of me?" he faux-politely
asks as he goes outside, ostensibly to try out the clubs), and soon enough
silence ominously replaces the dog's barking. Anna finally breaks through
the bourgeois social code and bluntly says, "I don't know what kind of
game you are playing, but I am not playing it with you." Peter, who is
now being called Tom , pretends to take offense at being accused of
"playing a game."
As Haneke explains this moment to Toubiana in their interview on
the DVD , it's "the anxiety of being faced with someone who doesn't
react at all the way you're supposed to in this society where you respect
the untouchability of the other, because that's a fundamental trust. If
you've lost that, you're really lost." Interestingly, though, it's Anna who
first breeches the powerful if usually unspoken division between the
54

M i c h a e l Haneke

Figure 6. Georg (Ulrich Ml.ihe) tries to

reason with Paul (Arno Frisch) and Peter
( Frank Giering) in Funny Games.

social/intellectual niceties and the physical/corporeal/visceral when she

violently tries to pull Peter!Tom out the door. Similarly, it is her husband
Georg who attempts to deal with the situation rationally as a counter to
his wife's emotional response. Ironically, this liberal, enlightened desire
to play rational "arbitrator," as he calls it, rather than giving vent to an
unthinking, atavistic drive to protect the family at all costs, precipitates
their ordeal.
When Peter and Paul react by breaking his leg with one of his golf
clubs-the Freudian overtones seem obvious but remain unemphasized
by the director-Haneke is careful not to show them hitting Georg; we
hear the violence, and we see, throughout the entire length of the film,
its consequences. Thus, while it is true that we rarely see the actual blows
in this or any other Haneke film, we are forced constantly to confront the
victim's pain that results, a situation that produces a complicated dynamic
and belies the simplistic claim that virtually all violence in Haneke's films
is offscreen, hence nonexploitative. Clearly, the violence is being "repre
sented," even if it is not actually "seen."
However, Haneke is also right when he maintains that, by refusing to
allow us an easy identification with the perpetrator of the violence, he is
not following the visual logic of most Hollywood films that feature goodThe Films of M i c hael H aneke

55

guy protagonists who use violence nonstop. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger

in many of his action films, Peter and Paul are in control, but their cause
is unjust and cruel, and hence impossible to support. Haneke forces us
to identifY with the receiver of the violence, the "innocent" bourgeois
nuclear family, and thus to appreciate the horrifYing nature of real vio
lence rather than making it "consumable" and thus further anesthetizing
us to it. In this way, the film is similar to a New Zealand film that made
a medium-sized splash on the U . S . art-film circuit, Once Were Warriors
( dir. Lee Tamahori, 1994) . Here, the audience is positioned, visually and
psychologically, to identifY with the battered wife who is the object of
the violence of her drunken Maori husband, and many viewers in the
two screenings I attended were so deeply disturbed by the film that they
were compelled to leave .
Nevertheless, in all the violence that is to come in Funny Games,
it must also be tempting for at least some members of the audience
to identifY with the killers, simply because, even if they are cruel and
unlikeable, they wield power and initiate all activity. Haneke puts audi
ence 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 begin to make viewers understand just what is happening when
they make the apparently simple decision to watch a movie, especially
a violent one.
There is another aspect to this displacement of identification that
has to do with Haneke's complex and perhaps questionable ideas about
guilt. As the director tells Cieutat and Rouyer in an interview translated
for this volume, "The theme of guilt is present in all my films. Funny
Games was meant as a metaphor for a society that has turned inward and
excluded the exterior world. Men today live in prisons they've created
for themselves . They can't escape, because they're the ones that built
the walls that surround them. So it's their own fault. This is where the
feeling of guilt that every victim feels comes from . There is no victim
in my films who is completely innocent. But nevertheless these victims
aren't killed because of their guilty feelings ." This last concession is a
welcome one, but Haneke's seeming insistence on some kind of moral
equivalence between the family's "guilt" and that of Peter and Paul ap
pears excessive, if not ridiculous .
56

M ichael Haneke

There's more . "In Funny Games," the director continues, "I was
playing with an ironic contradiction : each one of my victims became
guilty of a reprehensible act before the torturers took over. Of course,
they were forced by the two young men to act that way, like the mother
who suddenly isn't polite any longer, the father who slaps one of the
young men, or the son who was the first to shoot. It was an ironic way
of keeping spectators from siding with the victims right away because
they sympathized completely with them. I was also trying to draw the
attention of the audience to the fact-in terms of criminal violence-that
things in the world aren't so simple . Obviously, there's no connection
between the guilt of these people and their final disappearance . It's not
some kind of punishment. It would be completely idiotic to think that."
But perhaps it is also somewhat idiotic to think that these ultimately
innocent victims, merely by defending themselves against such vicious
evildoers, "became guilty of a reprehensible act before the torturers took
over" to the point that we would begin to realize "in terms of criminal
violence-that things in the world aren't so simple ."
The motif of the game comes back in the form of playacting (forcing
Georg to imitate the voice of a ship's captain, for example) and in Paul's
proposal of a guessing game of "Hot and Cold" to torment them further,
psychologically at least, regarding the fate of the dog. It is at this mo
ment that Haneke begins what is probably the most experimental set of
gestures undertaken in any of his films. Right in the middle of the game,
Paul turns and gives a big wink to the camera and thus, by implication,
to the audience. (Theoretically, he could be winking at an unseen Peter,
but this would make Peter an unpleasant and unwanted stand-in for us,
in our physical and emotional position, adding to our discomfort.) It is a
long shot, with the entire field in relatively sharp focus, but with Paul in
the front of the shot in extreme close-up. Here most people will think,
visually at least, of Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.
Such self-reflexive, quasi-Brechtian moments increase as the film
proceeds . Unlike most directors who have employed such a technique,
Haneke seems intent on using it to implicate the audience, emotion
ally and psychologically, in what is going on rather than to reveal, for
aesthetic or political reasons (as with Brecht), the make-believe, manu
factured nature of the ultra-realist proceedings . Whether this device
actually achieves Haneke's goal is another matter.
The F 1 l m s of M ichael Haneke

57

Haneke openly admits his polemical intention: "The film must be

unsettling. It's the only film I made to provoke. People have often criti
cized me for making films just to provoke . That was never the case. But
in this film, yes. It made me happy to give an awakening kind of slap:
Look at what you normally watch! " (Toubiana interview) .
He is also clear, and clearly didactic, about his intentions regarding
the act of spectatorship. "The killer communicates with the viewer. That
means he makes him his accomplice. I'm making the viewer the accom
plice of the killer, and ultimately I'm reproaching him for this position.
It's a little sarcastic, but I wanted to show how you always end up the ac
complice of the killer if you watch this kind of film. Not in a self-reflexive
film like this one, but in films that show violence in an acceptable way.
We always know that violence is taking place, that it's consumable, and we
don't realize that we're accomplices to this. That's what I wanted to show"
(Toubiana interview) . This argument frankly seems very confused. For
one thing, when Haneke says, ''I'm making the viewer the accomplice of
the killer, and ultimately I'm reproaching him for this position," it's like
saying, "I handed my car keys to the criminal, and I'm reproaching him
for stealing my car." There's a logical inconsistency: at one point, Haneke
claims that the direct address to the viewer makes him or her a de facto
"accomplice," but he immediately follows that by claiming that this does
not happen "in a self-reflexive film like this one."
But to what extent could any self-reflexive gesture, an address di
rectly to the audience, ever imply a collaboration between audience
and killer? For one thing, the self-reflexivity, by definition, immediately
indicates that what is going on is playacting, not real violence, so what
exactly can the audience ever be guilty of if it knows that everything is
fake? Furthermore, how can this new "knowledge" be transferable to a
non-self-reflexive violent film, the kind that Haneke disapproves of?
The distinction Haneke wants to make is more clearly articulated in
another interview, in which he compares Funny Games to Oliver Stone's
Natural Born Killers ( 1994). "My goal was a kind of counter-program to
Natural Born Killers. In my view, Oliver Stone's film, and I use it only as
an example, is the attempt to use a fascist aesthetic to achieve an anti
fascist goal, and this doesn't work. What is accomplished is something
like the opposite, since what is produced is something like a cult film
where the montage style complements the violence represented and
58

M i c hael Haneke

presents it largely in a positive light . . . . NBK makes the violent image

alluring while allowing no space for the viewer. I feel this would be very
difficult to argue about Funny Games . Benny's Video and Funny Games
are different kinds of obscenity, in the sense that I intended a slap in
the face and a provocation" ( Sharrett).4
Even though Haneke seems to have an unambiguous and untroubled
view of what he is doing, it is legitimate to entertain doubts about the
entire enterprise. Thus, as Haneke tells Toubiana, "The pleasure is to
show the viewer how manipulatable he is . . . and I think it works well
in the movie. Even though I always give the viewer new opportunities
to escape . . . . I've always said it's a film that you watch if you need this
film. If you don't need this film, you leave. If someone stays until the
end, he needed to be tortured during that time to understand. If you
want to, you can understand very quickly. It seems hypocritical to me
for someone to watch the film to the end and afterward protest and say,
'You can't do that.' I say, 'Then why did you stay? Obviously, you wanted
to know, you wanted to feel all this until the end."'
This whole line of analysis strikes me as more than a bit disingenu
ous, since all sorts of other factors-social (will your friends leave too?),
the pull of a narrative, an interest in "figuring out what's going on,"
curiosity about how far Haneke is willing to go, even the refusal to lose
the money spent on a ticket!-might keep a viewer in his or her seat.
A decision to continue watching a film can be made for many reasons
besides "needing to be tortured."
In any case, the self-reflexivity quickly gets caught up and inter
twined with the game motif and becomes the film's central game. An
other game includes Paul making up a story of Peter's deprived child
hood, then mocking the presumed bleeding-heart liberals who would
blame the killers' actions on society's shortcomings. As Paul puts it, "Do
you really think he comes from a deprived background? He's a spoiled
little shitface tormented by ennui and world-weariness, weighed down
by the weight of existence."
For his part, Georg continues to cling to reason by continually asking
them why they are doing what they are doing, but of course he never
gets a rational answer beyond the obviously bogus one that they are
"drug addicts," another mockery of liberal explanations for sociopathic
behavior. H aneke seems ultimately to suggest that there simply is no
The Films of M i chael Haneke

59

good reason for them to be torturing people, just as there was no good
reason for the family in The Seventh Continent to destroy their property
and themselves, for Benny to kill the girl, or for the cadet to go berserk
in the bank. As the director tells Toubiana, "I read lots of articles, es
pecially after Benny's Video, about criminal acts committed by young
people, always young people from good families, so without any social
explanation. Always from families more or less bourgeois who commit
ted crimes neither for revenge or to get rich, only for the pleasure of
feeling a sensation. That really disturbed me. And that was in a way the
trigger for the story."
Because their motives are unpredictable, they become even more
frightening. In this, they relate back to the "motives," less successfully
dramatized, of the title character of Benny's Video . Peter and Paul seem
to be into this for its own sake, for the sheer thrill of it, and they give no
thought to the traditional bourgeois notion of delayed or sublimated grat
ification, nor do they allow their irrational pleasure to be hampered by
inconvenient ethical rules that the middle class finds indispensable.
Paul's next idea for a game is betting on the time of death of each
one of the family members, and when their astonishment is shown in
individual close-ups, Paul turns to the camera and directly addresses the
audience, as he did earlier, but now with specific questions : 'What do
you think? Do you think they've a chance of winning? You are on their
side, aren't you? So, who will you bet with?" While this intervention has
the Brechtian effect of alerting us to the fiction of what we're watching,
it hardly seems to morally implicate us in anything.
The killers then pretend to realize suddenly that the family will lose
in any case. "As they say on television: 'The bets are placed! ' " Later,
when Anna asks, 'Why don't you just kill us right away?" Paul's reply,
sarcastically seconding Haneke's critique of Hollywood, is, "Don't forget
the entertainment value. We'd all be deprived of our pleasure."
They next want to play a sick game called "Kitten in the Bag," which
they describe as "a nice game, a family game," while slapping the child
( Georgie ) around. The child's humanity is obscured when a hood is
pulled over his head, just as the humanity of the entire family has been
metaphorically ravaged by these arbitrary games the killers insist on
playing. Also, the parents seem finally to break through social conven-

60

M ichael H a n eke

Figure 7. Paul (Arno Frisch)

wants to play a game with Georgie
(Stefan Clapczynski) in Funny Games.

tion in the intensity of their atavistic desire/need to protect the child

who, alas, is the first to die.
The most charged games in the world, of course, involve sexuality,
and this is also the case in Funny Games when the killers insist that
Georg ask Anna to take her clothes off. Again, though, it's not really
sexuality that they're interested in but the fact of her nudity, and thus
her human vulnerability at its most basic level. It's important to note
that Haneke carefully avoids showing Anna in a nude state . ( But we
know that she is naked, of course, and her humiliation is visible in her
face and body language-hence a variation of the dynamic regarding
the showing or not-showing of violence seems to be at work. ) Georg,
her emasculated husband, is also unable to look, and Haneke gives us
instead a series of close-ups on heads: Anna, Peter, Anna, Georgie, Anna.
In formal visual terms, these discrete, quick close-ups contrast power
fully with the single extreme long-take (which lasts over ten minutes ) ,
i n long shot, which i s about t o come.
Another psychological weapon in Paul's arsenal is language. In his
hands, or rather in his mouth, Paul's nonstop, ultra-juridical, hyper
"logical" verbiage becomes a tool of offense, especially in light of the

The Films of M ichael H aneke

61

reticence and spareness of dialogue in Haneke's earlier films. Perhaps as

a nod to the German theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's
Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Haneke surely read as a philosophy
student, we understand in the person of Paul the theory of the utterly
irrational outbreak-for Horkheimer and Adorno, the N azis and the
Holocaust-not as an outgrowth or intensification of irrationality but
as a product of the ultra-rational, inherited from the Enlightenment,
that disregards all purely human, nonlogical values.5
At this point in the film, more self-conscious genre conventions begin
to be employed. In other words, Funny Games finally allows itself to
begin to resemble films that we have seen before and that Haneke is
angry at us for having enjoyed. Though its plot is still ultra-minimalist,
it feels more story-driven, compared with the barely visible, microscopic
narrative threads of the director's earlier films, and certainly much more
like a conventional thriller. One common genre motif is the protective
device-in this case, the outer gates-that ironically turns against those
it is meant to protect. Georgie's escape attempt is first stymied by the
locked gates, originally meant to keep evil out; when he gives up and runs
to a neighboring house for safety, a motion sensor, installed to prevent
criminal activity, suddenly turns all the outdoor lights on, revealing his
location to the criminals. When he gets to the house, he discovers the
dead body of a female playmate (though Han eke treats this in the most
shorthand manner possible, barely indicating, in a cluttered long shot,
her legs sticking out from behind a wall) . While Paul hunts him down
in classic genre fashion, much of what we see, again classically, is from
the subjective-camera viewpoint of Georgie. Next a gun is revealed,
though, perhaps as a joke on Chekhov, nothing is ever done with it. It
is at this point that Paul puts a CD in the player, and the violent punk
music of John Zorn reappears with a vengeance.
Back in the family's summer house, Peter is flipping through television
channels. At first, the scene seems like a parody of normal middle-class
life, with the woman sitting silently on the sofa. Han eke again turns to the
audio track for his dissonance, in this case the horribly grating sounds of
a Formula One automobile race that is so offensive-to Anna's ears and
ours-that, later in the film, after she laboriously escapes her bonds, the
first thing she struggles to do, still hobbled, is tum off the Tv.
The killers go into a riff on Beavis and Butthead, and it's hard to know
62

M i c h a e l Han eke

whether Haneke is being facile here (in the United States, at the time the
film was made, Beavis and Butthead were often considered by hector
ing commentators to be the nadir of popular culture, a clear sign of the
impending collapse ofWestern Civilization) or merely trying to illustrate
the ubiquity of global (American) television culture. Similarly, when they
decide to kill Georgie, the violence occurs offscreen, and blood spurts
all over the 1V screen. ( Is the violence therefore still offscreen?) This
could possibly be recuperated in a number of ways: as simple "realism";
as graphically striking, in terms of its abstract lines; as facilely gory; or as
a rather ham-handed satire of the Hollywood thriller genre.
A version of "Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe," another game, will decide
who is killed first. Paul, demonstrating his complete amorality, non
chalantly continues to make his sandwich in the kitchen while hearing
unspecified violence in the other room, similar to the distanciation oper
ated by the same actor in Benny's Video while the dead girl's body lies
on the floor. All the while, of course, we continue to hear the lacerating
aural violence of the televised automobile race on the soundtrack, which
meshes perfectly with the "real" violence we are also hearing.
Arbitrarily, like the games they've been playing, Peter and Paul sud
denly announce that they are leaving. In a flash, they are gone. Perhaps
this occurs because these figures are more symbolic--of pure Evil? or
of the evils of contemporary society?-than real. In fact, Haneke, in the
Sharrett interview, says revealingly that they aren't "really characters,
they're artifacts ." An amazingly long take, more than ten minutes in
duration, begins, in extreme long shot, of the bound-up Anna, accompa
nied by the annoying sounds of the auto race. Apparently in shock, she
is weirdly lit from below by an overturned lamp-and then she finally
begins to move. We see Georg's leg sticking out on the left, and their
child's dead body on the right. Once Anna is able to hobble over to the
television to turn it off, the sudden quiet is overwhelming-to her and
to us-and she remains for a long while almost absolutely stationary,
presumably in shock, and still in long shot. It's as though after all the
mayhem that has taken place, the camera wants to keep the audience
at a remove, perhaps to give us a chance to recover before the next
onslaught begins.
The camera pans with Anna as she hops out of the room, leaving as
the central focus of the shot an apparently catatonic Georg, who sudThe Films of M ichael Haneke

63

denly begins to emit primal screams as if he is finally breaking down, or

rather letting himself break down. Anna comes back into the frame to
calm him . All becomes quiet once more, as Haneke again demonstrates
his mastery of sound dynamics . One of the most difficult parts of the
film comes next, as we watch Georg's tiny, excruciatingly painful steps
toward escape.
The first cut arrives, more than ten minutes after this extraordinary
long-take shot has begun, and takes us to an ironic shot of the outside
of the apparently peaceful house. It is decided that Anna will seek help
alone because Georg is too badly hurt. In a reprise of the communication
motif, Georg spends an inordinate amount of wasted time trying to get
the mobile phone to work Despite all our gadgets for communication,
Haneke seems to be saying, we remain unable to communicate and,
ultimately, at the mercy of primal animal impulses. Much of what follows
continues in the direction of genre conventions, but always well done.
Some passionate words are exchanged between Anna and Georg in the
midst of their suffering, transforming the simple scene into something
emotionally devastating and real. It is as though they have been awak
ened, through this ordeal, to the most basic forms , and meanings, of
human life.
The cruelest game that remains is perhaps the game of chance, as
we saw in 71 Fragments . On the road, Anna avoids hailing the first car
that passes, fearing it contains the killers-but, of course, it turns out
that this car would have saved her and Georg. Instead, she chooses the
second car, which, by chance, as we learn later, does contain Peter and
Paul, who have decided to return to wreak more mayhem . We return to
the house, and in a brilliant Hitchcockian gesture, a frightened Georg
hears a noise, then sees a golf ball rolling down the hallway. In English,
the unseen Paul taunts, "Playtime again! "
Just a s Georgie was earlier stripped o f his humanity b y having his
head covered with the bag, Anna is now seen in a ghastly, quite upset
ting pose with a rag rolled into a ball and stuck in her mouth. Georg is
bloody, but Haneke has, as usual, chosen not to show us the beating itself.
And then the arbitrary games begin all over again, with Paul insisting
obsessively on the roles, even though they seem open to an infinity of
interpretations according to the whims of the killers . Again, what comes
to mind is Horkheimer and Adorno's thesis about the greatest, most
64

M ichael H a n e k e

inhumane irrationality proceeding directly from the most meticulous

application of reason and its most common manifestation in human af
fairs, "the rules," which are always determined by those who hold the
power. Haneke's own take on this dynamic of rules is similar, though
expressed in a formal or dramaturgical light rather than a political one.
As he says to Toubiana, "I told the family, you're playing the tragedy,
and to the two others, you're playing the comedy. And when you put the
two together, it's horrible because there are no more rules. The rules
are different, and then you have a catastrophe which is essential." What
results is a cacophony of different (im)moral frameworks.
At this point, the game is arbitrarily expanded to include how Georg
and Anna will be killed. "We want to offer the audience something and
show what we can do, right?" says Paul, with a self-reflexive smirk. "You
can play again. We are going to play 'The Loving Wife,' or, 'Whether by
knife or whether by gun I Losing your life can sometimes be fun.' You
have to play with us." The new rules state that even though Georg has
been chosen to be the next to be killed, Anna can decide to take his place.
"Anna, have you had enough, or do you want to play some more?" one
of them asks . When Georg suggests that she not answer, Paul responds,
"Huh, that's cowardly. We're not up to feature-film length yet," as he
looks directly at the camera and the audience, asking, "Is that enough?
But you want a real ending, with plausible plot development, don't you?"
Again, one wonders what effect this gesture has on an audience.
Georg is next tortured with a little knife, but once again we only hear
but do not see what is going on, which is more than enough. "Anna, you
only need to follow the rules to avoid all this," they taunt. Then they
force her to flawlessly recite, from memory, a childhood prayer to God
to save her husband from further torture.6
At this moment comes Haneke's most overt (and most innovative)
self-reflexive gesture. Suddenly, Anna grabs the gun and shoots Peter
full in the chest. Paul knocks her down and, screaming wildly for the
remote control, stops the "film" we have been watching, as though it
were all on television, and rewinds the scene we've just witnessed. In
the second "version" of the scene, which we see next, when "play" is
pressed, Paul, apparently in charge of the script as well as the rules and
the remote, easily prevents her from obtaining the gun. Because she
has "broken the rules," Paul tells her, Georg is shot dead, offscreen. In
The Films of M ichael Haneke

65

showing the two versions of the scene, audience desire-that the fam
ily be saved-is overtly acknowledged and then cruelly denied. It's also
the most completely (and purposely) "artificial" moment in this mostly
realistic film.
For Haneke, this is the supreme gesture of overt audience manipu
lation, undertaken to make us aware of how most films manipulate us
surreptitiously. "It's the top in this system of breaking the illusion. Before,
as well, when the character speaks to the viewer, it's a moment where you
completely lose your reference point. You're not in the story anymore,
but at the same time you remain in the story because the character re
mains . And there are several stages of alienation, and that's the height
of this system, the rewinding of the scene" (Toubiana interview) .
Yet, for all his finger wagging, Haneke i s not naive about the question
of manipulation, realizing that it is inherent to the viewing process. Thus,
as he tells Cieutat and Rouyer, 'With no matter what film, you're being
manipulated, but people are dishonest enough never to say it. I, on the
other hand, show it to say it. I think it's the exact opposite position. You
can't escape this problematic: as soon as you make a frame, it's already
a manipulation. I just try to do it in a transparent manner."
We next cut to Peter, Paul, and Anna, in bright yellow rain slickers,
preparing to go out on the lake in the family's boat. Peter begins talk
ing philosophical nonsense that seems, at least at first, to be something
to take seriously: "The problem is not only getting from the world of
antimatter to reality, but also to regain communication," and so forth,
but we quickly realize that this is gibberish, as arbitrary and meaning
less as anything else these two have proposed during the course of the
film. (Is Haneke making proleptic fun of the critics' explanations of his
film before they are written?) At a certain moment, the bound Anna
is simply pushed over the side of the boat with a cheery "Ciao, bella!"
Paul explains that he killed her earlier than planned because it was too
difficult sailing with her and because he was getting hungry.
The two laugh a little like Beavis and Butthead and then continue
their "philosophical" discussion. Peter speaks of cyberspace, arguing
that one universe is real, while the other is fiction. "And where is your
hero now, in reality or in fiction?" asks Paul. Peter replies, "His family
is in reality, and he's in fiction." Paul: "But the fiction is real, isn't it?"
Peter: "How do you mean?" Paul: 'Well, you see it in the film, right?"
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M i c hael H a neke

Peter: "Of course." Paul: "So, it's just as real as the reality which we see
likewise, right?" Peter: "Crap." Paul: "How so?"
Paul is of course correct that the profilmic scene that is being acted
and shot is real in its own way, even if it has a simultaneous life as a
representation of something else. The representation-in other words,
the film that we are watching-is also "real." The two terms thus easily
collapse, as Haneke continues his own little game-via the mouths of
these men who may not even be characters but only "artifacts"-about
the final inseparability of reality and fiction.
And then everything starts all over again, in a sense, at the house of
Georg and Anna's neighbor, except that it's now Paul borrowing the eggs.
The film ends with Paul looking right at the camera/audience-in a shot
that is startlingly reminiscent of the poster for A Clockwork Orange
acknowledging and forcing us to acknowledge, at least in Haneke's view,
our full participation in what has just transpired. Suddenly, John Zorn's
upsetting punk music starts again, for the third and final time. Freeze
frame, then: " FUNNY GAMES , " in the familiar bright red letters, followed
by the credits over the music. As the light comes up on Paul's unsmil
ing face, previously shadowed, we begin to see it more clearly, and how
clearly determined it remains.
At the film's world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, it
elicited exactly the kind of mixed response that Haneke was apparently
looking for: "At Cannes, it was a total mess. Some hated it, and some
loved it, and that gave me proof that it was working as I'd intended.
When she shot the fat guy [in the first version of the notorious scene
that Paul rewinds on the remote] , people started clapping. When it was
rewound, there was total silence, because they understood that they
had let themselves be totally manipulated. Because they had applauded
a murder. That's what I wanted to show, and that worked very well"
(Toubiana interview) .
Haneke's analysis seems facile here , if not downright silly, since
this obvious instance of self-defense on the part of Anna-she and her
husband have been tortured for hours, and their son has been brutally
slaughtered and his brains spattered on the living-room television-can
hardly be labeled a "murder" that the audience is applauding. Of course,
we clap when justice, however "primitive" a form it may take, seems to
be accomplished.
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67

Haneke also tells Toubiana that he told his producer at the time of
the premiere that "if the film became a big success, it would be because
it was also misunderstood. It has been big on DVD in English-speaking
countries. The representation of violence has evolved, the shock of this
film has become less, and now I'm afraid that the violence in this film
has also become consumable." However, as we shall see when we now
take a brief look at Haneke's English-language, shot-by-shot remake of
the film, which came out in March zoo8/ the director need not have
worried overmuch about the film's success in English-speaking coun
tries . The American version was a resounding flop in the United States,
grossing less than 1 . 3 million dollars.

Funny Games (U.S.; 2007-8)

For reasons that remain unclear,8 ten years after the release of the
original Funny Games, Haneke chose, as his first project in English, to
remake it, virtually shot by shot and line by line, with the well-known
international actors N aomi Watts and Tim Roth . Since it would be
unbearably cruel to expect a critic-scholar to actually compare the
two films shot by shot and line by line, I ask the reader to take it on
faith in the following brief discussion that while some rather large
differences are evident-it's set in the Hamptons, not Austria; it's in
English, not German; and all the actors are different-for the most
part its structure and mechanics remain identical.
The opening overhead shots of the car, during the credits, are the
same, as is the plethora of extreme long shots and close-ups of hands
and other body parts before faces are revealed. The bursting-through
of the screaming punk music as the title covers the screen in bright red
letters is still there, as is the juxtaposition of the smiling, innocent fam
ily and the discordant sound track, giving us a foretaste of the mayhem
to come. The tracking shots, the gates, the long stationary shots on the
big dark houses between takes, the white gloves the evildoers wear, the
strange, artificial formality of the language, the emphasis on game play
ing, the self-reflexive asides (including lines like "you shouldn't forget the
importance of entertainment") , the rewind of the repressed scene-all
remain, virtually unchanged. A tiny, probably insignificant difference
resides in the use of the word "awesome" by the nefarious pair, which
68

M i c h ael Haneke

thus becomes a kind of signifier of the new, American version. Peter

(a.k.a. Fatty and Tom) is now more appropriately known as "Tubby."
Of course, as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida taught us long
ago, no two things can ever be truly identical or the same, since at the
very least they will always occupy two different spaces and times. The
first major difference showed up in the impossible marketing position
that Warner Independent Pictures, the film's distributor in America, was
placed in during the film's commercial run in the United States between
M arch and M ay of zoo8. Apparently, a more mainstream audience was
envisioned for the remake, an audience looking to see a thriller-which,
according to the director's statements, was exactly the ideal, the impos
sible audience that he had sought from the beginning. In other words,
an audience whom he could chastise for liking the kind of film that he
was proposing they buy tickets to see.
Despite being in English and set in the Hamptons, it's obvious that
the film is too idiosyncratic and still bears too many traces of its art-house
origins (the various self-reflexive gestures are still in place, as well as the
long-takes in which "nothing happens") to ever attract a mass U . S . audi
ence . While self-reflexivity can work in genre films, as in Wes Craven's
Scream series, it really works only when it's meant to be funny. At the
same time, the American version's overt fascination with and depiction
of violence (whether disguised as an accusatory investigation of audience
response or not) is precisely the kind of the thing that would keep most
art-film lovers away.
Though camera angles, camera distance, and the mise-en-scene are
virtually identical in the two versions, two moments of technique are
different, one small and one large. The small thing is that when John
Zorn's punk-rock music suddenly blares in the middle of things (once
at the beginning of the film, when it forces out the classical music they
are listening to in the car; once when Paul is looking for young Georgie
in the house next door; and once at the end) , in the American version
it still blares, but it's noticeably less loud and consequently less disturb
ing. Similarly, the voiceover of the announcer in the NASCAR races on
television is much less viscerally annoying than in the German version,
though the first thing that Ann (Naomi Watts ) does during the famous
extreme long-take scene (when they think the bad guys have gone) is,
once again, to tum off the TV It is difficult to tell whether this was
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69

meant as a kind of superficial domestication of the film, and whether it

was Haneke's choice or the distributor's.
The bigger thing is at once simple and powerful: the film is in English
and thus seems to be more directly accessible to the American conscious
ness. But is this really the case? Clearly, it would be more accessible to
the average mall-going viewer, unused to negotiating subtitles, and thus
accessible to more people, at least in principle . But for a viewer who is
used to watching foreign-language films and who has already seen the
film in German, frankly, it's a bit of a bore, and certainly no more im
mediately frightening or upsetting because it's in English and stars the
more familiar Naomi Watts. (In fact, the very presence of Watts, pre
cisely because she's a star, tends to work against the frightening realism
achieved in the original version. ) The question that arose over and over
in the mind of this viewer was, "Why was this remake ever undertaken
in the first place?"
The acting is excellent, with professionals like Watts and Roth always
completely convincing. Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet, with their fleshy,
full-lipped features, may even be more effective producers of dread and
anxiety than Otto Frisch and Frank Giering. Young Georgie (Devon
Gearhart) seems like an adult and a child at the same time, a disturbing
combination that fits the film's dynamics quite well.
On the important question of sexual vulnerability and nudity, it is
true that Naomi Watts is also not shown in the nude, and the camera is
at first very puritanical in her regard, even when she is most psychologi
cally exposed. But then for a long stretch of time we do see her only
in bra and panty briefs that prominently display her pubic bone and
that finally seem to be much more revealing that the undergarments of
Susanne Lothar in the original. This could be intentional on Haneke's
part, to enhance the sexual quotient so that the audience will be more
tom about taking (sexual) pleasure in the spectacle of someone being
tortured--or not.
In any case, the film was greeted with, at best, mixed reviews when
it first appeared in the United States in zoo8. Receiving only a mediocre
so percent rating on the well-known critics' Web site Rotten Tomatoes, it
managed to upset quite a few well-known critics, such as Anthony Lane
in the New Yorker and A. 0. Scott in the New York Times, the headline
of whose review reads, "A Vicious Attack on Innocent People, on the
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M i c hael Haneke

Screen and in the Theater." David Edelstein's comments on N ational

Public Radio can perhaps stand for the majority opinion: "It's difficult to
grapple with serious themes when what comes through most vividly is
the director's sadism . In the end, Funny Games is little more than high
toned torture porn with an edge of righteousness that's not unlike Peter
and Paul's . . . . The movie is shallow and itself glacially unengaged-a
punkish assault without punk's redeeming passion."

Code Unknown (zooo)

With Code Unknown, the very Germanic sensibility of Michael Haneke
makes an impressive leap into a very French world: Paris location, French
language script, and a well-known French actress, Juliette Binoche, who
had expressed interest in working with the director. Based on the artistic
success and even notoriety of his earlier German-language films, H aneke
was able to obtain financing from Arte France Cinema, France 2 Cinema,
and Canal + , as well as continuing German participation by Bavaria Film
and, somewhat surprisingly, financial support from the Romanian govern
ment and a Romanian production company, owing to the primary location
of one of the three stories that comprise the film.
The source of the title, according to the director, derives "from the
first impression I had felt in Paris, that one couldn't go anywhere without
knowing the code number of a building. And for me that was a very good
first image in terms of the film's contents. Like the preface you find before
beginning a novel that tells you that without the proper code, you won't
be able to figure out the feelings you're going to be confronted with: you
are going to stay outside, and there won't be any communication. So it's
a title that has two meanings" ( Cieutat interview in this volume) .
I may b e part o f a critical minority i n finding that while some o f its
themes and motifs are fascinating, Code Unknown is not wholly success
ful either dramatically (the acting is decidedly uneven) or narratively,
given the basic problem that multistory films often have involving spec
tators emotionally in the lives of multiple characters . (The narratives
of Haneke's earlier films are often incoherent, but purposely so, and to
often superb effect . ) Nor is the film as aesthetically or formally inter
esting as his earlier, more challenging films . Yet there is still quite a bit
going on here, and Haneke's apparently conscious attempt to appeal to
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71

more mainstream art-house sensibilities, and to expand his international

audience, should obviously not be condemned out of hand.
The film is broken down into a somewhat awkward arrangement of
three different stories that only marginally interweave with one another.
The first centers on Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche), an actress living in
Paris . The second concerns an African family living a disadvantaged life
in the same city, and the third is about Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu), a
Romanian woman reduced to begging in the streets before being picked
up by the police and deported. If its fractious multicultural aspect has
grown a bit stale, at the time of the film's appearance it was a serious
French (and worldwide) social problem only beginning to come into
focus; ongoing riots in the Parisian banlieue attest to Haneke's percep
tiveness in this regard.
There is also quite a bit of that patented Haneke vagueness and
ambiguity-enough to keep academic critics analytically engaged several
decades into the future--those same qualities that will flower, and attain
deeper resonance, in Cache (zoos) . Now, however, the ambiguity exists
at the highest level of narrative and theme and no longer-or at least
not quite as frequently-requires viewers to struggle to decipher the
simplest relationships between characters, as in the earlier films.
The film begins with an Antonionian framing gesture that recalls,
again, the strategy employed at the beginning of Antonioni's L'Eclisse
( 1962) about how this film is to be watched and interpreted. A perfectly
framed long shot shows a young girl, who is deaf (as we will shortly
discover), and who is increasingly jammed up against a blank white wall
as she crouches into an ever smaller and more vulnerable bundle. Next,
close-ups on individual children reveal that they are all "speaking" in
sign language, which is, of course, to many viewers, a code inconnu.
They try to guess what the first girl is acting out, in her game of
charades, and the absence of music or any other sounds, beyond the
guttural tones often associated with the deaf and now generated oc
casionally by one of the children surrounding her, produces a strange
effect. They are obviously desperate to communicate, unlike so many
of the hearing characters we will meet in the film . The final interpre
tive suggestion made by one of the children is "imprisoned?" as we are
notified in the subtitles . When the first girl shakes her head no, the title
flashes on the screen, accompanied by a subtitle, "Recit incomplet de
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M ichael H a neke

divers voyages" (Incomplete story of different journeys) , and the name

of the director.
We are then thrown immediately into the world of Anne Laurent
and the precipitating incident that brings all of these different lives to
gether. Anne's boyfriend is named Georges (Thierry Neuvic; yes, another
Anne and Georges), a professional photographer who covers "zones of
conflict." Georges's younger brother Jean (Alexandre Hamidi), fed up
with the brutal life on the farm he shares with his father, has come to
the city to stay with Anne and Georges, who is in Kosovo at the mo
ment. The theme of the "unlmown code" receives its first overt mention
when Jean complains that he couldn't get into Anne's apartment building
because "the fucking code has been changed." Throughout their mutu
ally exasperating discussion, Haneke's camera follows them tightly in
a heavily marked tracking shot, now to the right, now to the left. This
tracking shot, with its host of expressive meanings, will become one of
the signature techniques of all of Haneke's French-language films.
After being told by Anne that he can't stay, Jean moves back toward
the left, with the camera suddenly reversing direction to follow him,
until he comes across some young men playing guitars and singing. In
a fit of frustration, he throws a bag, with a pastry Anne has bought him,
now half-eaten, into the lap of M aria, the Romanian woman (whose
identity we learn later) , who occupies the lower left of the frame .
At this point, Amadou ( Ona Yu Lenke), a young African man, accosts
Jean and tries to force him to apologize to the woman he has disrespected.
They struggle, and soon enough the French police, portrayed throughout
as brutal and uncaring, hustle everyone off to jail and end up deporting
Maria simply because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong
time. In this fashion, the three interconnected stories are set into motion.
What comes across most clearly in this initiating scene is the tension and
ill-feeling that reigns in the contemporary multicultural urban space.
The long-duration tracking shot is also a long-take, a shooting style
that Haneke has used since the beginning of his career. The director has
said that it has several purposes in the film, some of which are related to
one of his central artistic concerns, the manipulation of the audience. It
also turns out that the technique is intended as a deliberate counter to the
camerawork of the film-within-the-film that the actress Anne is shooting,
yet the two opposing styles end up being not so different after all.
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73

Figure 8. Anne (Juliette Binoche) watches

as Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) struggles
to escape the clutches of Amadou
(Ona Lu Yenke) in Code Unknown.

Haneke explains his use of the long-take to Michel Cieutat in the

intetview translated for this volume:
I used the long-take . . . [f] irst, in order to find a rigid structure for the
fragments, as in a puzzle, but also to separate them from the scenes
relating to the film-within-the-film, which are shown in the usual way.
Another reason was to let each scene develop in real time, which is a way
of not manipulating time; which is also a kind of manipulation, because
it's a question of showing that the scenes of the film-within-the-film
are just as artificial as the other sequences. In fact, in Code Unknown,
everything is related to manipulation. I play with that, because every
one knows that cinema is a manipulation of the spectator; and it's not a
question of knowing it but of feeling it, of understanding it more deeply.
Whence the difference in the way the two types of scenes were handled .
. . . I also wanted to show, starting with these two opposed aesthetics,
that spectators taken by a well-made story can be totally manipulated
. . . as I wanted them to be!

In other words, Haneke uses the long-take to make us understand on

a visceral level that we are being manipulated when we watch conven
tional cinema. But once this lesson has been learned, the next lesson is

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Michael Haneke

that we are always being manipulated by the long-take style-in fact,

by any style-as well.
After the typical fade to black, which insists, as always, on the idea
offragments rather than on a developed narrative, the next scene intro
duces another favorite Haneke theme, the interrelation of politics, the
news media, the depiction of various atrocities in different conflicted
zones, and the power or usefulness of the visual image, a conflicted
topos that has been a staple of his cinema from the beginning. What
is perhaps new here, as hinted at in the previous quotation, is that he
seems also to be implicating his own visual representation as part of the
media landscape that is to be critiqued, in a way that goes beyond the
somewhat smug and showy self-reflexivity of Funny Games.
In this vignette, we see a close-up of various unidentified war pho
tographs, while on the sound track we hear Georges's voice reading
aloud a more or less factual letter to Anne. Interestingly, though, after
a while the content of the letter suddenly veers over into the personal
while the visual track is still occupied by the horrific photographs, creat
ing a disturbing, obviously intentional juxtaposition that begins to raise
questions, albeit indistinct, about the relation of the personal and the
political. While Georges is in the middle of a sentence, the camera cuts,
once again, to black.
In the next scene, Haneke loads the dice a bit by focusing on an old
black cab driver-only after the usual epistemological detective work
that the director always insists we perform do we discover that he is
Amadou's father-who gets a call informing him that his son is in jail.
He speaks in an African language, then patiently explains in French to
his passenger-whom we never see-that he will be unable to take him
any further, owing to a family emergency. He even takes him to a taxi
stand and tells him that he won't be charged, and still the presumably
white Frenchman is irrationally angry and obnoxious, just as were some
of the French businessmen in the opening scene with the police.
Haneke seems to be insisting on the total lack of human sensitivity
that reigns in this urban environment, even to the point of irrationality,
compounded by the multiple cultures and languages that lead to further
confusion and irritation. Clearly, the Austrian Haneke, making his first
film in France, feels no compunction about showing French people in
a severely unflattering light.
The F 1 l m s of M ichael H aneke

75

The next scene introduces the quasi-Brechtian, self-reflexive theme

that is one of the film's most interesting aspects, and that Haneke has
spoken of as a major structuring principle against the long-take. We find
ourselves in a red room and hear people talking theater talk, but we see
no one. Anne then moves into the shot, looking straight into the camera,
while the camera shakes a little bit, calling attention to its presence, and
thus its mediating role. She approaches the camera until she is in an
extreme close-up, and the dialogue, which concerns whether or not a
door is locked, makes us begin to think that perhaps we are watching
the making of a thriller.
The director is never seen, but suddenly a male voice, presumably
his , says, "You will never get out of here," and Anne suddenly looks
utterly stricken. Yet it's finally impossible to tell whether the character
Anne is playing is frightened, or whether Anne herself has suddenly
become genuinely afraid. When we remember that the director had
offered to read the other character's lines for her to play against, how
ever, all seems, for the moment at least, cleanly sutured. The still invis
ible director then says, "Show me your real face, be spontaneous, react
to what's happening," and we can easily imagine this as a command
corning from Michael Haneke himself, directed not toward the actress
character, Anne, but toward the actress Juliette Binoche herself. This
same self-conscious ambiguity will arise in later scenes as well and is
related to Haneke's exploration-which was begun in Benny's Video
and which reaches its peak in Cache-of the impossibility of ever fully
distinguishing, at least in the context of the cinema, between reality and
its representation, and thus of ever understanding the basic ontological
status of any noncontextualized image. Once again, we go to black.
For the first time we meet the farmer father of Georges and Jean,
but as usual we must work to establish his identity. (Haneke likes to keep
his audience actively participating. ) Here he eats alone while reading the
newspaper in a semidarkness marked by heavy greens and blues . When
Jean, Georges's brother, enters, his father offers him beets, because "that's
all there is ." Since Jean has told Anne that he will never go back to the
farm, in the first scene, it's difficult to know the place this scene occupies
in the story's overall chronology. Has he returned to the farm, or is it a
flashback to his earlier life there? Or, for that matter, a flash-forward?
Silence and alienation reign until we once again cut to black.
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M ichael Haneke

Our next view is a static shot of the entrance to an airplane as pas

sengers board. Despite their obvious animation, we can't hear any of the
rather lengthy exchange between the flight attendants and the ground
crew; it reminds us of the deaf children at the beginning of the film, for
we can see some form of communication taking place, but we don't have
access to the code. Then we spot M aria, the Romanian woman, being
taken aboard in handcuffs, in a completely de-dramatized fashion, by
several policemen. By refusing to underline this narratively significant
part of the action and holding it off until the very end of the scene,
Haneke suddenly "narrativizes" what appears to be a long, apparent
ly completely unmarked scene by the appearance of a character we
(slightly) know. In other words, the entire scene, until this final moment,
remains inscrutable because we lack the "unknown (narrative) code ." In
addition, a political question about globalization and multiculturalism
is subtly raised concerning the irrelevance of borders in a technological
age of instant displacement by jet airplane.
Then back to the "African story," with a tight shot of an emotional
African woman, sobbing to some sort of witch doctor or tribal elder in a
(subtitled) African language, another unknown but translated code, about
her son being arrested. The camera resolutely stays on her, and Haneke
refuses to give us the conventional countershot even when the man,
whom we never see, is speaking. In the middle of one of his sentences
just as earlier with Georges-the image once again goes to black. With
the endings of these two scenes, the idea of the fragmentary has been
expanded to include speech as well. As Haneke puts it to Michel Cieutat
in the interview translated for this volume, regarding "the fragmentation,
I also opted for other little things like cutting during the dialogue: in the
scene of the letters from the photographer, the reading is interrupted
right in the middle of a word; in other sequences, a question is barely
asked before the cut comes and excludes the answer. A total reality can
never be seized in the cinema or in real life. We know so little !"
Next the scene shifts to Romania (we surmise) , and Maria and a
child are walking along a road, followed through the blowing rain by
a tracking shot. Finally Maria is alone in the shot, surrounded aurally
by fearsome industrial noise, and she meets a man who remains un
identified. Frankly, the segment is utterly boring, to the point that the
viewer wonders whether this effect is intentional or whether the scene
The Films of M ichael Haneke

77

simply doesn't work. Is Haneke trying to convey M aria's complete lack

of energy, or has the scene not in any way been narrativized, not even
minimally, and thus remains completely uninvolving? The remainder of
the scenes set in Romania are equally flat and unfocused and raise seri
ous questions, never answered, about whether they have any narrative
or thematic purpose beyond the obvious one of justifying Maria's later
decision to return clandestinely to Paris. Judged in conventional terms,
the Romanian story is clearly the weakest thread in the film.
Back to Anne, who is ironing while watching a cultural program on
television about abstract painting and music. She turns down the TV and
listens intently to indistinct sounds coming from another apartment. Later
we learn that the sounds may have come from a child being abused, but
precious little narrative information is doled out during the scene itself.
After a while she puts the program back on and returns to her ironing.
After another desultory scene in Romania about M aria's family and
some wedding plans, we cut to a group of deaf children vigorously play
ing drums, producing a powerful beat that will return at the end of the
film and unite, musically at least, all the different story strands. Through
the use of the drums, Haneke seems to be suggesting that the only real
communication possible in a multicultural context such as contemporary
urban French society is through the visceral and nonverbal. The next
scene introduces us fully to Georges for the first time. Obviously just
returned from Kosovo, he is going through the mail and some photo
graphs . Eventually Anne appears, and they play another little Haneke
game, pretending to be formal with one another. They are "playacting,"
in short, and thus recapitulating in a minor mode the scenes in which
she is shown acting in her film.
The next scene seems to begin in Romania, following a truck on the
road, then seamlessly becomes the French farm of Jean and Georges's
father. (I freely admit that this description may be completely incor
rect, as Haneke continues to serve up a maddening paucity of specific
narrative information . ) The father sets up a motorcycle and then disap
pears (though the camera holds steady for a long time on the pillar and
the humanless space) until his son Jean appears and drives off on the
motorcycle. Apparently this is one more fruitless gesture on the father's
part to convince Jean to remain on the farm . It might be surmised that
these scenes on the joyless farm are meant to represent the old France
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M i c h a e l Ha neke

that is quickly being replaced by the new, multicultural France of the

city, for better and worse. But it is also by means of this impoverished
rural family that we realize that the "foreigners" marginalized in modem
urban French society extend beyond the Africans and the Romanians
whose lives we have also been following.
Back to Anne and Brecht. We are in an apartment in Paris, and ev
erything seems real, but then we see a boom mic and camera moving
backwards. At first the apartment seems window- and doorless, but then
we move into another room with windows and we realize that we are
witnessing a different scene from the same "thriller" that Anne later tells
her friends that she is working on. This is followed by a wordless and
chronologically indefinite scene of the farmer and Jean working and feed
ing the animals, before we move once again to black.
One of the film's few overtly thematic scenes follows next, in a res
taurant with Anne, Georges, and two other couples having dinner. After
Anne talks a little about the movie she's working on, Georges offers the
opinion that life is simpler in a war zone than here. At this moment we
expect that Han eke will finally begin developing an articulated themat
ics of the image. But no, Anne starts talking banalities about her teeth
hurting. Yet it is precisely this juxtaposition of violent death and mind
less dinner chatter that seems intended by Haneke to critique the sea
of images that engulfs us-both those taken by Georges and perhaps
those being "taken" by Haneke as well-images whose very abundance
have caused them to become little more than a form of entertainment
or a way to pass the time.
At this point, Amadou passes by their table and is picked up by the
camera and followed, with his white girlfriend, to a table . The white
waiter seems at any moment about to start making difficulties (Haneke
is a master at playing with audience expectations)-but he never does .
In a strange gesture, the girl takes off her watch because Amadou has
indicated that he doesn't much like it, leaves it in an ashtray, and then
later denies , when the waiter asks , that it's hers . For some reason she
seems tense and keeps asking Amadou to return to an apparently point
less story he is telling. We switch back to the other diners, as Anne rec
ognizes Amadou as the "troublemaker" from the movie's first scene.
In another aborted attempt to articulate a theme, their friend Fran
ine (Arsinee Khanjian) attacks Georges for taking photographs simply
The Films of M ichael Haneke

79

to show misery because, she says, she "doesn't need it." He replies that
for her it's all theory, whereas for him it's lived experience, but he agrees
that he can't really articulate that feeling in his photographs themselves.
"So why do you take them?" she asks, a question that Han eke is presum
ably also asking himself concerning the film we are watching. Alas, the
issue is dropped, and Anne points out Amadou to Georges. While he is
looking, the image goes to black once again.
Four more (purposely?) lackluster scenes , moving from story to
story, follow. Amid a plethora of half-finished construction, M aria lies
to a Romanian neighbor about having found a good job in Paris; Anne
finds an anonymous note (about whose contents we are told nothing) ,
calls Georges, and goes next door to accuse her elderly neighbor of
having sent it; Amadou's mother continues to talk to the witch doctor
we never see; and Jean's farmer father reads a (second) note, from Jean:
"I am never coming back; please don't try to find me."
Then comes the treat of a sustained emotional scene between Anne
and Georges in a supermarket. Regarding the note that she has received,
Anne accuses Georges of not caring, simply washing his hands of the
matter (presumably the abused child) , and we wonder whether this
critique is also meant to apply to his lack of emotional involvement in
the photographs of various "picturesque" atrocities he has taken. After
informing him that she has had an abortion, she asks, "Is there a single
person you have made happy in your life?" He admits that there isn't,
and though the scene ends with hugs and kisses, we sense that Anne is
becoming slightly deranged, presumably from the sheer anxious tension
of multicultural urban life.
We next move to a joyous, if modest, wedding party in Romania
(perhaps intended to contrast with the alienated upper-middle-class
urban life of Anne and Georges ), then to Amadou's father castigating
his middle son Demba for getting in trouble in school. Interestingly, the
father speaks only in his native language, and Demba responds only in
French, but they do manage to communicate nevertheless.
Multilingualism, of course, is a standard feature of the multicultural
world, and it can be seen as cultural enrichment as much as a sign of
fractious conflict. Here, however, it seems to principally signifY the alien
ation that predictably occurs between generations in this new world.
Another thematic trace begins with Georges rigging up a special
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camera that will allow him to take photographs of anonymous passen

gers in the Paris metro without being seen. Again, the responsibility
of the image maker is addressed, if only obliquely and ambivalently.
When we see the subway photos later, we suspect that Haneke is in
some way equating, beyond the fact that they have been taken by the
same photographer, the previous images of faraway carnage and the sad,
spiritually impoverished faces that populate the metro.
We next see Georges's father, who has, in an act of apparent despera
tion that harkens back to Haneke's earlier films, just killed all his animals.
Is this act being offered, however tentatively, as a kind of explanation
or source for Georges's inability to connect emotionally to anything? Is
it something in his genes, or something related to the solitude of rural
life? In any case, it's clear that the bleakness of life in the country, where
everything is ostensibly more "natural" and organic, offers no viable
alternative to the various urban conflicts we witness in the film.
Again to Anne as actress. She is alone on a stage, a tiny, laughing
figure bathed in white light against the surrounding darkness. A refer
ence to M alvolio accompanied by her hysterical laughter indicates that
she is perhaps participating in a rather experimental performance, in
Fren ch, of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. She appears only as a tiny dot,
and while we can hear the director whispering (one presumes it's the
director-we can't see him, just as we can never see Haneke, the director
of the "outer" film we are watching) . A trademark Haneke moment of
paranoia is evoked in Anne's plaintive question at the end of this scene :
"Is someone there?"
The idea of language and its lack as unknown codes continues in
the next scene, set among Amadou's relatives. The scene also contains
a black, nonhearing child we see for the first time, and she inevitably
reminds us of the opening sequence of the film. Multiple languages,
along with sign language, contend simultaneously, while the camera
refuses to budge . The girl's last question, while looking at a map, could
not be more obvious in authorial intent: ''Where is Africa?" she asks .
After two short scenes in which we see Georges trying out his new
camera technique in the metro and people in Romania discussing the
logistics of sneaking into France, we cut to a resonant scene of Georges's
father Franc;ois, obviously worried about Jean's disappearance, sitting
at his table with Anne and Georges . He agrees that there's no future on
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81

Figure 9. Amadou's family at table in Code

Unknown, while his little sister signs.

the farm for Jean, and, now that he's run away, he laughs that at least
Jean won't have to get up at s:oo A.M. anymore. Anne talks about the
thriller she has just been filming, called The Collector, while Franois
distractedly plays with the crumbs on the table.
Next we see clandestines, including Maria, being sneaked over the
European Union border, with German as the principal language heard
one more new ingredient added to the bubbling linguistic broth-and
then the burial scene for "Ia petite Franoise," who is presumably the
abused little girl that Anne had been concerned about. The camera
follows Anne as she departs, in silence, with her neighbor.
Another potentially important thematic scene begins, as we see the
collection ofblack-and-white still photos Georges has taken in the metro.
Curiously enough, however, these images are accompanied by his run
ning commentary about his adventures with the Taliban in Afghanistan,
including his kidnapping. It's as though all the different sad locations are
being collapsed into a single space of deprivation and otherness. Con
nected to this is Georges's story about one of his kidnappers, who kept
asking him, in English, 'What can I do for you?" until Georges finally
realized that his questioner didn't actually know what the phrase meant.
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Figure 1 0 . Anne (Juliette Binoche) comforts the

farmer (Josef Bierbichler) while his son Georges
(Thierry Neuvic) looks on in Code Unknown.

Perhaps another example of an "unknown code"? An empty signifier

without a signified?
In any case, the juxtaposition of the dialogue about Afghanistan with
the Paris photographs seems purposeful but, as usual, unclear in intent.
Georges begins to philosophize a bit, presumably continuing to argue with
their friend Francine in her absence: "It's easy to talk about the ecology of
images" and "the value of the nontransmitted message," he says, "but what
matters is the end result. I guess she finds it all too bothersome. But after
all, she could be right. How would it help her knowing [about all] that? I
don't think I'm fit for life in peace. At least what you call 'peace."'
Again, Haneke seems to want to raise various political ideas related to
the nature of visual images but, never completing a thought or a theme,
always forces us to pursue their implications on our own. The closest he has
come to explaining this thematics is when he told Christopher Sharrett that
"the film also questions whether the image transmits meaning. Everyone
assumes it does. The film also questions the purpose of communication,
and also what is being avoided and prevented in communication processes.
The film tries to present these questions in a broad spectrum ."
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83

What follows is an almost self-consciously "beautiful" image of a

tractor plowing, which may or may not be related, beyond mere prox
imity, to the previous scene . The frame is neatly divided between the
lush green of the grass and the brown earth that has been overturned.
The camera holds steady on this image as the tractor moves out of the
frame, its sound becoming steadily less strong. This shot is followed by
a drinking party in Romania whose joyfulness is diminished by anxious
talk about having the appropriate work card. M aria, sobbing in the dark,
gets to the emotional climax of her thread in the film when she speaks,
with shame, of being disgusted by a Gypsy woman after giving her some
money, then being despised in tum by a man who threw twenty francs
at her on the Boulevard St. Germain because he found her disgusting.
Anne and her thriller The Collector follow once more, in what is prob
ably Haneke's most effective self-reflexive scene in Code Unknown. Anne
and an unknown man are kissing in a swimming pool in what appears to
be an penthouse apartment, when suddenly we spot a child about to fall
over the railing. Anne and the unknown man manage to save the child
at the last moment in an impressively convincing manner, then strike
him for doing something so dangerous. We find ourselves at a loss in the
middle of this highly convincing and actually quite lengthy family scene.
Then we cut suddenly to the two actors in a screening room watching
the scene we have just witnessed, which they are redubbing because of
an airplane that flew overhead during the take, while they begin to laugh
uncontrollably.
As Haneke gleefully points out in the interview with Cieutat in this
volume, "The scene in the swimming pool, for example, which was edited
in the normal way [i.e . , with no long-take] , was taken by many people
for a real scene in the film." Once again, we have been taken in by the
lack of a limiting context. As Jacques Derrida has shown in Limited,
Inc , his famous book on J. L. Austin's speech-act theory, all meaning is
dependent upon context. But since context can never be fully known or
limited, meaning is always indeterminate . Haneke is showing us how this
works regarding cinematic images and thus, by implication, all images.
We can never be sure, in other words, of what seems so clearly evident,
of what is right before our eyes. Furthermore, we understand that each
time we witness a scene like this, a scene whose editing purposely clashes
with that of the overall film, Haneke is contrasting the two aesthetics and
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thus also pointing to his own involvement in the image-making process

and the audience manipulation that is its inevitable corollary.
But is there more? Does Anne's innocent, nearly hysterical laughter
somehow set her-and us-up for the most powerful scene in the film,
which is shortly to come?
After a brief and incomprehensible shot of cars disembarking from
a ferry in an African country-we see everything through a car wind
shield-what comes next is clearly intended as, and magnificently works
as, the emotionally climactic center of the film . We find ourselves once
again in the Paris metro . Anne, as we will later discover, is sitting in
the far end of the car, with her back toward us, but, in a shot that runs
counter to every technique Hollywood holds dear, for the longest time
we have no idea that she's there .
Two Arab teenagers enter the car at the rear, yet the camera remains
at the opposite end, in its accustomed stationary long-take, and refuses
to move closer for narrative clarity. However, the purposely annoying,
unbalanced compositional elements contribute tellingly to the emotional
and psychological power of the scene, as the viewer is carefully drawn
in and played with when one of the Arab youths begins to taunt the
French woman we eventually realize is Anne. As he unleashes a tirade
of class and ethnic resentment on her (at one point he even mockingly
refers to himself as part of the "racaille" [scum] , a term that France's
president, Nicholas Sarkozy, would famously use a few years later to de
scribe troublesome Arab youth) , no one in the car comes to her aid, and
she finally moves to the other end, nearer to us, facing the camera.
The tension builds when the Arab youth follows Anne to the camera
end of the car and sits down beside her, continuing his abuse. Sud
denly and completely unexpectedly-the shocking Haneke signature
moment-he spits in her face. She is barely able to maintain her com
posure as an older Arab man next to her begins to defend her against his
younger compatriot. Interestingly, and purposely, when they both stand,
we don't see their heads as they argue, as Haneke refuses to move the
camera for purposes of visual clarification, or Hollywood "professional
ism," as though it were merely a neutral recording device that is trying
its best to catch life in the raw. Anne, realizing that there is nothing to
be done beyond enduring the experience, holds herself in emotionally
and suffers in silence . Then, offscreen, the young man suddenly shouts,
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85

severely startling Anne, the older Arab man, and the entire audience.
(Interestingly, it has the same effect as the suicide scene in Cache, and
the same actor who slits his throat in the later film, Maurice Benichou,
here plays the role of the older Arab man . ) Finally breaking down, Anne
thanks the man, in an important gesture, and begins to sob .
It is difficult to know where the director is in all of this . Naturally,
in a single iconic scene of a film, we see little of the underlying social
conditions (40 percent unemployment of Arab youth, giant alienating
high-rises in the Arab ghettoes of the banlieue, constant harassment by
the police) that might cause us to side with the Arab youth in his anger.
Similarly, we have been psychologically identifYing with Anne (after all,
she's played by Juliette Binoche ! ) throughout the film, and it is difficult
to imagine many audience members coming away with anything but total
contempt for the Arab youth. This feeling is to some extent mitigated
by our respect for the older Arab man who comes to her rescue, but in
going along with this ethnic stereotyping, presumably in the name of
realism, Haneke is clearly playing a dangerous game. It's important to
note, in other words, that his famous desire to manipulate the audience
overtly can have right-wing implications as well.
The director has discussed this scene from a formal and psychological
point of view, however, if not a political one, drawing a careful distinc
tion between being manipulated and being implicated, that shows him
at his most Brechtian:
To create an artificial uruverse, one always develops a situation in which
one is implicated. Which is the danger the cinema represents: you can
make people believe they are implicated in a situation to the point where
they're no longer capable of judging things coldly, of remaining outside.
That's what most of the ffimmakers who play on identification do. I, on the
other hand, am always fighting a little bit against this idea of identification.
I give the spectator the possibility of identifYing, and immediately after,
with the help of the black shots for example, I say to him or her: Stop a
little bit with the emotional stuff and you'll be able to see better! (Cieutat
interview in this volume)

After the usual cut to black, we come back to the powerfully stirring
beat of the drums heard earlier, now being played outside, as a train goes
by in the background. As we cut to Maria walking around the same area
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in which the film began-the location in which the precipitating inci

dent took place that would involve all their lives-the drums continue
pounding, aurally uniting the various stories as the end of the film nears.
What remains visually fragmented, therefore, is at least aurally unified,
and thus there is hope. As Haneke told Christopher Sharrett, "Of course
the film is about [the failure of communication] , but the scene of the
children drumming is concerned with communication with the body,
so the deaf children have hope after all, although the drumming takes
on a different meaning at the conclusion when it provides a specific
background."
Maria walks past the place in which the film began, past the flow
er shop, back and forth, with the tracking shot changing direction as
needed, and finds another beggar in the spot she had earlier occupied.
She stops in front of an unreadable historical sign of the sort that dot
Paris, as though Haneke were underlining her absolute lack of connec
tion with Parisian history and thus with French culture in general. With
the drums still at full blast, she finally finds a suitable place to beg, but
her discomfort and shame are clear. But, beyond the obvious point of
an illegal immigrant's lack of a real "place" to be in this multicultural
world, it is difficult to discern the director's intention here. As the drums
continue, M aria is urged by area businessmen (or security guards) to
take her begging elsewhere.
The drums accompany Anne out of the metro, as the camera tracks to
the right, in the opposite direction from that taken by Maria, then Anne
walks head-on toward the camera before it resumes its side tracking shot.
She punches in the entrance code-now connu , at least to her-to what
seems like a new apartment building. Georges arrives in a cab, in the
pouring rain, and after buying her a gift in a fancy store-the drums are
still pounding away-tries the code but is unable to enter. Obviously,
for him, the new code remains inconnu . He goes to the other side of
the street to shout up to the window, thinks better of it, and then goes
to a payphone but apparently gets no response. He looks forlornly up at
the apartment, gives up, and then hails a cab while continuing to look
up, hopefully. When the image goes suddenly to black, the drums stop
suddenly as well.
The final scene of the film is an obvious bookend to the first one .
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87

impaired girl (or possibly a boy) is standing alone, making those animal
like noises, as in the opening scene, that deaf people sometimes make
that can upset hearing people. The child looks happy and is "talking"
away, but of course we haven't a clue what he or she is saying because
the code is unknown to us-Haneke provides no subtitles . Nothing is
translated, and we feel what it is like to be an outsider. We see no other
kids in this scene, which is much shorter than the opening scene and
more immediately, if ambiguously, expressive.
For the final time we cut to black and are told that we have just
watched "un film de Michael Haneke ." The artist signs his work, and
once again, art reigns supreme in this modernist world. When Cieutat
asked the director, in the context of a discussion of Code Unknown, if it
is true that "art is the only thing left as the last great refuge for man," the
latter responded without hesitation: "Yes, I think so. Art is the only thing
that can console us whatsoever! But spectators have to look for their
own responses wherever they are. It's useless if they find responses that
don't come from within. That can only give them a good conscience."

The Piano Teacher (2001 )

The Piano Teacher, Haneke's first and only literary adaptation among
his theatrically released films,9 is quite distant in tone and theme from
his earlier "glaciation trilogy" and differs significantly from his previ
ous French-language film, Code Unknown, as well. Based on a 1983
novel by the difficult and often angry Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek,
who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 2004, the film
generally follows the novel's plot, such as it is, as well as retaining all
of the principal characters and situations . In short, looked at from one
perspective, it is a remarkably faithful adaptation.
On the other hand, the novel itself is often so (purposely) irrational
and bizarre, reveling in its jumbled and contradictory depiction of its
characters' psychological motivation, that, owing to commercial and
even dramatic and narrative exigencies, the film-and this may come
as a surprise to the many who have been shocked by it-is, compared to
Jelinek's novel, quite tame, formally and in terms of its subject matter.
It's clear that this is not due to any reticence or fear of offending on
the part of the director. Rather, without access to the internal thoughts
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M i chael Haneke

of the characters , which is a given in fiction, many otherwise under

standable (if strange) gestures in the novel simply could not be taken
seriously if translated directly into the always external visuals of a film.
Nevertheless, the film retains enough of the exotic sadomasochism of its
source material to satisfY even the most jaded of art-film aficionados.
One of the apparently minor but illuminating differences between
the novel and the film is that in German, the novel's title is Die Klavier
spielerin (The [female] piano player) . In the English version, it's lmown
as The Piano Teacher, which is a more accurate description of the position
occupied by Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), its central character. (This
little change may also have indirect thematic import: in the novel, it is
clearly indicated that Erika has become a teacher because she has failed
as a concert pianist, but significantly, this is not mentioned in the film . )
Haneke has explained the film's title this way: "I was adapting the title
of Jelinek's book, which in the original is Die Klavierspielerin, or 'The
Piano Player,' which is a deliberately awkward title and an uncommon
term in German. This is to point to Erika's degraded situation. Pianisitin
[sic] is the German word for the female pianist, so the title of the novel
in German is a put-down suggesting Erika's crisis . The English transla
tion of the novel is The Piano Teacher, which isn't correct at all, and is of
course a little nonsensical and even more devaluing of the protagonist.
[In the French title of the film,] I left the German title of the book not
quite as it is, to give her more dignity, which is simply my approach to
the material" (Sharrett) .
Also, when Erika frequents the porno places i n which she watches
a live sex act (in the novel) or porn movies (in Haneke's film, for the
obvious self-reflexive reasons that we have seen the director employ in
earlier films), in the novel much is made of the fact that the men are
Turks . In fact, Jelinek seems obsessed by this situation, which is not
even mentioned in the film (though the visual evidence is there if one
thinks to look). It is quite possible that she intends this racist attention
to be a representation of what her fellow "good" Austrians would be
thinking, since her views in the rest of the book are clearly at least as
anti-Austrian as they could ever be construed as anti-Turk. In fact, as in
most of her novels, Jelinek's view of the human race, in all its ethnic or
national manifestations, is decidedly misanthropic-virtually everyone
in her books is a horrible person-and Haneke, for once seeking to
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modulate his attack on the viewer and on bourgeois conventions, wisely

soft-pedals Jelinek's obvious idiosyncrasies.
Haneke's adaptation has been called "pornographic, " and his re
sponse to this attack has allowed him to make an interesting, if some
what self-congratulatory, distinction between the pornographic and the
obscene that harkens back to earlier statements about the consumability
of violence and clearly links The Piano Teacher to his earlier work:
I would like to be recognized for malang in La Pianiste an obscenity,
but not a pornographic film . . . Whether concerned With sexuality or
violence or another taboo issue, anything that breaks with the norm is
obscene. Insofar as truth is always obscene, I hope that all of my films
have at least an element of obscenity.
By contrast, pornography is the opposite, in that it makes into a com
modity that which is obscene, makes the unusual consumable, which
is the truly scandalous aspect of porno rather than the traditional argu
ment posed by institutions of society It isn't the sexual aspect but the
commercial aspect of porno that makes it repulsive . I think that any
contemporary art practice is pornographic if it attempts to bandage the
wound, so to speak, which is to say our social and psychological wound.
Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propa
ganda films in that it tnes to make the VIsceral, horrific, or transgressive
elements of life consumable. Propaganda is far more pornographic than
a home video of two people fucking. ( Sharrett)

On a more formal level, Haneke's camera work in this film-including

the two or three extended tracking shots that recall Code Unknown-is
relatively straightforward, though occasionally he resorts to his earlier
technique of showing only body parts, rather than faces, so that we are
never sure whom we are seeing. This straightforward visual factuality
also serves as a kind of cinematic equivalent of Jelinek's short, usually
abrupt sentences that enforce a clinical feel throughout her story.
The other difference between the two versions is the most obvious:
given her medium, many of Jelinek's effects are achieved linguistically.
Her language often seems about to run off the tracks of logic and good
sense, and she freely mixes the literal and the metaphoric, as for example
when she describes Erika's unmotivated, surreptitious attacks on people
on a bus : "SHE kicks the right heel of an old woman. S H E is able to

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assign every phrase its preordained location. SHE alone can take every
sound and insert it in the right place, in its proper niche. SHE packs the
ignorance of these bleating lambs into her own scorn, using it to punish
them . Her body is one big refrigerator, where Art is well stored" (zo ) .
Elsewhere, a musical performance suddenly gets metaphorized into
a page-long description of ice skating: "Gathering speed, the skater is
compressed into herself by a gigantic fist: concentrated kinetic energy,
hurtling out at exactly the right split second into a microscopically precise
double axis, whirling around, landing right on the dot. The impact jolts
her through and through, charging her with at least double her own body
weight, and she forces that weight into the unyielding ice" ( 103) . And
so on. Haneke obviously doesn't have these linguistic resources at his
disposal, and it's unclear what a possible cinematic "translation" of such
devices might look like. Instead, what Haneke substitutes for Jelinek's
scandalous language is the scandalous presence of real bodies.
Haneke's film indicates a further shift in his own work regarding char
acter portrayal, with the characters of Code Unknown marking a kind of
transitional point between the social and the personal. In the director's
earliest theatrical films, people usually act the way they do because of the
social alienation that they experience, not because of their own individual
psychology. To some extent, this is still true in Code Unknown, though
the French setting and at least one well-known actress push the film
toward a greater focus on the characters' personal problems, especially
that of Anne (Juliette Binoche) . With The Piano Teacher, the shift to
individual character psychology seems almost complete in the person
of Erika, played brilliantly by Huppert.10
While the emphasis in Jelinek's novel is still to some extent on the
social sources of the characters' malaise, the critic Maximilian Le Cain is
right to say of the cinematic version of Erika that "while she is indubita
bly alienated, her angst stems not from being adrift in the depersonalised
void of the modem urban environment, but from being imprisoned in a
world of her own creation, governed by her own neurotic sensibility. . . .
For the first time [in Haneke's films ] , the emotional intensity of relation
ships is allowed to prevail over the more detachedly analytical question
of man's disconnectedness from his everyday reality." Yet Haneke has
insisted that Erika is not "crazy" in any conventional sense and that his
main objective is still social analysis : "'Obviously she's not mad, and
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that's obviously what's interesting about her. . . . In all my films, I use

extremes-be they incidents or behaviour-as a way to show what is
typical in our society. It is through these extreme cases that we can best
depict normality"' (qtd. in Morrow) .
When Christopher Sharrett asked the director if this is the film that
best represents his sensibility and development, he replied, "I wouldn't
say this, since the idea isn't mine but based on a novel, whereas my other
films come from my own ideas . . . . Of course, I chose the topic of La
Pianiste because I was very much drawn to it, and what I could bring
to this work. But in some ways it is a bit distant from me. For example,
I couldn't have written a novel on the subject of female sexuality." He
put it more succinctly to Scott Foundas : "I would say that my version
of looking at the story is pretty distanced and cool, while the novel itself
is almost angry and very emotional. The novel is much more subjective
and the film is much more objective."
Whatever its relation to its source material, Haneke's film is striking
and, for the average film goer, one presumes, even occasionally shocking.
Erika and her mother (Annie Girardot) , who sleep together in the same
bed at night, are locked in mortal combat, yet also emotionally code
pendent. Both film and book begin with a battle royale in which Erika
attacks her mother physically, literally pulling out clumps of her hair,
then, groveling at her feet, apologizing minutes later. In both versions,
the mother must, for her own psychological reasons, control Erika at all
costs, and the novel contains an occasional flashback on Erika's sexually
and emotionally stunted childhood.
Haneke's accent on the conflict within this dysfunctional family is
representative of a more encompassing view concerning the general
psychological unhealthiness of all family life. As he told Sharrett in an
uncompromising statement that deserves being quoted in full,
I wanted first of all to describe the bourgeois setting, and to establish the
family as the germinating cell for all conflicts . I always want to describe
the world that I know, and for me the family is the locus of the miniature
war, the first site of all warfare The larger political-economic site is
what one usually associates with warfare, but the everyday site of war
in the family is as murderous in its own way, whether between parents
and children or wife and husband . . . . I wanted to describe this in as

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detailed a way as I can, leaving to the VIewer to draw conclusions . The

cinema has tended to offer closure on such topics and to send people
home rather comforted and pacified. My objective is to unsettle the
viewer and to take away any consolation or self-satisfaction .

One of the film's two principal emotional battlegrounds having

thus been established right from the beginning, its opening credits
are interspersed throughout a series of piano lessons in which the
demanding E rika, under the guise of pedagogical rigor, takes obvious
pleasure in humiliating several young students . The perhaps purpose
ful linguistic confusion that is at the heart of the film-it's a German
language novel set in Vienna, yet the film's characters speak French,
though all the signage that surrounds them throughout the film is in
German-is foregrounded by Haneke from the start in that what is
being practiced is a German lied by Schubert, sung in German . Each
time we cut to new credits, simple small white capitals against a stark
black background, the music is abruptly cut off, and silence momen
tarily reigns .
We are soon introduced to Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel)-in
terestingly, and in a manner that presages what is to come-through the
grillwork of an elevator that separates him from Erika and her mother.
At least a decade younger than Erika, he will become the film's co-pro
tagonist, or antagonist, depending on your point of view, and will shortly
be engaged in intense emotional combat with the piano teacher and her
mother. Haneke has made him much more educated, sophisticated,
polite, and-most important-musically talented than Jelinek's Walter.
In his novelistic incarnation, his physical, athletic side (represented in
the film only in passing, via his membership in a hockey team) is much
more heavily emphasized, especially seen against E rika's perverse but
also idealized ideas about love and sex.
Haneke's changes to Walter's character actually go even further and
show the director in a surprisingly accessible, even commercial, light.
As he told the British critic Stuart Jeffries, '"In the novel Jelinek keeps
calling Klemmer an arsehole. You can do that in a novel but in a film
if you are told that a character is an arsehole, then in five seconds you
see how the picture is going to end. It was important to leave Walter as
an open character for possible identification"' (qtd. in Jeffries ) . Again,

The Films of Michael Haneke

93

a key question for Haneke, even in the context of literary adaptation, is

the manipulation of audience identification.
Similarly, the director has delineated the differences between his
and Jelinek's treatments of Walter in more specific terms by saying that
"the novel is written in a very cynical mode. The novel turns him from
a rather childish idiot into a fascist asshole . The film tries to make him
more interesting and attractive. In the film, the 'love affair,' which is
not so central to the novel, is more implicated in the mother-daughter
relationship. Walter only triggers the catastrophe. In the book, Walter
is a rather secondary character that I thought needed development to
the point that he could be a more plausible locus of the catastrophe"
( Sharrett). These somewhat self-contradictory comments clearly show
that Haneke's relationship to Jelinek is at best a quasi-adversarial one.
It should also be noted that for whatever strategic or polemical reasons
of his own, Haneke inaccurately describes Walter's status in the novel
as "a rather secondary character."
At their first meeting, Erika and Walter discuss Schumann and Schu
bert, and Erika asks whether Walter has read Adorno on Schumann's
"Fantasia in C M ajor," an essay that concerns Schumann's music just
before he fell into madness . 1 1 Haneke also uses a technique that we
have seen in his earlier films, especially in Code Unknown, of keeping
the camera resolutely on Erika, even though they are having a two-way
conversation, with not a single shot/reverse shot to mitigate the visual
intensity of focusing solely on her face, which remains utterly expression
less . Reaction shots are infrequent here and in the other later Haneke
films, perhaps as another way to distinguish his work from standard-issue
Hollywood fare.
Another Hanekean technique that reappears is one that was used
to particular advantage in Benny's Video : the extended sound bridge,
especially moving from a scene of banality or vulgarity to a scene in
which classical music is being played or sung, with obvious thematic
implications. Haneke uses this technique to move into and out of Erika's
first visit to the porn place, strangely (for Americans , at least) located in
some sort of shopping mall.
Once she enters the mall, Erika is followed by Haneke's familiar
tracking shot and finally settles into her private cabin to watch a lively
scene of fellatio on video. Apparently desirous of involving her other
94

M i c hael H a neke

senses as well in her erotic pleasure, she plucks a used tissue from an
adjacent waste basket to sniff while watching. This is followed by a
long audio bridge of a male voice singing a lied in German, which is
especially noteworthy juxtaposed with the moans and groans emanating
from the porn video. One can hardly imagine a better representation of
the contrast between the flesh and the spirit, between commercialized,
"consumable" sex, with its attendant bodily fluids, and sanitized high
culture . Interestingly, even more seems at stake in the novel, in which
Jelinek's narrator discusses the relation between porn films and other
films. Her narrator chillingly concludes that "in its supreme form, pain
is a variety of pleasure . Erika would gladly cross the border to her own
murder" ( 107). Matters are quite a bit less extreme in Haneke's film,
however-it seems strange to think of him as the conservative one-and
besides, Jelinek's narrator's remark may merely represent an aspect of
Erika's fantasy life, not a conscious wish.
Erika is up to more than just porno watching and semen sniffing,
however, and soon enough we are alone with her in the bathroom as she
sets about, in her characteristic workmanlike manner, to slash her geni
tals with a razorblade . An apparently intentional whiff of black humor is
added when we hear her mother, offscreen, calling her to dinner, while
her blood courses down the side of the bathtub. "Coming, mother!"
she chirpily replies, causing the audience to giggle. A few minutes later,
Erika's mother spots blood running down her leg, assumes that it's men
strual blood, and points out how disgusting it is .
A more lighthearted component, relatively speaking, of Erika's sado
masochism comes out when she finds one of her young male students in
a store perusing porn magazines with his friends. Later, during his piano
lesson, she continues to torment him about it in an ice-cold manner,
despite his apologies, suggesting that he bring his mother along with
him the next time.
In the meantime, the already highly accomplished Walter Klemmer
is accepted by the conservatory as her student, despite Erika's uncon
vincing, halfhearted objections to his admission to the program . Soon
enough, he confesses his love for her and again; owing to the necessary
simplifications inherent to the cinematic form, it all seems to be little
more than a matter of the standard crush students sometimes develop
toward teachers whose intellect and abilities they respect, rather than
The F i l m s of M ichael Haneke

95

the contradictory, even dangerous feelings that swirl between these two
figures in Jelinek's version.
Though Haneke has claimed that he has made Walter a more impor
tant character than he is in the novel, he has clearly decided to focus on
the scandalous sadomasochism of Erika rather than repeating Jelinek's
obvious loathing of Walter's animal vitality and self-assurance-in other
words, his sheer maleness ("She thinks he is referring to Schubert, but
he really means himself, just as he always means himself whenever he
speaks" [ 120] ) . In the film he comes off as a bit aggressive, certainly,
but also polished and even, at times, rather dashing. Despite rebuffing
his advances, Erika is clearly intrigued and follows him to his hockey
practice, which she watches from afar.
Her next transgressive act is to prowl a drive-in movie theater (rather
than the empty field ofVienna's famous Prater amusement park, as in the
novel) , looking for couples engaged in sex. This is an absolutely appro
priate substitution for the image-obsessed Haneke to make, especially
since it is accompanied by his trademark tracking shot. The cinematic
images of the drive-in are particularly impressive because they loom
gigantically, out of focus, behind her and seem to be making a silent
comment on the deleterious ubiquity of such artificially generated, eas
ily consumable images in our culture . After all, if many young people
go to the drive-in to have sex in the presence of these overwhelming
images, how different is the functioning of the porn video shop she has
earlier visited? (As Jacques Lacan might point out, the image is now
gazing at the spectator-as it always has been. ) After finding a couple
making love, she looks in the car window and, while listening to their
moaning, decides to urinate between the cars . (In the movie it is implied
that this is her rather offbeat response to her own sexual stimulation,
whereas the book makes it clear on several occasions that her urination
is involuntary, something that, in these situations, she can't control. )
When she is spotted by the young man in the car, h e takes off after her,
but she escapes.
Another display of an overtly sadistic act arises from the jealousy
Erika experiences when Walter shows kindness to a promising female
student whom Erika has, perversely, been particularly mean to, despite
the student's talent and devotion to her. The student, who is to accom
pany the male lieder singer in a concert, is so upset by Erika's criticism
96

M i c hael Ha neke

that her diarrhea keeps her from performing, but Walter cheers her up
enough to enable her to go on stage. Haneke keeps the camera fixed
on Erika's expressionless face for the longest time, as she listens to the
music the girl is playing while considering what action to take. Finally
she decides to break up a glass and put the dangerous pieces in the coat
pocket of her perceived rival for Walter's attention. When, at the end of
the concert, the girl's scream is heard offscreen (in an efficient Hitch
cockian moment), Erika plays the innocent with complete aplomb .
Owing to her urinary compulsion at moments of stress (as explained
in the novel) , she heads to a bathroom (which is spare and antiseptic in
the film, disgustingly filthy in the novel) , followed by Walter, who tries
to overwhelm her with passionate kisses, to which she only partially re
sponds. Clearly, she wants to humiliate him by controlling every aspect of
the sexual situation, though some will perhaps see her actions as reclaim
ing a balance of power in a relationship that, under patriarchy, is always
by definition unequal. Thus, she pulls his zipper down and masturbates
him, but she won't let him kiss her and tells him that if he moves even
slightly, she will leave. As one of my students pointed out, this is a kind

Figure 11 . The first

sexual encounter
of Erika (Isabelle
Huppert) and Walter
(Benoit Magimel ) ,
in t h e music
conservatory
men's room , in
The Piano Teacher.

The Films of Michael Haneke

97

of (at least symbolic) rape of Walter that parallels the real one that he
will inflict on Erika later in the film.
Walter, obviously none too happy about having lost all power in the
situation, also complains that she is hurting him . She kneels for fellatio,
but all that we witness, from his waist up, are his contradictory reactions
of pleasure and unease. She tells him that she will give him a letter in
which all of her "instructions" will be made clear and then refuses to fin
ish masturbating him. Nor will she let him continue on his own-though
she insists that he keep his penis out while facing her-and then finally
goes back to coldly masturbating him again. By the end of this bizarre
sexual encounter, Walter laughs, playfully smacks her and, demonstrating
that this normal young man hasn't a clue as to what has just happened,
promises that their lovemaking "will go better next time."
At their next (musical) practice session, Erika gives Walter the letter
of sexual instruction, while he continues to entertain the illusion that she
is interested in a conventional love affair and begs to kiss her neck. When
he asks her to "loosen up," she replies, "I have no emotions, Walter, and
if I do, they will never defeat my intelligence."
Later that night (or, possibly, another night), Walter accosts Erika in
the hallway of her apartment building. She dismisses him, but he won't
go away, and Erika allows him, despite her mother's strong objections, to
enter their apartment. Erika insists he read the letter, full of its precise
directions as to how he is to beat, humiliate, and lock her up, while her
mother frets in front of the television in the next room, afraid that she
is going to lose her dominance over Erika.
Repelled by her requests , Walter nevertheless tries to initiate the
conventional lovemaking that he is familiar with and unreasonably
continues to expect, while she demonstrates the sadomasochistic sex
equipment that she has collected for their use. "Do I disgust you?" she
asks . "The urge to be beaten has been in me for years . From now on,
it's you who gives the orders . You will choose what I will wear." This
neat reversal is Haneke's tidy dramaturgical way of translating Jelinek's
internally expressed realization that E rika's method of maintaining
complete control is by insisting that she be reduced to utter power
lessness . ("Did he get it right: By becoming her master, he can never
become her master? So long as she dictates what he should do to her,
some final remnant of E rika will remain unfathomable" [Jelinek 2 1 6] . )
98

Michael H aneke

Walter's response to Erika can only be that of the bourgeois he is: "You
are sick. You need treatment ." "Hit me if you want," she pleads . " I
wouldn't touch someone like you even with gloves ," he replies . "Right
now you repulse me, though I loved you ."
Once Walter has left, Erika, presumably aroused after she has retired
to bed with her mother, begins kissing her wildly while sobbing like a
wounded animal. Recoiling, her mother tells her that she is completely
crazy. "I saw your pubic hair," Erika informs her by way of response, a
line that clearly represents Haneke's bid to vie, at least occasionally, with
Jelinek (who speaks of the same thing in this scene, though as part of
the narrator's third-person internal discourse rather than in the spoken
dialogue) in pursuing the sexually transgressive .
In a scene set in the equipment room of Walter's hockey team, a
scene added by Han eke that nicely parallels their first sexual encounter
in the bathroom, Erika takes a completely different tack. Apologizing for
the shock of the letter, she says that she now realizes that they should
have talked it over first. Begging his forgiveness, desperately pledging
her love for him (presumably the "normal" kind of love that he has been

Figure 1 2 . Erika (Isabelle Huppert) pleads

with Walter (Benoit Mag1mel) for sex
in his locker room in The Piano Teacher.

The F i l m s of M ichael Haneke

99

seeking), she wildly digs at his pants in search of his penis, while the
ever-conventional Walter worries about being discovered.
He is still fully dressed in his massively padded hockey uniform ,
and this fact plus the expressive mise-en-scene-a plethora of hockey
equipment that surrounds them-bizarrely and brilliantly adds to the
incongruousness and power of the scene. Given the arrangement of the
thrusting bodies, Walter seems to be plunging his penis into her mouth,
though it can't be clearly seen. Her response is to throw up violently
(the novel speaks of her "gorge rising") . Stung by what he takes as yet
another rejection of his offer of "normal" sex, Walter launches into a
tirade about how disgusting she smells, as she becomes more and more
abased. "You need to wash your mouth more often, not just when my
cock makes you sick," he tells her. Is she genuinely humiliated, against
her will, or, given the proclivities she has expressed orally and in the
letter, is this humiliation precisely what she seeks from him? This will
become, in a certain sense, the central question of the entire film.
In the penultimate scene of the film (at this point Haneke, probably
wisely, omits two scenes from the novel, one in which Erika puts clothes
pins and sharp pins on and into her skin and another-which parallels
Erika's earlier nighttime foray into the Prater-in which Walter goes look
ing for an animal to kill in order to express his frustration), E rika is in bed
with her mother when Walter begins impatiently ringing the doorbell.
Once inside the apartment, he informs Erika that he was masturbating
under her window and expresses his humiliation at having been reduced
to that. Unfortunately, this is another example of a moment in which the
movie, by following the book, demonstrates its courage and power but
also comes off, especially in terms of character motivation, as inexplicable
and illogical, because we aren't privy to Jelinek's complicated (and often
contradictory) verbal descriptions of the characters' mental processes.
Still obviously upset by the contents of Erika's letter, Walter locks up
her mother in the bedroom and begins smacking Erika around, ultimately
breaking her nose. JustifYing his actions, he angrily quotes from the let
ter of "instructions," but now she pleads for him not to hit her, claiming
that she was completely wrong and that she has now changed her mind
about what she wants from him. But is she being honest here-whatever
being "honest" might mean-or is this an indirect way of manipulating
the angry Walter to pleasure her by beating her up? Is she powerless at
1 00

M ichael Haneke

Figure 1 3 . Walter deals with h1s other adversary,

Erika's mother (Annie Girardot) , as Erika (Isabelle
Huppert) looks on in The Piano Teacher.

this point, or all-powerful? When her breast is revealed, he says, "Don't

show me your disgusting body."
Walter gets Erika to admit that she is "partly responsible" for what is
happening, because "you can't get a guy all excited then put him on ice.
We can't just play by your rules. You can't delve around inside people
then reject them." At first feigning affection, or perhaps feeling it after
his own fashion, Walter soon turns toward rape as the quickest way to
make himself feel better. She begs him to stop, while he simply demands
that she love him and continues to thrust away as she remains limp. At
this point, audience sympathy, presumably, is fully against Walter. But
could it not also be the case that Erika's convincing expression of her
fear of being hurt is accomplishing exactly what she really desires? After
he's finished, he warns her not to tell anyone, since it's for her own good
anyway: "You can't just humiliate a guy." Oh, and, 'Will you be all right?"
he gently asks, bewilderingly reversing course. "Do you need anything?
You know, love isn't everything."
In the final scene, the next morning, Erika picks up a knife from
the kitchen as she and her mother get ready to go to the concert in

The Films of M ichael Haneke

1 01

which E rika will substitute for the girl whose hand she is responsible
for cruelly maiming. At the conservatory, Erika seems to be looking for
Walter, who finally bounces up, in supremely happy fashion, with a group
of friends . Now alone, E rika cries softly and suddenly stabs herself in
the shoulder, causing a wound whose blood spreads across her light
colored blouse. ( In the novel, Jelinek mentions several times that Erika
has no idea whether she is going to stab Walter [significantly, in front of
the engineering school, where he began his studies , rather than at the
conservatory] or not, right up until the last minute. )
I n the eyes o f this viewer, at least-though obviously other readings
may be equally plausible-this act of self-mutilation provides a retroac
tive explanation of what has occurred the previous night. She is, in fact,
still in thrall to her masochistic desires-perhaps in order to escape the
emotional domination of her mother that has stunted her life-and thus
it makes sense to read Walter's assault and rape as intentionally induced
by Erika and as producing exactly the effect she was aiming for. (In at
least one interview, Haneke refuses to say whether E rika "gets what she
wants at the end of the film," though several commentators have simply
assumed that she has been sexually violated against her will. )
The second-to-last shot o f the film foregrounds the symmetry o f two
different sets of doors leading to the interior concert space, as though to
reestablish a kind of classical order akin to that of classical music-say,
that of Haydn or Mozart-above the irrational level of human passion.
Then the very last shot does the same thing, but now outside, as the cars
whiz by the beautifully lighted entrance and grillwork, their drivers and
passengers unconscious of the "illicit," irrational human desires that have
just been enacted inside . As always, it's purposely unclear, but Haneke
seems to be saying that E rika has come full-circle and has achieved at
least part of what she has been searching for all along.
So what does it all add up to? As Sharrett directly asked the direc
tor, are "sexual relationships . . . impossible under the assumptions of
the current society?" "We are all damaged," replied Haneke, "but not
every relationship is played out in the extreme scenario of E rika and
Walter. Not everyone is as neurotic as Erika. It's a common truth that
we are not a society of happy people, and this is a reality I describe, but
I would not say that sexual health is impossible." On the basis of the

1 02

Michael H aneke

evidence provided by The Piano Teacher, however, Haneke's sentiment

seems more wishful thinking than reality.

Time of the Wolf (2003)

Time ofthe Wolf ( Le Temps du loup ) , like Haneke's two previous films,
is in French (for the most part) and presumably, like Code Unknown,
set in France, though neither the name of that country nor the name of
"the city" (as it's occasionally referred to) is ever mentioned in the film .
Conceived some years earlier than The Piano Teacher, the success of the
latter film finally allowed Haneke to obtain funding to make it.
Its plot is basic, nearly nonexistent: Adrift among strangers, a family
comprised of a mother named, as usual, Anne (Isabelle Huppert), and
her two children, Eva and Benny, struggles to survive after an apparently
apocalyptic but never-explained "event." With the elimination of all back
story and the intentional vagueness of its conflicts-or rather their reduc
tion to one simple and all-consuming conflict, survival-the film remains,
intentionally or not, emotionally abstract and largely uninvolving.
To my mind, the basic difficulty with the film, which remains nev
ertheless quite interesting in formal terms, is encapsulated in Haneke's
remarks in the interview included on the DVD: "I didn't want to make
another disaster film, but a very personal film about interhuman behavior.
Especially if now you tum on the Tv, in every newscast you see a little bit
of the end of the world. But it's always far away, affecting other people.
And I wanted to do a film for our superfluous society, which feels good
and comfortable, which is watching the end of the world on TV because
it's far away. And to give a taste of what it would feel like if it happened
to you." Guided by this quotation, it is possible to say that Time of the
Wolf is a good if negative example of what happens when a director's
ongoing, obsessive desire to condemn a society, especially in terms of its
representation in the media, overrides all other considerations.
Visually, it is a return of sorts to the rigorous formal abstraction of
the earlier films, unlike, say, Code Unknown, whose frame is generally
jammed with "stuff," but stuff that is arranged in no particular logical
spatial order. Yet precisely because of its atmosphere of never-specified
crisis and its back-to-basics survival mode, the film also avoids a repre-

The Films of Michae l Haneke

1 03

sentation of the plethora of manufactured objects that oppressed the

characters, and us, in the films of the "glaciation trilogy." It is precisely
its chilling depiction of a world empty of these objects that gives Time
of the Wolf the quiet power it indubitably contains.
Lighting contributes heavily to this sense of minimalist abstraction.
From beginning to end, chiaroscuro rules, as though Haneke had the
painters Caravaggio or, better perhaps, Georges de la Tour, in mind
when he designed the look of the film. Virtually every scene is cast either
in almost total darkness (often illuminated by a painterly single-light
source, like the shrouded candles employed by de la Tour) or in full, if
not blinding, light.
One effect of this visual dichotomy is to formally embody the black
and-white themes of good and evil that structure the film intellectually.
This stark binary is visually embodied in the standard Haneke film credits,
which are cast as simple, small white letters against a black background,
with no music or other sound to mitigate the intensity of the visual ab
straction thrust before us . The title is itself expressive. Indeed, the time
in which our characters are living is not the time of "humanity" but the
time of the wolf, when danger lurks everywhere and humans have been
reduced to a brute animal existence.
The opening scene of the film is strongly reminiscent of the opening
of Funny Games, with a bourgeois, nuclear family, in their van, mov
ing quietly through the countryside (here represented by a close-up of
tree trunks, which will become a frequent visual motif in the film) and
then pulling up in front of their vacation place . Once they enter, they
are accosted by a semicrazed man with a gun, intent on protecting his
own family, apparently driven to madness by some disaster that has
occurred but about which we learn nothing. As in Funny Games, the
just-arrived, middle-class, eminently reasonable father tries to negoti
ate logically with the interlopers-in the process, he even invokes the
sacred bourgeois principle of private property-but this time around
he is almost immediately killed.
This nuclear family doesn't seem to have the slightest idea concern
ing the reason for the sudden violence, yet Anne's relatively subdued
response hints that maybe they do understand and that the unnamed,
even unmentioned "event" is the reason they have left "the city" for their
vacation home in the first place. (The ever-reticent Haneke gives us no
1 04

M i chael Haneke

narrative help here . ) Dad is shot point-blank, but, as usual, we don't

actually see him shot; rather, we cut quickly away to several different
reaction shots of the children outside-if such utterly blank faces can
be said to be "reacting"-followed by a close-up of Anne, as we hear
the murderer's wife screaming on the sound track. Anne, casually or in
a state of shock, wipes her face of the blood that has splashed from her
husband's wound, then vomits .
The next shot, the first of many perfectly framed, purposely over-aes
theticized picture-book images, is an extreme long shot that is bisected
horizontally, with the road in the middle, green grass in the front, lower
half, and the trees and blue sky occupying the upper half. These aggres
sively beautiful, artificially composed, and frequently repeated images
seem to represent the perfection that resides in a purely aesthetic world,
one that is so far from the reality that exists just below the thin veneer
of human civilization in this "time of the wolf' and thus, by extension,
during all times and places . (Or are these images an expression of uncor
rupted nature-the opposite pole of another binary opposition that has
nothing to do with the self-destructive activities of human beings?) A
distant, unrecognizable figure, probably Anne, moves along the road.
Anne seeks help from others and, as in many Haneke films, is re
peatedly turned down. The director seems to be suggesting that when
human beings are reduced to survival mode, little of the "human" re
mains. (The animal world, represented by Benny's green canary and the
horses that are shot for meat, comes in for even more punishment and
bewilderment. In other scenes, their maggot-ridden bodies are strewn
about the landscape. )
Much o f what immediately follows takes place in areas of total dark
ness that are occasionally punctuated by strong lighting from huge blazes.
These immense fires carry their own symbolic freight of apocalypse, de
struction, and damnation, as well as a kind of "visual violence" that subtly
affects the viewer. These vivid contrasts are replicated on the aural track
as well, where a complete lack of dialogue, along with diminished sound
effects, alternates with moments of violent, anonymous screaming.
Sometimes the particularly picturesque visuals feature a gray, foggy
atmosphere, a kind of luminal visibility that mitigates the binary qual
ity that otherwise predominates . In several highly aestheticized shots,
instead of the normally bright, sunny day (which itself is in ironic counThe F i l m s of M ichael Haneke

1 05

terpoint to the situation that the humans find themselves in and attests
once again to the indifference of nature to human suffering) , what we
see instead through a miasmic fog is, apparently, a series of farm build
ings. We cut among different structures, but all remains indistinct. This
particular series of shots is followed by an extreme long shot, from the
end of a deserted road, in which we see the three members of the fam
ily struggling along their journey to nowhere. What is emphasized once
again is their isolation yet at the same time, like the famous shot in the
fog in Antonioni's Red Desert ( 1964), the indistinctness of borders of any
kind, including the one between self and other, or self and nonself.
Despite the brusque brutality shown by most of the people that
Anne and her children encounter in their wandering, some are more
caring. Mr. Azoulay, the most humane and sensitive character of all, is
played by the Arab-French actor Maurice Benichou, who had a small
but crucial role in Code Unknown as the older Arab man who defends
Anne on the metro and who plays an even more salient part in Cache.
In addition to the kindness that emanates from a character like Mr.
Azoulay, however, in this film Haneke seems to show a greater respect
for family bonds than in any of his other films. Looked at negatively, this
might signifY that in survival mode, your family is the only thing you can
count on, but Anne shows a consistent, powerful concern for her children
that seems to be positively affirmed and that belies Haneke's negative
comments about the family as the embodiment if not the source of all
human conflict that was quoted in the previous section.
In fact, her entire motivation or "character psychology" throughout
the film seems to stem from her desire to protect her family. Perhaps
the most powerful expression of this atavistic familial bond comes in
the scene in which Benny disappears, a sequence that begins with a
gorgeous, painterly shot through a window, illuminated by the luscious
dark blue light that proliferated in Haneke's early films. The mother and
daughter are desperate to keep the fire going, with the aid of a failing
cigarette lighter, because otherwise they will never again find Benny nor
each other in the total darkness. Even this emotionally wrought, frantic
moment is counterpointed with the beautiful illumination emanating
from the fire, which creates red and gold highlight effects . "Eva, je
t'aime," says Anne, feelingly.
It is at this moment, perhaps, that Haneke's core theme of "human1 06

M i c hael Haneke

ism," as he would put it, is expressed. As he says in the DVD interview,

"I try in all my films to be a 'humanist' because I think if one is seriously
interested in art, you can't do it any other way. Humanism is the sine
qua non . Art cannot exist without humanism; it would be a contradic
tion . It's the most important reason for working. Communication is
also a humanistic act. Refusing to communicate is a terrorist act that
provokes violence . " Thus, all of H aneke's themes and obsessions
humanity, communication (and its lack), art, violence-come together
in one simple equation .
After a cut t o extreme darkness once again, as Anne hopefully asks
the shadows, "Is someone there?" another sudden cut takes us to the
site of a raging inferno, as Eva has carelessly allowed the bam to catch
fire. Though they argue about whose fault it is, and both are emotionally
upset, Anne, ever the conscientious mother, tries to succor her daughter
and not to blame her for the mishap.
Benny is returned by a wild child who suddenly materializes after the
bam has burned down. The Hanekean night blue prevails once again,
and the unknown, unkempt boy asks what the family will give him in
return if he gives them some of his precious water. Money is now worth
less in this perforce barter economy. The next day, while Anne is treating
the dog bite on the newcomer's hand, he speaks of a train station where
one can bribe the personnel to be permitted entry. Thenceforth this
station becomes their goal and, once they reach it, the locus of the rest

Figure 1 4 . The Wild Child (Hakim Taleb) is tended

to by Anne (Isabelle H uppert) in Time of the Wolf.

The Films of M ichael Haneke

1 07

of the film . At least one extreme long shot of the train tracks stretching
into the distance is isolating-and thus alienating-and also beautiful,
a tension the director works throughout. When a train does pass them,
they chase after it, but to no avail.
Once they reach the station, the multicultural, multilingual dynamics
of Code Unknown, along with the attendant conflict, prevail. Some of the
station's inhabitants speak in Eastern European languages and!or broken
French, others in native or lightly accented but fluent French. The chiar
oscuro lighting effects return in this interior that also has an exterior, to
which its denizens frequently repair, continuing the binary logic of the
film. It is clear that the rules for civilized life and the maintenance of one's
humanity will be under great stress in this unaccustomed situation.
A mystical or mythical element appears when the friendly Bea (Bri
gitte Rouan, a film director in her own right) explains to Anne the ex
istence of "the Just," a group fixed at thirty-six members who "assure
that God will protect us." Bea's111question is whether the tough-guy camp
organizer Koslowski (Olivier Gourmet, a Belgian actor who appears of
ten in the films of the Dardennes brothers) is a member of that group.
Later in the film, another man babbles about the Just and "the sacrifices
they make for us. Their job is to keep the old ball spinning? But when
there are fewer than thirty-six, everything is thrown out of whack. Let's
make another group." "The real champions of world redemption," he
concludes , "are my Brothers of Fire." Though neither mythic group is
mentioned again in the course of the film, here they seem to be invoked
to demonstrate how humans naturally tum toward myth and the propitia
tion of a constructed divinity, in severely difficult times, to understand
what is happening to them and how to remedy their situation.
Arguments ensue concerning the best course of action, in a desul
tory, vague fashion that faintly resembles the debates between Estragon
and Vladimir in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. On his portable
radio, Azoulay hears vague news reports about "the situation," while Lise
Brandt ( Beatrice Daile) suddenly starts screaming at a woman who has
been praying obsessively since her husband was hit by a train. Finally,
Lise's husband Thomas (Patrice Chereau) slaps Lise, and she apologizes.
(The fact that Chereau is also a film director, like Brigitte Rouan, may
be simply an accident of casting or Haneke's tongue-in-cheek attempt

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M i c h a e l Haneke

at self-reflexivity. ) Anne breaks down and appeals to them to stop their

bickering for the sake of the children.
A major subplot in the film now begins to unfold, concerning the
relation of Eva and the "wild child" (Hakim Taleb ), who is never named.
He tells her about having to kill his dog after the dog bit him . Eva tries
to care for the young boy, but their tentative attempts at intimacy and
communication are crushed by the cruel environment into which they've
been thrust, a theme, in its most general outlines, that has preoccupied
Haneke since the beginning of his career. All that Eva gets in return is
a "whatever you want" when she is looking for a "thank you," but the
wild child does finally give her a pair of glasses in exchange for taking
care of him . We later witness the barter system in its most basic form
when a woman inside the station, speaking a foreign language, begs for
water in exchange for sex.
Haneke next employs an interesting narrative technique that carries
its own unique emotional resonance . Eva begins writing a letter to her
dead father, which provides a useful summary overview of all that hap
pens in the makeshift camp-without having to take the trouble to dra
matize it-as well as an index to the inner psychological state of at least
one character. (A similar technique is used in The Seventh Continent,
in the letters to the grandparents . ) In the course of narrating this letter
in voiceover, Eva narrates the story of the film as well. Thus she reports
on the state of the family, providing a day-to-day summary of their lives,
and informs her dead father, and us, that she "writes to understand it all
herself." Simultaneously we see unconnected scenes of destruction that
remind us of the strong images that mark the "glaciation trilogy." Her
voice suddenly stops, and we get a picture of the forest (continuing the
motif of the strongly fore grounded individual trees , perhaps a signifier
for the confusion that reigns), including the work detail that she is, in
a way, silently explaining in voiceover. In a sense, what happens next is
produced narratively from her letter.
We (barely) see someone sobbing in the dark, babbling in a language
that is not translated by subtitles . It's typical and thematically important
for Haneke to allot so much time to this kind of incomprehensibility. The
voices and cries themselves, though empty of meaningful content, are
expressive in their own right-and thus they communicate almost like

The F i l m s of M ichael Haneke

1 09

a strange song or chant, or like the drums played by the deaf people at
the end of Code Unknown. Tiny lights appear in the upper right-hand
comer of the frame, as the unintelligible voice dies out.
Extending the system of strong contrasts on which the film is built,
next comes a sudden cut to the bustling activity of a group of determined
men carrying things onto the abandoned train car that occupies the track,
while fires bum all around. A system by which men and women take
baths at different times is established, demonstrating that the incipient
anarchy has not yet manifested itself and that a thin layer of civilization
still holds . The men plan, surreptitiously, to kill the water sellers' horses
the next day, for dinner.
Fights inevitably break out, and often, as in many internecine con
flicts, they are based on things that have happened earlier and elsewhere.
Thus the "Polacks" are attacked, first verbally, then physically, by a man
obviously carrying a specific grudge from a previous encounter. (Similar
scenes return several times later in the film.) Haneke's wandering camera
keeps returning to an old man who can't speak French, who gives his
wife something to drink while Anne watches. Then Eva and Anne hear
the unmistakable strains of classical music, a rather obvious signifier, it
must be admitted, of the threatened but defiantly inextinguishable voice
of "civilization" that Haneke has had recourse to in earlier films. (One is
grateful that it is not the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
or Pachelbel's "Canon in D M ajor"; the director is too sophisticated for
that . ) Later Eva questions the young man, who rewinds the audio tape
with his finger to save the dying battery, about the music.
When daytime comes, we are once again treated to a beautifully pho
tographed extreme long shot, this time of a green and white building in
the middle of a perfectly bisected image, green grass in front, blue sky on
top, that bears an exact structural relation, in its embodiment of perfection
and abstraction, to earlier still shots that were primarily of natural objects.
The grass blows, gorgeously, in the wind. These shots seem to represent a
kind of ideal, classical stasis (like the final shots of the classical building in
The Piano Teacher) that has been lost in the current mode of survival and
a precarious civilization. Significantly, they rarely include human beings.
Inside, people go about their everyday business, as during every other
natural or manmade disaster: a woman suckles an infant, a man shaves,
and another man reattaches his false leg.
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Michael Haneke

Suddenly, a screaming match (another instance of Haneke's use of

quick and unexpected change in dynamic range) breaks out between
Anne and the man who has killed her husband, or at least who she thinks
has killed him . An apparently self-appointed leader tells Anne that he
can't do anything in the absence of proof. While they argue, we see the
horses slaughtered for their meat in an extremely graphic manner, as
though to make manifest the potential violence that is coagulating, just
below the surface, within the humans. Rain follows, looking a little like
blood, as the horses run aimlessly to and fro. Eva desperately looks for
her little brother, and once she finds him shivering under a train car,
she protects him with a cover and hugs him . Obviously, at least on a
familial level, the best and most "humanistic" impulses have yet to be
eliminated. Later, Eva and Anne embrace as well.
It turns out that the nameless wild child was actually responsible for
stealing a goat, a theft attributed to the "Polack," a misattribution that
almost gets the man killed, and Eva upbraids the child for not coming
forward. In a psychological breakthrough, a victory for values and civil
ity, the child actually says he is sorry. We then learn that another girl,
the daughter of M . Azoulay, has committed suicide, and after a power
ful shot of her naked body being washed for burial (a sight witnessed
by Benny) , her bereaved father distributes her clothes . We cut to the
close shot of the dense tree trunks for the third or fourth time, and we
watch as the wild child has to kill the goat to keep it from bleating, thus
revealing his hiding place to the men who are looking for him and the
goat. Eva, now disgusted by her potential companion, says, "I thought
you could help me, but you ruin everything."
Night falls again, continuing an alternating rhythmic and elemental
pattern of day and night, dark and light, that structures the entire film .
In a scene with powerful ritualistic overtones, among the most visually
striking images in the illm, we see Benny walking toward a fire, his mouth
smeared with blood, almost as though in a trance. He stares at this fire
that bums on the track, then throws brush on it to make it bum brighter.
In a strongly composed image, he stands at the far left of the frame, while
the fire blazes on the right.
Perhaps in emulation of the burial rites for the young suicide that
he has just witnessed, he takes off his jacket. After a cut to a very dark
shot, then an extreme long shot of the fire, we see Benny standing in
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111

front of it as he begins to take all of his clothes off, apparently readying

himself to jump into the flames . A unknown man shouts at him and
begins to approach, but the skittish boy moves closer and closer to the
flames . Finally, the man tricks Benny into looking away and is able to
grab him in time to prevent another suicide.
He asks Benny where his parents are, as the camera pulls slowly
back into an extreme long shot that rivals the aesthetic and emotional
power of anything we have seen thus far. "You were ready to do it, that's
enough," he tells Benny comfortingly. "Maybe tomorrow a big car will
come and a guy will get out and say everything will be all right and
we'll eat roasted pigeon and maybe the dead will come back to life." By
this point, the camera has pulled back and up, from which position it
seems to assume an almost godlike perspective . "It's enough that you
were ready to do it. Don't worry. I'll tell everybody about it," the man
assures Benny, apparently convinced that what is principally at stake
for Benny is some species of male honor. Since the scene is so heavily
foregrounded, yet the thoughts seem so alien to Haneke's worldview,
it's difficult to know where the director stands at this climactic moment
of the film .
A sudden cut takes us inside a speedily moving train on a bright and
beautiful day, from which we see the lovely green countryside. We have

Figure 1 5 . Benny (Lucas Biscombe) approaches

the apocalyptic fire in Time of the Wolf.

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M ichael Haneke

no idea who is running the train or where it is going. And whose point of
view is being represented here? It is impossible to say, as there are no re
verse shots that would reveal the source of the gaze. It's another instance
of the signature Haneke tracking shot, now moving more quickly than
ever but not following anything human or even animal, for that matter.
It's as though the humans have all been saved and are elsewhere, or they
have all been wiped out. As far as nature is concerned-the nature we
have seen throughout the film in those perfect, impossible shots-it's all
the same. The only sound we hear is the rhythmic clicking of the train
on the tracks . There is a sudden cut to black, and the film ends .

Cache (zoos)
Cache begins with what has quickly become known as one of the most
striking openings in cinematic history. An unexceptional, rigorously sta
tionary shot of a nondescript house in Paris, partially hidden by the usual,
ubiquitous string of parked cars, holds for what seems an unconscionably
long time. Most importantly, and most annoyingly (or fascinatingly) for
the audience, the shot seems completely unmotivated. Who is looking
and why?
The first thing that alters the image is a highly imaginative credit
sequence that lists all we need to know, including the film's title and
entire cast and crew, in an innovative, additive (rather than substitutive)
presentation of information, all of which remains onscreen throughout
the sequence . Since everything is added and nothing removed, the ef
fect is to accentuate even further the stationary quality of the single,
nonmoving image that provides the background for the credits . When
the credits finally disappear, the camera nevertheless remains utterly
still. Our earlier and continuing makeshift assumption that it's simply a
shot offered from the point of view of the director's camera begins to
seem doubtful.
We hear only ambient, natural sounds , like the chirping of birds .
A young woman, perhaps Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche, playing yet
another Anne) , leaves the house, and a few seconds later a man whizzes
by on a bicycle . The static shot that remains is primarily composed of
strong vertical and horizontal lines, with little that is round or amorphous
in shape. Suddenly we hear unattributed voices talking about the image.
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113

"Well?" a man's voice says. "Nothing," replies a woman . "Where was

it?" he asks . "In a plastic bag in the door," is the reply. The result of this
exchange is a radical but unintelligible division between the apparently
stuck image that we can't seem to get rid of and these unidentified voices
whose bodies we can't see.
The woman asks, 'What's wrong?" We cut to a closer shot of cars and
finally see those who will become the principal protagonists, Georges
Laurent (Daniel Auteuil, playing one more Georges) and Anne Laurent,
emerging from the house and walking between the parked cars. It's from
a different, closer angle and is presumably a "live" shot from the point
of view of the filmmakers, or rather the film called Cache, as opposed to
the videotape within the film that Georges and Anne, and we, have been
watching. But we can never be sure, and the definitive source or context
of any given represented visual field, as with Benny's Video, Funny Games,
and Code Unknown, will be forever occluded. How can we tell the dif
ference between the "intentional" Haneke footage (the film Cache) and
the videotape footage produced within the diegesis of that film, especially
since both are shot with a big digital camera? Haneke has returned to a
favorite topos, the relation of reality and visual representation.
As the camera pans across the street, following Georges as he seeks
(apparently) to determine whence the original shot was taken, we see
a street sign naming the Rue des Iris, which, according to my Parisian
street map, places it in the Thirteenth Arrondissement and adds fur
ther to the "authenticity" of this shot, at least in terms of its claim to be
representing a pro-filmic "real" space. A complete, "realistic" world is
formed by suturing the visual and sound tracks: the panning camera head
shows Georges speaking as we hear his words, thus lending metalevel
credibility to this particular shot.
We cut back to the original shot (we haven't yet learned that it's a
videotape ), accompanied by their discussion, in voiceover, about what
to do with it. A bit of sound editing allows us to hear them moving from
one room into the other, "closer" to the image on the screen, and then
suddenly we see the fast-forward lines and find out from Anne that
the entire videotape-which we understand to be so, for the first time,
because of the lines-lasts two hours .
When they spot Georges leaving the house on the video, Georges
and Anne rewind and then play the tape at a normal speed, stopping it in
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Michael Haneke

freeze frame, while entertaining various hypotheses as to its provenance.

(The idea of rewinding itself recalls themes from previous Haneke films,
such as the rewinding of the tapes in Benny's Video, making the violence
they contain, according to Haneke, more "consumable," and the meta
level, self-reflexive rewinding of Funny Games that reverses the entire
narrative.) We then cut to a metashot of them watching the tape in the
quasi-darkness. Naturally, the audience begins to be affected, like the
Laurents with whom viewers are starting to identifY, with the sense of
violation that comes from being watched. As we watch the video intently
along with them, we too become investigators of the image (like Georges
and Anne) but also voyeurs (like the maker of the tape) as we stare,
fascinated, at the video recording their lives. The film analyst watching
Cache on DVD, rewinding, fast forwarding, and pausing in freeze frame,
is of course replicating the same actions as the Laurents, furthering the
chain of the mise-en-abfme that Haneke plays with here.
The walls of the Laurents' comfortable dining room are covered with
books (reminiscent of the pretelevisual epistemological order that obtained
in the apartment in Benny 's Video), as is the set for Georges's television
program, which ironically and perhaps anachronistically concerns books.
Here on the studio set, however-underlining and complicating the film's
theme of the real versus the represented-the books are all fake.

Figure 1 6 . Georges ( Daniel Auteuil)

moderates his book-discussion show
in front of a fake set in Cache.

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115

The next time we see a video, or what we learn is a video (we are
never told right away), is at night. The shot is apparently from the same
angle as the earlier video, and it visualizes the same space and is held
onscreen for an extremely long time. A car goes by. Unlike most static
long-take images in which "nothing happens," this one compels our at
tention because a mystery has been provoked by the earlier video, and
we wait expectantly for something to happen. Suddenly, automobile lights
shine brightly as someone pulls up to park in the extreme foreground
area that is actually behind the camera.
Despite the duplication of the angle and distance, we have no way of
knowing whether this shot is "live"-that is, a metashot from the point
of view of the director Haneke and his high-definition digital camera
making the film called Cache-or yet one more video-within-the-film.
Importantly, we can never really know because there is no contextualizing
or framing shot before or after this one. As Jacques Derrida has pointed
out, meaning is always indeterminate because it is finally dependent on
context, and context can never be stabilized and fixed. Complicating mat
ters is the realization that whichever of the two it is (Haneke's metafilm
or surreptitious video) , Haneke and/or his crew have, in any case, shot
it, even the video. Our uncertainty about the source of the shot within
the fiction leads to a greater and continual uncertainty, at least in terms
of a visual epistemology, of the status of the shot and its truth value for
us as we struggle to construct a meaningful narrative.
It is important, even crucial, to understand that Haneke is not (merely)
playing games here. This uncertainty and manipulation regarding the im
age is central to Cache and to his work in general. After the interviewer
Richard Porton had quoted to him Godard's famous dictum that "cinema
is truth twenty-four frames per second," Haneke replied, " My perspec
tive on that, my article of faith, is that I've adapted Godard's observation
to read, 'Film is a lie at twenty-four frames per second in the service of
truth.' [Laughs. ] Or a lie with the possibility of being in the service of
truth. Film is an artificial construct. It pretends to reconstruct reality. But
it doesn't do that-it's a manipulative form. It's a lie that can reveal the
truth. But if a film isn't a work of art, it's just complicit with the process
of manipulation" (Porton 5 1 ) . It is precisely this question that motivates
all the destabilization of the image that occurs in Cache.

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M ichael Haneke

At his studio, Georges receives another videocassette , this time

wrapped inside a child's drawing that shows blood squirting from a
child's mouth. The cassette contains the same shot, described in the
paragraph above, that we had been watching before we cut to his televi
sion show, so only now do we understand its status as another produc
tion of the "anonymous stalker," if such a being or entity even exists .
The most important thing here, though, is a strange, brief intercut
shot of a small, Arab-looking boy wiping blood from his mouth, clearly
connected to the drawing (both of which images we will understand
more clearly later) but for which we have at this point no source or even
logical motivation. This boy is clearly not part of the present moment.
Is this image somehow an untamed emanation from Georges's uncon
scious that has been released by the drawing and that the metafilm has
somehow inserted into the middle of the video? Or is it an interpolated
flashback that the viewing of the video has triggered in Georges ? In
short, what is its status vis-a-vis the present-day tape? (Interestingly,
Haneke's careful mise-en-scene has the bloody drawing right next to
the television remote control, in a visual field in which virtually nothing
else is visible . ) Again, Haneke plays with the gap between what we are
seeing and the disembodied voiceover provided by Georges and Anne
as they, like us, seek to construct a narrative based on the silent images.
The "added" image of the Arab-looking boy is a wild card that destroys
the internal logic of the videotape that we watch.
When Georges stops the tape, the television image automatically
returns to that familiar Hanekean topos, the television newscast, which
pursues, automaton-like, its factual recital of mayhem even while the
couple continues to talk, leading to a further clash between the compet
ing discourses.
Anne next receives a call in which an anonymous voice demands to
speak to Georges, whom we then see-at least his hands, in that familiar
Haneke gesture of the visual "cutting off' of body parts-playing with
a small card that shows another amateurish drawing of blood spurting
out of a child's mouth. When Georges is subsequently almost hit by a
bicyclist while getting in his car, a yelling match ensues that Anne is
barely able to mediate. It's clear that Georges is beginning to overreact
to the pressure of the videotapes and the drawings, and it seems also no

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117

accident that the cyclist is a black man, upping the stakes of the conflict,
hinting at further complications later in the film, and bringing to bear
the modem-day multicultural urban tensions seen in Code Unknown.
What next appears is a long shot of students emerging from a school
the same shot, from an identical position, with which the film will mys
teriously end. (This repetition later adds to the sense of some unknown
third force, someone or something beyond all our possible guesswork
who is doing much of the malevolent observing in this film.) A tracking
movement centers the figure of Pierrot, the Laurents' son, whose exact
role in the film's events remains ambiguous. Once Georges picks him
up, Pierrot reveals a card similar to the one Georges has received, but
with unexplained indications that it has come from Georges.
Again Haneke plays with our epistemological expectations by making
the next shot a long-take on a dark street through an open, second-floor
window. We have no way of knowing whether this is simply an infor
mational or traditional establishing shot, a point-of-view shot that will
eventually reveal Georges, in a reverse angle, looking at what the shot
shows, or yet another anonymous videotape. What follows, apparently
"within" this shot, is a strange forward tracking movement on the same
dark-skinned child seen earlier, barely visible in the night, coughing

Figure 17. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) loses

his cool i n multiethnic Paris while his wife
Anne (Juliette Binoche) looks on in Cache.

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M ichael Haneke

and choking from the blood coming from his mouth. Is this a foreshad
owing of what we later learn is Georges's troubled childhood, or is it a
manifestation of what the film historian Bruce Kawin once called the
"mindscreen," or consciousness, of the film itself? Again, there is no way
of knowing, either now at the moment of the shot or later, when all the
shots have collectively given up all the information they contain.
This forbidding reference to an apparently conflicted past is sud
denly replaced by the bright colors of a new day. The dark secrets of the
night have been dispersed, and Georges takes Pierrot to school. Inter
estingly, the shot showing them leaving the house begins in exactly the
same manner as the first video but then quickly starts to tilt and track,
as a-for once-clear-cut marker that what we are seeing emanates
from the consciousness of the filmmaker or "external" film, not from a
possible video-within-the-film .
The next scene begins with an almost literal shaggy-dog story in
which a dinner guest of the Laurents recounts a long tale, which turns
into a joke, about something that happened to him . Again, the work
any audience must undertake to construct a coherent narrative out of
unstable, even invented, material is foregrounded here, just as with the
videos. One of the guests, even after the punchline has been delivered
to howls oflaughter, innocently asks, 'Well, was it true or not?"-adding
another layer to Haneke's theme. Their further discussion of a friend
who is writing a screenplay adds to the sense of self-reflexivity; Haneke
keeps us aware that what we watch is always a manufactured and thus
manipulated representation.
The doorbell rings, and Georges goes outside to find another tape
with an accompanying childlike drawing, this time with the blood shoot
ing from a rooster's cut throat. Angry because Anne tells their friends
about the troubling videos and phone calls, he grumpily retrieves the
latest cassette he has just hidden in his overcoat, announcing, "I have
nothing to hide [cacher] ." This time the video shows a road, seen through
a rain-covered windshield across which wipers move . After a pause, the
camera suddenly jerks around to the left to reveal, as Georges explains
to his guests, the house he grew up in.
As if the editing, or perhaps the videos, has determined the narrative,
rather than vice versa, the next scene depicts Georges visiting his mother
in this very house, during which he tells her that he recently dreamed of
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119

Majid. (Could this dream he speaks of be the source of the two intercut
moments showing the Arab boy with the bloody mouth?) She seems
completely untouched by this information, even though he reminds her
that she and his father were once planning to adopt Majid (the child of
an Arab family, we learn later, who worked for them) . She never thinks
about it, she says, because it was long ago, and it was unhappy.
We next cut to Anne at a noisy book party, then suddenly a shock cut
takes us to a rooster with its head being lopped off. While the rooster
flops around, bright blood splashes on an unknown child's face, which
seems to be the bloody face we've seen intercut earlier. At this point
we have no idea whether it's a flashback (and if so, whose) or an event
taking place in the film's present, but we nevertheless watch horrified
as the rooster jumps around headless. The camera cuts several times to
a close-up on Georges as a young child, as he is menacingly approached
by Majid (whose identity will be verified later) with the hatchet just used
on the rooster. Georges, now a grownup, suddenly wakes up, shaken and
covered with sweat. The nightmare-sequence is a standard film tech
nique, but in Cache it carries an extra bit of anxious resonance because
so many of the film's shots lack a clear status and source.
After a short scene showing the present-day Georges walking around
his mother's house the next morning, we cut to a shot of a car speeding
down a working-class street. Characteristically, the driver is not shown. We
are suddenly plunged into the empty hallway of a workers' high-rise build
ing (an "HLM," as it is called in French), and we see only the emptiness
in front of the jerky camera, which finally stops at one of the anonymous
blue doors. Suddenly, the telltale rewind lines appear, indicating for the
first time that, contrary to what we may have thought, we are seeing yet
one more anonymous video, and that Georges and Anne are in the process
of analyzing it to ascertain the location. Once again, our vision has been
tricked, and the ostensibly "self-evident" visual has been shown to be
highly ambiguous and difficult to read, especially when decontextualized.
This theme, begun with the thriller film that the actress Anne is making
in Code Unknown, here reaches its apotheosis.
Since they know that the police won't help them, Georges decides
to follow the visual clues himself, matching the video markers with the
reality that is represented within Haneke's "outer" film. They struggle,

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M ichael Haneke

with the assiduousness of Antonioni's photographer in Blow- Up , to read

a street sign. Georges won't tell Anne whom he suspects-Majid, of
course, whom we ourselves are beginning to suspect, based on the frag
ments doled out to us-and they argue about Georges's lack of trust, his
absolute refusal to reveal what has been hidden, which is an important
part of the emotional dynamics of the film and one of its principal themes.
Though it's less overtly marked, this theme is perhaps the equal of the
reality-versus-representation theme we have concentrated upon thus far
and considerably more central to the film than the much-debated histori
cal theme, which will be discussed below. Once again, the audience is
forced to laboriously put together clues, in the manner of Georges and
Anne, to try to ascertain simply what's in front of them and how it may
correspond to some pretextual "real."
Next, we see a stationary shot of the avenue that Georges and Anne
have identified, exactly hke the many anonymous video chps we have seen
thus far. Reversing expectations once again, however, Haneke cuts to a shot
of Georges in a cafe looking out on this avenue, and thus retrospectively
motivates the previous shot as a subjective shot, in Haneke's metafilm,
from Georges's point of view. Following this, we see the same shot of the
empty hallway of the HLM from the point ofview of the tracking camera,
but this time we hear footsteps that we presume, correctly, are Georges's.
( Note the infrequent but important part played by the audio track in sort
ing out the film's epistemological complexities . ) This is verified when we
see him walk into the frame and ring the doorbell.
Majid opens the door, and from the very beginning of the encounter
between Georges and Majid, it is the former, the privileged one, who
is petulant, angry, and aggressive and the latter, the disadvantaged one,
who is calm and, initially, even warm and friendly toward Georges. Majid
clearly has no idea what has brought Georges to see him. As in Funny
Games, the motif of the game quickly arises, with Georges saying, like
Anna in the earher film, that because he is now an adult he no longer
wants to play. Georges finally says, ''You were older and bigger than me,
what could I do?" indicating that he knows very well who this man is,
but we haven't a clue what Georges is trying to explain. After threatening
Majid, Georges leaves. When he calls Anne from a local cafe, however, he
hes to her, for reasons that are, as usual, difficult to divine, and says that

The F i l m s of M i c h ae l Haneke

1 21

no one was home. Clearly he is hiding something once again, something

enormous that perhaps we will never fully understand, like so much else
connected with this film.
A sudden cut takes us to Pierrot's swimming match, in which a favorite
Haneke technique, the tracking camera, is in full operation. Anne and
Georges are thrilled when Pierrot wins, and a shot of them cheering also
shows many of their fellow observers sporting video cameras, surely a
deliberate, even heavy-handed, directorial decision to enhance the scene's
self-reflexivity. Another sudden cut takes us back to the encounter between
Georges and Majid in the latter's apartment, but this time the angle of
view is completely different. Again, we are-purposely-confused. Who
has taken this shot that lasts longer than the earlier, "real" shot, since it
shows Majid sobbing at his kitchen table after Georges has left? What
is the status of these images? we ask ourselves once again. Suddenly, we
hear Anne say in voiceover, "That's it," and we discover, yet again, that it's
a videotape that Georges and Anne have received and are watching.
Georges finally apologizes to Anne for lying about his visit and tells
the story of Majid's parents, Algerians who were probably killed in the
police massacre of October 17, 196 1 , when dozens of Arab demonstra
tors were thrown into the Seine to drown. This historical reference has
occasioned, to my mind, a great deal of unwarranted critical speculation
to the effect that the film is principally "about" the Algerian War, a great
tragedy that has been called France's Vietnam but which is, after all,
barely mentioned in Cache.
Haneke himself says, in the interview with Cieutat and Rouyer trans
lated for this volume, that "I was still in Austria when I had the idea
of doing something about a father and son who were implicated in a
sorrowful past. If I had developed it then, I would have interwoven the
story with the Second World War. But you can find shadow zones in
the past of any country. In regards to France, I had already opted for
the Algerian War when I saw, just by chance, a documentary on Arte
that really shocked me regarding the events of 196 1 .
Taking Daniel
Auteuil's age into account, everything fit. It was not indispensable to the
plot, but linking the plot to politics kept the guilt from remaining on
the personal level."
"At the same time," he told another interviewer, "I don't want my film
to be seen as specifically about a French problem. It seems to me that,
.

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in every country, there are dark comers--dark stains where questions of

collective guilt become important. I'm sure in the United States there
are other parallel examples of dark stains on the collective unconscious
(laughs ) . . . . There's a reason why it's so important to me that this not
be seen as a specifically French problem . . . . This film was made in
France, but I could have shot it with very few adjustments within an
Austrian-or I'm sure an American--context" (Porton so) .
Anne slowly pulls the rest o f the story out o f Georges: h e was jealous
of Majid having his own room, so he "told on" him . She pries further,
and it turns out that Georges lied about M ajid, telling his parents that
he had tuberculosis, thus preventing M ajid from going to school and
getting an education. Georges's central defense, repeated over and over,
is that he was only six years old and thus not really responsible for his
actions, and that all of the bad things he did were "normal" for a boy
of that age . In any case, he terms the affair an "interlude," refusing to
see it as a tragedy, thus refusing to show any sympathy for what M ajid
went through then or in later life. This refusal to recognize a common
humanity between him and Majid seems, to Haneke, Georges's great
est transgression. When Anne ejects the new cassette and hands it to
Georges, we see that the picture taped to it depicts blood coming from
Georges's throat. Haneke's variations on this simple motif, especially
one rendered in childlike stick figures, are remarkable.
The refusal to take responsibility for the human tragedy, the blighted
life, is demonstrated in the next scene by Georges's superior at the televi
sion station, who has also received a copy of the tape and who worries only
about the problems the affair could cause for Georges's career, and thus,
presumably, his own. Georges lies to him as well, justifYing his threats
against Majid, captured on the video, by accusing Majid of harboring a
supposed "pathological hatred" of Georges's family, of which we have
not seen the slightest shred of evidence. Though we will never know for
sure, it seems that Georges's own pathological need to lie implies that
he is hiding something even more serious than what he has confessed to
thus far. Georges returns to Majid's apartment building, and this time
the camera follows him , a third visual variant for showing the hallway
(and for once, narratively clear-cut), but no one is home.
In another signature Haneke gesture, we next cut from a meeting in
a cafe between Anne and their family friend Pierre to a newscast about
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the war in Iraq, but specific thematic connections with the film we're
watching seem remote. The newscast is suddenly contextualized when
Anne walks in and we discover that Georges has been watching it on
the television in their living room. A serious argument ensues because
Anne has turned off her cell phone while out for dinner with Pierre,
and the row escalates when they discover that Pierrot is missing.
A trip to the police station results in two officers accompanying Georg
es down the familiar hallway that leads to Majid's apartment, followed by
the camera. As usual, the policemen rough up the Arabs-Majid and his
son (Walid Afkir)-solely on the basis of the "Frenchman's" complaint.
Humiliatingly, the Arabs are taken to the police station in the back of the
police wagon (while Georges sits in the front), as the camera shoots them
against the light, clearly suffering, in a purposely dragged-out, quietly
intense scene absent of all dialogue.
Pierrot is brought home the next day by the mother of one of his
friends , and a battle of wills begins between Anne and Pierrot, who
thinks his mother is having an affair with Pierre, which, in light of the
final shot of the film, gives some slight reason to believe that Pierrot
may himself be engaged in the production of the videos . Yet Haneke
structures the film in such a way that we will never know for sure .
After a short, abortive scene in which Georges tries to effect a rap
prochement with his alienated son, we cut to Georges's television show,
which we naturally take, once again, to be happening live before us,
just as we took the earlier videos to be. How many times will we fall for
this? Haneke seems to be tauntingly asking. Yet once more it is suddenly
revealed that Georges and his producers are in the middle of editing
the raw video footage of the show, thus again calling into question the
epistemological and the ontological status of what we are watching ( and
what we watch in general). The freeze frame that results is almost shock
ing when it occurs at the same time as Georges's first, asynchronous
voiceover commenting upon what we are watching. Haneke has said that
the point of this scene is to critique television by showing that "reality
is manipulated by TV to be more attractive to viewers; TV reproduces
and transmits a vision of reality that is supposed to be more interesting
to viewers, and I am glad I was able to point that out in the film . . . . Yes,
absolutely, there is the problem of the terrorism of the mass media today.
There is the dictatorship of the dumbing down of our societies" (Badt) .
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One wonders, though, how many viewers still believe that television
shows are unedited, pure reality.
Yet one more trip down the hallway of M ajid's apartment building
ensues . For once, the camera is at the other end and watches Georges
approach the apartment, in what is the fourth or fifth variation of the
hallway shot. This gesture also demonstrates the multiple choices (thus,
varieties of manipulation) that image makers of any sort have available
to them when they purport to show "reality." This time, however, the
familiar tracking shot results in the most powerful Hanekean signature
moment of all when Majid, ever sweet, ever polite, suddenly cuts his
throat in front of Georges, shortly after he has entered the apartment.
(The sudden spurt of blood purposely recalls the child's drawings that
have accompanied many of the videos, almost as though the action
had been preordained.) Georges has entered the apartment throwing
his weight around as usual, only to be instantly defeated by the most
powerful statement available to the powerless. Georges is completely
frozen, and the full meaning of M ajid's gesture cannot and will never
be made clear, to him or to us .
But Han eke rejects the false clarity of "the powerful versus the pow
erless" opposition as an explanation for the relation between Georges
and Majid. He told Porton, "''m not sure if it's so black and white. We
don't know if Georges is telling the truth, and we don't know if M ajid
is telling the truth. We don't really know which one of the characters
is lying-just as we don't know in real life . You can't say that the poor
are only poor and good and the rich are only rich and evil. Life is far
more complex, and as a filmmaker and artist, I'm trying to explore the
complexities and contradictions of life. I hope that, for that reason, the
film is unsettling and disturbing-mainly because we don't know how
to react" (Porton 5 1 ) . This theme-the final, fundamental unknowabil
ity of reality and character psychology-has been regularly sounded by
Haneke at least since The Seventh Continent.
Uncharacteristically, Haneke is more willing to speculate on the rea
sons behind Majid's desperate act itself: "I think his suicide represents
a couple of things . First of all, it's a desperate act of self-destruction.
But it's also an act of aggression directed toward Georges. Interestingly,
someone I know who saw the film recently recounted to me a story that
he had heard. A man who had left his wife was asked by her to meet
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125

him at a subway station. They met and, while he was there, she threw
herself under a subway car before his eyes. I think that's an interesting
comment on my film " (Forton 5 1 ) .
After Majid's abrupt suicide, Georges, seriously distraught, leaves
the apartment and goes to the movies to avoid having to go home . Fi
nally, he enters his dark house from the rear, using his cell phone to ask
his wife to get rid of their dinner guests . Again, he wants her to lie to
them, to hide something from them , which she is reluctant to do, but
ultimately he reveals more details to her of the truth of his childhood
with Majid.
Another long shot out Georges's bedroom window, like the one earlier,
leads us to wonder, once again, about its motivation-we have become so
epistemologically paranoid-though the source is revealed as Georges,
who is looking out the window while walking around in the dark. Anne
slowly drags more hidden information out of her husband in a scene that
takes place in the dark room, against whose windows, through which only
the slightest bit of light passes, the two figures seem virtually hidden.
He keeps trying to avoid, to hide, the whole truth, making us suspect
that perhaps there is even more to the story that we will never learn .
He gives more details about lying to his parents about Majid coughing
up blood, which fits perfectly with the blood motif that has structured
the film, then about lying to Majid by telling him that Georges's father
wanted Majid to kill the rooster, whence the blood that drenches Majid
in Georges's earlier nightmare-sequence .
From the dark hiddenness of the bedroom, we cut to the incredibly
bright, high-tech modem building that houses Georges's studio and the
channel's administrative offices . It stands in contrast to everything that
has gone before, especially the shabbiness of Majid's apartment. Here,
unlike Georges's past, apparently everything is transparent, open, unbid
den. Suddenly Georges is confronted by Majid's son, who wants to talk
to him. When he threatens Georges with making a scene by telling ev
eryone things they shouldn't hear, Georges says he has "nothing to hide. "
Majid's son is polite, like his father, though decidedly more assertive, yet
he seems merely to want some expression of sympathy from Georges,
which the latter-as always, presuming himself as utterly guiltless, with
"nothing to hide "-refuses to give. Majid's son denies any involvement

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M i chael H a n e ke

with the videos, yet Georges once again refuses to believe his and his
father's denials no matter how convincing they may seem to us.
M ajid's son seems most interested in making Georges face all the
repercussions of his childish actions : "You deprived my father of a good
education . The orphanage teaches hatred, not politeness, but my Dad
raised me well. " Georges's self-defensive response: "I refuse to have a
bad conscience because your dad's life was miserable. I'm not respon
sible ." And, once again, Georges threatens him, as he has threatened
his father on several other occasions . M ajid's son, however, gets the last
word before he leaves : "I just wondered how it feels to have a man's life
on your conscience . That's all . Now I know."
We cut to the same shot of the outside of the Laurents' house, from the
same angle, with which the film begins. At this point, thoroughly schooled
in the instability of the image, we wonder what the status of the shot is .
One of the things suggested here is that whoever is the author of the
videos, he or she is still at work. Or perhaps that it is "Haneke" who has
been the real author of the videos-which, of course, in a practical sense,
he is, since he or someone under his direction shot them to make this film
we're watching. In any case, the shot of the outside of the house turns out
not to be another surreptitious video but part of the "outer" metafilm.
Georges pulls up, parks the car, and goes into the house, announcing
to his wife over the phone that he has taken "deux cachets." ( One wonders
if the second word, "pills," a homonym for the film's title, is being used on
purpos e . ) He is enveloped by the same deep blue color that we have seen
in so many of the earlier films, and he goes to bed. The complete darkness
that he achieves by closing the blinds suggests, symbolically perhaps, that
much remains hidden in his mind and conscience.
This unconsciously self-defensive action on the part of Georges
seems to represent the central moral point of the film for H aneke, since
he discusses it at great length in an interview.

The moral question the film raises is how to deal With this question of
guilt. All of us have moments of selfishness, moments that we prefer
to hide The Daniel Auteuil character has this choice. The act that he
carried out may not be likeable, may be reprehensible, but it is realistic,
all of us have these hidden moments in our lives . . . we all feel guilty,
about the relationships between the industrialized world and the third

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127

world, or how we deal with the elderly, for example. We all take sleeping
pills as does Daniel Auteuil, although it may take many different forms :
it may be alcohol, a drink before we go to bed, it may be sleeping pills ,
or we may donate money to children in the third world. But each of us
pulls the blanket over our heads and hopes that the nightmares won't
be too bad. For example, I am sure you oppose strict immigration laws
that have been introduced in almost every European country. And yet
what would you say if I were to suggest that you take into your home
an Afncan family? I think this is the case with all of us. All of us have
knowledge that tends to lead to tolerance; at the same time we have
selfish interests that are contradictory to this tolerant ideal. (Badt)

After Georges takes the sleeping pills, we cut to a powerful, lengthy

scene in which Majid is being cruelly taken away from Georges's house
sometime during the 1g6os . Again we are unsure of the shot's status,
but this time for a different reason. Is it Georges's dream or merely an
autonomous flashback, as it were, the film's mindscreen or "memory"?
The camera rigorously holds on an extreme long shot, and everything
plays out at a distance, all perfectly framed. In its immobility, it recalls
the shot of the Laurents' house that opens the film. We also remember
the scene of the killing of the rooster, since the camera occupies the
same position as it did in that scene, though this time the central action
plays out much further away. After Majid tries to run away (toward the
camera) from the people who are taking him away to the orphanage and
is captured, the car finally drives off, and the scene is again silent. We
do not see Georges waking up, which would contextualize or motivate
the scene as his dream .
When Haneke was asked by Cieutat and Rouyer why he chose to
show this flashback, when it was already understood from the story itself,
he replied, "It's one thing to know something and another thing to feel
it. I find that scene very touching. I didn't put it in earlier because I
wanted to save it for the end: Daniel's character takes his two sleeping
pills, pulls the covers over his head, and hopes to escape, but the reality
is something completely different."
Instead of seeing Georges wake up, we cut to the final and most
inexplicable scene in the film . It is the same shot that we have seen
earlier, when Georges arrives to pick up Pierrot at his school. This time,
however, we clearly see Majid's son and Pierrot talking in the upper left128

M i chael H a n eke

hand comer with a group of Pierrot's friends . Majid's son, much older
than the others, seems out of place . They then move down the steps,
just the two of them, to the lower left-hand portion of the screen-the
camera doesn't budge-and while Majid's son gesticulates expressively,
he continues to look suspiciously all around him as though he might soon
be caught. When they part, Majid's son seems to be smiling.
Does this, looking to the past, mean that Pierrot and Majid's son,
each for his own reasons, have been partners in the making of the dis
turbing tapes? Or, looking to the future, does it mean that Majid's son
is now planning to exact his revenge on Georges for his father's suicide
by first befriending his son? Even more complexly, what is the status of
this shot, and what chronological place does it occupy? (Just because it
comes last in the film chronologically does not mean it happened last,
just as the previous scene is actually something that took place forty
years earlier. )
We finally see Pierrot, now alone, go back up the steps and talk to
some other friends-perhaps to finalize the details of a plot?-then they
all come back down the steps and depart screen left. At the same second
that Pierrot disappears from the visual field, the final credits begin to
roll. As the film ends, we not only have no idea "whodunit"; we're not
even sure about exactly what has been done.
Many critics and some ordinary viewers I've spoken with have criti
cized the director for not sorting out everything by the end of the film.
For this viewer, however, the indeterminacy of the ending feels right
and is a powerful indicator of how seriously Haneke takes his work. One
makes films in the service of art, not to satisfy audiences, he would insist.
In fact, it's perfectly obvious that we never fully comprehend the world
or why people do the things they do, so why should we expect a film to
lie to us and say that we can?
Cache, for all its inexplicable mystery, demonstrates that Haneke has
not strayed far from the themes and obsessions with which he began
his remarkable cinematic journey. As in all the films from The Seventh
Continent on, he is still thinking about the meaning and instability of
representation and the way cinema must always manipulate the audience
by purporting to show, or at least to tell us something about, reality, in
cluding the reality of violence. But it is larger than that, as well, because
the real fault of the media, defined as broadly as possible, is that if it is
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129

not acting in the service of art (that is, not continually seeking to shake
us out of our reassuring slumber), it is putting us more deeply to sleep.
And it is in this sleep, with the covers pulled over our heads, that we
can refuse to communicate, and thus refuse to recognize our own guilt
and, most important, our common humanity, for Haneke, the greatest
sin of all.

The White Ribbon (2oog)

Haneke's most recent film, as of this writing, is The White Ribbon, which
won the Palme d'Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. It's a brilliant,
richly achieved work that is superbly acted, a masterpiece of histori
cal reconstruction as well as a powerful sociohistorical critique, and it
demonstrates clearly the director's ongoing ability to surprise. Taking
what may be only a temporary break from his French-language films of
the past decade, Haneke is once again working in German. Even more
surprisingly, The White Ribbon, whose script, Haneke said at the Cannes
press conference, 12 he has been working on for ten years, is set in the
early twentieth century-though we only find out exactly when, crucially,
late in the film-despite the fact that none of his previous films, with
the possible exception of part I of Lemmings (which was made in 1979
and set in 1959), is a period piece.
Besides the film's narrator, who is also the local schoolteacher, the
cast of characters includes the Baron, his Steward, the Pastor, the Doc
tor, the Midwife, and the Farmer-plus all their assorted spouses and
children-as well as a governess named Eva, who has caught the eye
of the Schoolteacher, and several other minor characters. This use of
generic roles rather than proper names has the effect of making the
film more overtly abstract and symbolic, clearly one of Haneke's prin
cipal goals. It also emphasizes the rigid social structure that obtains in
the village, which has nothing to do with individual personalities and
everything to do with social roles .
Other surprises include the fact that the film is narrated i n voi
ceover-a technique unheard of in Haneke's previous work-years after
the events depicted take place. (Sony Pictures Classics, the film's Ameri
can distributor, says that the voiceover will be translated into English for
its release in the United States, to my mind a wise choice. ) It's also shot,
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M i c h a e l H a neke

again for the first time in a Haneke film, in black and white, marked by
rigorous and thematically fitting compositions , a visual choice that is
stunningly appropriate for the time period in which the film is set. M any
gorgeous shots (winter snow scenes, buildings presented straight-on
and perfectly framed, blowing wheat, the stark interior of the village
church ) demonstrate a concern for aesthetic beauty that is present but
subdued in his earlier films .
Perhaps H aneke is finally beginning to fear less the power of the
image, and thus allowing himself to exploit it more . When asked why
he used black and white, he said that it was mainly because our image
of that period tends to be in black and white (unlike earlier centuries,
which we know through the color of p aintings , and the following cen
tury, which we know through color photographs and films ) . Color, he
said, would have lessened the possibility of making the depicted reality
more purposefully abstract. This decision accords with the distancing
achieved by the voiceover narration and the generic roles of the principal
characters . Significantly, Haneke also said that he used black and white
because "I love it."
And though the various stories with which the film is occupied are
told in rather short vignettes , the fades to black that punctuated earlier
films are now gone. In their place is the bookend structure of a fade
up from gray at the beginning of the film and a fade-down to gray at
the end. There is no music, except of the diegetic variety, as when the
Schoolteacher plays the organ, the Baroness plays Schubert on the piano,
and the choir sings in the church .
In a similar vein, H an eke has taken great care to make the individuals
seem as "authentic" as possible, particularly by making the characters ,
especially the children, closely resemble photographs of the period,
which is where our visual knowledge of the era comes from . According
to the director, some seven thousand children were considered for the
children's roles, with the first criterion being acting ability but the second
being that of an authentic look that we unconsciously associate with the
period. The costumes are also perfectly appropriate, and great care has
obviously been taken in their regard. A like touch comes in the extremely
simple credits-tiny white words against a black background-when
the German words for "A German Children's Story" are written in by
hand, as it were, under the words of the film's title. The letters are in

The F i l m s of M ichael Haneke

1 31

the handwritten script version of the Black Letter or Gothic font that
was the standard form of the German language at the time.
One of the biggest changes is how refreshingly straightforward the
film is. While its plot is centered around a mystery (whose solution is
purposely obvious almost from the beginning) , unlike in earlier Haneke
films, we almost always know exactly what is going on in each scene,
who the various characters are and how they are related to each other,
despite-or perhaps because of-the very large cast. Similarly, while
the film's pacing is deliberate-Haneke hasn't changed everything-it
seems always to be moving toward a clear, predetermined goal. Close
ups dominate, even extreme close-ups, and Haneke's signature tracking
shot is seldom if ever utilized. Long-takes appear only occasionally, as
when he holds on an empty, silent hallway for what seems at least a
minute, until we hear the sounds of a child being beaten behind the
closed door of another room.
On the surface, the film tells a fable-like tale of the interpersonal
dynamics of a conservative tum-of-the-century Protestant community
somewhere in northern Germany. At this initial level, up through the first
half of the film, say, we are privy to the unexceptional personal lives of
the village's denizens, ruled by its rigid social hierarchy. Haneke's focus
on the supposedly unimportant everyday features of his characters' lives
is no different from many of his earlier films. However, he also holds out
the promise of something more, something deeper, when he inserts, in
the narrator's initial voiceover, the words, "I believe I must tell of the
strange events that occurred in our village, because they may cast a new
light on some of the goings-on in this country."
In other words, the particular is given the resonance and importance
of the universal from the beginning of the film . The "strange events"
referred to are a series of suspicious accidents and several anonymous
child beatings . The Doctor's horse is tripped up by a hidden wire, send
ing him to the hospital for months, and the Farmer's wife is killed in an
accident in the lumber mill. Sigi, the young son of the Baron, is severely
whipped by unknown persons, and later Karli, the "mongoloid" illegiti
mate son of the Midwife, is beaten nearly to death. The Baron's bam is
also set on fire, and his cabbage patch is shredded.
As these events-some of which are unrelated and obvious in their
intention, while others remain unexplained-begin to slip out of the
1 32

M i chael Haneke

community's collective mind over time, Han eke probes more deeply, and
we start to see the reality behind the carefully constructed fac;ade of this
God-fearing community. Thus we discover that the Doctor is sexually
abusing his fourteen-year-old daughter and psychologically abusing his
mistress, the Midwife. At one point, his verbal attack on the Midwife,
while she is masturbating him, is so vicious ("Your breath stinks, and you
are old and ugly. Why don't you just die?") that it constitutes violence of
the most unmitigated sort. The Pastor, an upright, fearsome figure who
recalls some of Bergman's more rigid clerical characters, is so incensed
about his son Martin's proclivity toward masturbation (which he can
only speak of in the most roundabout way) that he ties his hands to
the bed at night. Martin and his sister Klara are also forced to publicly
wear the "white ribbon" that betokens purity and innocence-which,
according to their father, they have yet to achieve. His other children
are regularly sent to bed without dinner after each has shown obeisance
by kissing the Pastor's hand. He so humiliates Klara during confirmation
class at the school that she passes out, and the Steward brutally canes
his son for taking another boy's cheap flute. The children of the Doctor
unhealthily discuss death at great length, and Klara, the daughter of the
Pastor, stabs a pet parakeet and leaves it dead on her father's desk. The
desperate husband of the woman killed in the Baron's unsafe lumber mill
hangs himself, because his son's futile gesture of revenge (destroying the
Baron's cabbage patch) has caused the Baron to discharge the Farmer,
in effect starving his large family. Yet occasional acts of tenderness also
occur, as when the Pastor pauses for a moment, obviously moved, over
the unexpected kindness of one of the children he tyrannizes in the
name of "good discipline." But any such inadvertent demonstration of
human feeling is quickly repressed.
It is only at the very end that we find out, via the stunning announce
ment that Archduke Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian empire has
been assassinated in Sarajevo, that the film is set on the verge of World
War I. In the meantime, the Schoolteacher deduces that the various
outrages committed against the village, at least the ones that remain
unexplained, have been instigated by the children, who seem to have
morally run amuck despite-or because of-the severe discipline they
have had to endure . The Baroness, who wants to leave her husband,
makes one of the few overt denunciations by a character in the film when
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133

Figure 1 8 . Martin (Leonard Proxauf) wears

his bad ge of shame in The White Ribbon.

she tells the Baron that she can no longer stand him or this horrible
village, which is rife with "malice, envy, and brutality."
The village's enthusiasm for the coming war erases all previous scan
dals, and the narrator's last words are, "Today, more than a quarter of a
century later, toward the end of my life, and several years after the end
of a second war that was to change this world in a more cruel and radical
way than the first one, the one we faced at the time, I wonder if the events
of those days and our silence about them weren't the germ of the tragedy
toward which we were heading. Didn't we all know secretly what had
happened in our midst? Hadn't we, in a way, made it possible by closing
our eyes? Didn't we keep our mouths shut because otherwise we would
have had to wonder if the misdeeds of these children, of our children,
weren't actually the result of what we'd been teaching them?"
The film ends with a series of three shots perfectly framing the
church, each one at a greater distance, as though the director were
moving toward an ever greater sense of abstract universality. Then we
cut to another perfectly square, rigorously framed shot of the interior
of the church and hear the choir, which occupies the upper quarter of
the unchanging shot, singing sweetly as the Pastor takes his place . The
image fades back to gray, and the film ends .

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Michael Haneke

Haneke has purposely avoided any precise delineation of the film's

sociohistorical critique, but it seems clear that it's meant to be a portrait
of German society prior to the beginning of World War I, with a hint of
the fascism to come. But he also insisted that he wasn't only, or even,
offering an analysis of the origins of fascism , as one might conclude be
cause the film is set in Germany. No, he insisted, as he had earlier about
the supposed "Frenchness" of Cache, this problem concerns everyone
and in every nation, and perhaps now more than ever.
For H aneke , the central moral lesson of the film is that if children
have absolute values impressed upon them, especially with violent re
inforcement, they will absorb these values and act the same way in their
tum . "Anytime you have absolute p rinciples, this leads to terrorism of
many different kinds . Absolute principles always become inhuman . " He
also mentioned that the original title of the film was "The Right H and
of God," since if children are told repeatedly that a certain system of
values is always correct, then they will act to punish the others who don't
follow the rules precisely or who don't fit the approved template (like
the Doctor, Sigmund, and Karli) , just as they themselves were violently
punished, presumably for their own good.
What is most fascinating here is that H aneke's interests and themes
seem to have come full circle, returning to his earlier, brilliant television
films like

Lemmings, to trace the causes for the wars and dislocations of

German-speaking countries back to the social and familial structures, as

well as the accompanying, often violent value system, that obtained at the
time.

Lemmings

as well offered an analysis of sorts of the disillusioned,

even suicidal youth who committed petty crimes just for the thrill of it in
reaction to the bourgeois values of their World War II -era parents .
Gone therefore-at least for the moment-is the critical examina
tion of the media, of Hollywood manipulation of the audience , of the
power of the image, and of the audience's moral responsibility, all themes
that have played such a huge part in the films made for theatrical re
lease, beginning with

The Seventh Continent in 1g8g.

Now back in the

sociopolitical , historical analysis where his career began, it is difficult

to say whether this represents a true break and return for Haneke, or
merely a temporary respite . Yet one thing remains, and that is the di
rector's ongoing, tireless investigation of the ills of our society, past and

The F i l m s of Michael Haneke

135

present-that sick society, of which we are all a part, that keeps us from
ever being fully human to one another. As he gleefully said at the end
of the Cannes press conference, "My films are like a ski jump-and it's
up to the spectator to take offl "

Notes
1 For further discussion of Haneke's television films, see Brunette, "Michael
Haneke and the TeleVIsion Years ."
2. See the two interviews in this volume for specific detruls regarding Haneke's
working methods and how his various cinematic techniques are achieved
3 It is important to note that Haneke does not see a clash between opera
and punk rock in the film. "I have nothing against popular music and wouldn't
think of playmg popular against classical forms . I'm very skeptical of the false
conflict that already exists between so-called 'serious' music and music catego
rized strictly as entertainment. . . . But, of course, with the guessing game at
the beginning of the film there is an irony in the way their music suggests their
deliberate isolation from the exterior world, and in the end they are trapped
in a sense by their bourgeois notions and accoutrements, not just by the killers
alone" (Sharrett) .
4 Haneke's view o f A Clockwork Orange i s similar. " ' ' m a huge Kubrick fan,
but I find A Clockwork Orange a kind of miscalculation, because he makes his
brutality so spectacular-so stylized, with dance numbers and so on-that you
almost have to admire it. . . . I read somewhere-I'm not sure if it's true-that
Kubrick was completely shocked when he saw how the public reacted to A
Clockwork Orange, and he even tried to have the film recalled. It became a cult
hit because people found its hyperstylized violence somehow cool, and that was
certainly not what Kubrick had intended" (Wray 49).
5 To quote from the section on the works o f the Marquis d e S ade: "Reason
is the organ of calculation; of planning; it is neutral with regard to ends; its ele
ment is coordination . More than a century before the emergence of sport, Sade
demonstrated empincally what Kant grounded transcendentally: the affinity
between knowledge and planning which has set its stamp of inescapable func
tionality on a bourgeois existence rationalized even in its breathing spaces. The
precisely coordinated modem sporting squad, in which no member is in doubt
over his role and a replacement is held ready for each, has its exact counterpart
in the sexual teams of Juliette, in which no moment is unused, no body orifice
neglected, no function left inactive" (6g).
6. One can only imagine the toll that this film took upon the actors. As Haneke
tells Toubiana, "As always, I work very technically. For example, the long scene
after the death of the child I went into their wardrobe and talked about all the
emotional stages I was saying, 'Take your time to put yourself in the situation.'

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M i c hael H a neke

We were in the studio, everything was ready, they came in and did the scene
twice, and at the end, no one could speak, it was so strong. But when he forces
her to pray, for example, that was very hard because she couldn't reach that
level of feeling. So we shot that scene over and over, maybe twenty-eight times,
and at the end she was totally exhausted, and then it worked. But we needed
someone who had the will to do this . Because I know few actors or actresses
who would dare to go as far as she did in the film, physically as well. Her eyes
were all swollen, and it wasn't makeup ."
7 In a curious sense, this story may already have been made in the United
States in a 1955 film called The Desperate Hours, directed by William Wyler
and starring Humphrey Bogart, who plays a sociopathic criminal. It's a taut,
extremely well-made thnller about three escapees from pnson who terrorize a
family ( father, mother, young boy, and teenaged girl) in their own home over a
period of several excruciating days. Many of the themes that show up in Funny
Games are already present in this fifty-year-old film, such as the focus on the
daughter's vulnerable sexuality, the psychological castration of the father figure
(Frederic March), and the sense of the "invasion" by unsavory elements of the
sanctity of middle-class life, embodied in the home. Most strikmgly, at one point
the mother ( Martha Scott) accuses the Bogart character of gratuitous "torture
and cruelty"-that is, beyond what is necessary for a successful escape from
prison-and even refers to his continual brutality as "some kind of game." The
principal differences are that in the earlier film the police play an important
role, there is much attention patd to class resentment and only a small amount
of violence, and, most importantly-and unsurprisingly for a Hollywood film
the family is saved in the end.
8 . When asked by Dave Calhoun why he remade the film, Haneke agreed
that it had always been at least partially directed to an American audience,
especially given the fact that the violence of American movies led him to make
it. "The title was an English title. If you look closely at the inside of the house
in the original, there's no house like this anywhere in Austna! The idea of the
original was to address the American viewer of violent films a little bit, but
unfortunately because of the German-speaking cast, the ongtnal film worked
only on the art-house circuit. When they gave me the opportunity to make it
again and in a new language, I said, 'Okay, let's do it ' I hope it works. We'll see.
I'm very curious" (Calhoun) .
g. During the period i n which Han eke was making films for theatrical release,
he also made an excellent adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Castle ( 1997), which
also starred Ulrich Miihe. This film will not be discussed in the present book,
pnncipally because of Haneke's own rigid distinction: "I would draw a definite
line between The Castle and The Piano Teacher, because The Castle was made
for television, and I'm very clear about the distinchon between a TV version and
a movie. Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the
objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after

The F i l m s of Michael Haneke

1 37

seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is
that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expecta
tions. I would not have dared to tum The Castle into a moVIe for the big screen,
on TV, it's OK, because it has different objectives . But with The Piano Teacher,
if you compare the structure of the novel to the structure of the film, it's really
quite chfferent, and I feel I 've been dealing very freely With the novel and the
way it was written" ( Foundas ) .
1 0 . Haneke has said that "Isabelle represents both sides of the character:
she has this extraordinary emotional strength and capacity for suffering, but
also this icy intellectualism . If I was to shoot this film, she had to play the role"
(Applebaum ) .
1 1 . Music offers a rich subtext i n this film that unfortunately, oWing t o limi
tations of space and the present author's lack of musical expertise, cannot be
fully explored here . There is also an important socioaesthetic aspect. Haneke
told Sharrett that "you need first to understand that in that film we are seeing a
very Austrian situation. Vienna is the capital of classical music and is, therefore,
the center of something very extraordinary. The music is very beautiful, but
like the surroundings it can become an instrument of repression, because this
culture takes on a social function that ensures repression, especially as classi
cal music becomes an object for consumption. Of course, you must recognize
that these issues are not just subjects of the film's screenplay, but are concerns
of the Elfnede Jelinek novel, wherein the female has a chance, a small one, to
emancipate herself only as an artist."
As Haneke told another interviewer, however, "I present music as a form of
pure beauty. But it is also true that, in this Viennese petty bourgeois society, music
allows people to rise socially. . . . However, the social reality doesn't detract from
the beauty. It is like trying to analyse love you can try to define it as a physiologi
cal process, but that doesn't touch the reality of the emotion that affects people.
Music, in my opinion, is the most sublime art of them all" (Applebaum).
1 2 . All of Haneke's remarks concerning The White Ribbon are taken from
this press conference, held on May 2 1 , 2009 .

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M i chael H a n e ke

Interviews with Michael Haneke

"Interview with Michael Haneke:

The Fragmentation of the Look"
Interview by Michel Cieutat, translated from the French by Peter Bru
nette. (Originally appeared in Positif 478 [December 2ooo] : 25-29. )
Interview conducted at Cannes, May 20, 2000; translated from the Ger
man by Robert Gray.
MICHEL CIEUTAT: [Code Unknown] is the second time, after 71
Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, that you've opted for a story

based on a structured fragmentation. You seem very interested in this

narrative mode.
MICHAEL HANEKE: For me, it's not an interest but rather a neces

sity because the cinema of distraction [Haneke's term for Hollywood

or any non-art film] claims that we can show reality in its totality, which
is false. If the cinema wants to be responsible-in other words, a true

art-it's obligated to realize that our perception of the world is naturally

fragmented. So we have to find the aesthetic means that will allow us to
transfer this fragmented look onto the screen. Today no writer would
dare claim that he or she could retranscribe the totality of the world
in a book. He or she too would think about the means of writing that
would lead him or her to reproduce this same fragmented perception
of existence. It's an attitude that is certainly not particular to the mod
em world-it's always been that way-but we're more conscious of it
in our time. It's my personal way to proceed. It's not a fascination for
fragmentation: it results very naturally from the force of this necessity.
MC: It's also in addition a major common theme of your films, this
loss of the sense of reality from which Western man suffers today.
M H : Yes . I belong to a generation that was able to grow up without
the continuous presence of television. I was thus able to apprehend
the world directly, without an intermediary. Today, on the other hand,
children learn to know reality through films, and reality is presented on
television in two different ways: there is the reality of documentary shows
and the reality of fictional images. I think that the media has played an
important role in this loss of the sense of reality, but that isn't the only
reason. In the industrial world in which we live, the one I make my films
for, we are also participating in a refusal of reality. For example, we don't
want to recognize whatever we don't like . So we construct interior walls
that are psychological or spiritual.
MC: What is the source of the screenplay for Code Unknown?
M H : There were several things that led me to that scenario. First
of all, a call from Juliette Binoche, who wanted to work with me, then
the idea that I had to make a film on the theme of immigration, on
the opposition between the rich people of the host country and the
poor people who go to this country, a contrast that can only continue
to grow during the course of the new century that is about to begin.
I had noticed that there were two cities where you could begin to see
the putting into place of this type of multicultural society: London and
Paris . When I got the call from Juliette, already having this subject on
my mind, I saw an interesting coincidence there, and I decided to make
the film in Paris, where I had been doing research for several months.
I met with people from the black community, clandestine Romanian
immigrants-whose problems I already knew a little bit about, since I
1 40

M i chael H a n eke

treated them in a character in 71 Fragments; then I went to Austria to

assemble . . . my material! But that only concerned the material level
of the film-its story, its plot. The major point of the film went beyond
the immigration theme.
MC: Do you remember the first fragment [of your material] that
showed up in the screenplay?
MH: No, because I take a lot of notes; but the day comes when I feel
that I have enough, and then I proceed to a kind of a big collage. Each
idea is written on a sheet of paper, and I assemble the ideas on a big
table. It's the longest and most necessary work. The general structure
is everything for me. The writing of the screenplay itself goes quickly.
It's easy to write a scene when you already know the context. As far as
writing the dialogue, it's a pleasure and goes even more quickly! The
construction of the whole is much more complicated and takes time.
Besides, I never start writing until I have the entire structure in my head.
For [Code Unknown] , I in fact started with the first scene that you see,
but I no longer remember the first fragment I kept.
MC: During the editing, did you change the order of the appearance
of the fragments vis-a-vis the screenplay?
MH: Yes, there were several changes, because during the shooting,
we realized that the final amount of footage was going to be longer than
we had thought. So four scenes that were in the script disappeared: two
were abandoned because we already knew that the film would be at
least two hours long, but they weren't absolutely fundamental scenes;
and, also before shooting, there were two scenes that I thought were
flawed and weren't necessary either! But then I had to restructure the
whole thing, not a lot, but still a little bit. Since that time, I've forgotten
what exactly.
MC: This writing in articulated fragments around a certain number
of characters links your film to a subgenre called the "choral film ." But
Code Unknown seems different somehow.
M H : 71 Fragments and Code Unknown are different from Short
Cuts, American Beauty, or Magnolia, a genre that's currently in vogue.
These films have a tendency to tie up the strings of all their stories at
the end. After finishing 71 Fragments, I tried to do the opposite, or
something much more complicated. I prefer to follow all the strings,
in perfect continuity, without losing them, but without ever having to
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1 41

come back to them to tie them up in an explanatory way. That was my

biggest worry during the elaboration of the structure of Code Unknown.
It's very difficult to tell a story in that way.
MC: Your use of the long-take implicates the spectator on the level
of identification with the protagonists and on the level of his or her ma
nipulation by the director. In other words, is the long-take just as much
an affair of realism as a calling into question of the reality shown?
MH: I used the long-take in Code Unknown for several reasons . First,
in order to find a rigid structure for the fragments, as in a puzzle, but
also to separate them from the scenes relating to the film-within-the
film, which are shown in the usual way. Another reason was to let each
scene develop in real time, which is a way of not manipulating time;
which is also a kind of manipulation, because it's a question of showing
that the scenes of the film-within-the-film are just as artificial as the
other sequences . In fact, in Code Unknown, everything goes back to
manipulation. I play with that, because everyone knows that cinema is
a manipulation of the spectator; and it's not a question of knowing it but
of feeling it, of understanding it more deeply. Whence the difference in
the way the two types of scenes were handled. Besides, people mix them
up. The scene in the swimming pool, for example, which was edited in
the normal way, was taken by many people for a real scene in the film .
I also wanted to show, starting with these two opposed aesthetics, that
spectators taken by a well-made story can be totally manipulated . . . as
I wanted them to be!
MC: But one can feel oneself more implicated than manipulated, for
example, in the scene in the subway, which could be taken for a real,
contemporary document.
MH: That's not contradictory. To create an artificial universe, one always
develops a situation in which one is implicated, which is the danger the
cinema represents: you can make people believe they are implicated in a
situation to the point where they're no longer capable of judging things
coldly, of remaining outside . That's what most of the filmmakers who
play on identification do. I, on the other hand, am always fighting a little
bit against this idea of identification. I give the spectator the possibility
of identifying, and immediately after, with the help of the black shots for
example, I say to him or her: Stop a little bit with the emotional stuff and
you'll be able to see better!
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M icha el Haneke

How do you prepare your long-take shots?

MH: It's much more difficult than normal shooting, but I had very
good actors, an excellent assistant, Alain Olivieri, who made my task
easier with numerous extras, for example, during the second sequence
(in the street) and the one in the restaurant. For the scene in the street,
we had three days: one for rehearsing the actors with the camera, one
for placing the extras in relation to the camera, and one for the shooting.
There were thirty-two takes. Actually, we interrupted several of them
as soon as a problem arose. Nevertheless, we were able to shoot eight
or nine complete takes. The worst was making the definitive choice,
because naturally we never had a perfect take. The beginning shot was
best, so we had to choose that take, but there were errors as well . . . . As
always, I worked a lot on the sound, and I kept the sound from another
take and then stuck it on the one that was kept. For the sequence in the
restaurant, we had one day of rehearsal and one day of shooting during
which I shot thirty-three takes! For the sequence in the subway, every
thing had to go very fast, because we couldn't start until after midnight,
and we had to stop at 4:00 A . M . We had to do everything in the space
of two or three hours. It was hard! But I have to say that I had worked
a lot with the two young men beforehand: we had rehearsed before the
shooting, as early as the auditions, then during weekends, because they
were nonprofessionals . The young Arab, Walid Atkir, is extraordinarily
talented. We found him totally by chance on the street.
MC: Tell us about the black caesuras between the fragments .
MH: They were already in The Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments.
These "black shots" are directly linked with the different sequences.
They create a real sense of fragmentation. In The Seventh Continent,
their duration corresponded to the depth of the preceding scene. If there
was a lot to think about in the sequence, I made the black last longer.
[In Code Unknown, ] as in 71 Fragments, they are all two seconds long.
Unfortunately, the projectionists don't always respect them when they're
at the end of a reel and even elsewhere : in many festivals, they just cut
them right off, except at the Directors Fortnight at Cannes ! I had to put
a little explanatory text on each reel! To come back to the fragmentation,
I also opted for other little things, like cutting during the dialogue: in the
scene of the letters from the photographer, the reading is interrupted
right in the middle of a word; in other sequences, a question is barely
MC:

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1 43

asked before the cut comes and excludes the answer. A total reality can
never be captured in the cinema or in real life . We know so little !
MC: Since

The Seventh Continent, your way of putting a film together,

at first very close and understated, very B ressonian, has gotten progres
sively expanded from film to film.
M H : In

The Seventh Continent,

I examined the obj ectification of

our lives, which are now determined by a whole series of givens. That
implied the use of a precise aesthetic. I was very well aware of the fact
that a close-up has a different meaning in film and in television . But
the succession of very closely linked shots not being very common on
television, that led me to think that it was the appropriate discourse to
convey this concept of the objectification of the individual. I came back

Fragments : there's a connection between this

film and The Seventh Continent, just like between Benny's Video and
Funny Games, which take up a certain thematic. There is always a tight
to this aesthetic with 71

relation between the content and the form . Consequently, I am never

devoted to a single, specific aesthetic . B ut I think that, whatever the
style that is chosen, you can still recognize my film s !
MC: How d o you develop your sound track?
M H : The sound track is already more or less e stablished in the

screenplay. I even write the sounds in capital letters to distinguish them

from the rest, which is written in lowercase letters . I try to describe
them as precisely as possible, but while shooting, everything depends
on the physical context that is created by the actors , their movements ,
and the sounds that result. I treat the sounds j ust like the images and
handle them in such a way that the final result corresponds to what I
had planned. That s aid, sound represents a different kind of work than
that on the image : there are things that you don't m anage to record,
so we have to find something els e .
MC: How d o you direct your actors ?
MH: It's difficult to say. But, as always in my work, the finished film

corresponds absolutely with the screenplay: I draw a storyboard, and noth

ing is added during the shooting, with the exception of what the actors
bring to their characters from their own personalities, from their sense
of creativity. What's most important for the actors is the mutual trust that
creates a feeling of security for them. That way, an actor can go much
further than he or she would otherwise. People had already asked Fred

1 44

M i c hael Haneke

Zinnemann, a filmmaker of Austrian origin, how he got the actors in his

films to perform so well. He replied that it had to do with two things: good
casting and the fact that all mistakes had to be avoided! It's a philosophy
that I subscribe to. As far as my particular way ofworking with actors goes,
I am very tenacious, and I keep doing takes until the actors give me what
I want. I can't compare my work with that of other directors, because I
don't have the slightest idea how they work. But the thing that I'm most
sure about is that you have to love actors. I love them a lot.
MC: A very strong sequence in

Code Unknown is the one that shows the

photographer, in the subway, who is stealing the passengers' portraits.

MH: Those are photographs taken by Luc Delahaye, a well-known war

photographer who is also a friend of mine . I met him through Raymond

Depardon, whom I know well, and who had the idea of making a film on
a war correspondent. The war correspondent, whom I don't know, had
written a text that Depardon had given me because, in the meantime,
he had given up the project. I was interested in a character who was a
photographer who specialized in war photography because it allowed me
to integrate another reality by means of his photos. Then Luc gave me
a book of photos that he had taken in the subway, and I found the idea
extraordinary for the film . We thought of having him retake the photos,
but that would have produced photos consciously taken and would have
been totally different. It's better to photograph beings who aren't conscious
of having their picture taken. One should reproduce, but create.
MC: Where does the title come from?
MH: From the first impression I had felt in Paris, that one couldn't

go anywhere without knowing the code number of a building. And for

me that was a very good first image in terms of the film's contents . Like
the preface you find before beginning a novel that tells you that, without
the proper code, you won't be able to figure out the feelings you're going
to be confronted with: you are going to stay outside , and there won't be
any communication . So it's a title that has two meanings .
MC: What is your interpretation of the drumming scene-as much

paradoxical as cheerful-given by the group of deafpeople (deaf people

create sounds with the greatest joy) , in relation to the title,
uses a code to protect oneself better)

Unknown

Code

(one

(but without the code

one no longer can communicate ) ? Isn't art the only thing left as the last
great refuge for man?

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145

Yes, I think so. Art is the only thing that can console us what
soever! But spectators have to look for their own responses wherever
they are. It's useless if they find responses that don't come from within.
That can only give them a good conscience.
MC: You've studied philosophy. Has that had a direct influence on
your films?
MH: No, I don't think so. Like all young people who study philosophy,
I was looking for answers to questions that preoccupied me. But, as you
quickly find out, philosophy doesn't offer any solutions. So I can't speak
of a philosophical influence on my work. At the time, there were people
who influenced me, like Hegel, because my professor was a Hegelian;
for him, in fact, philosophy more or less ended with Hegel. In our stud
ies we got as far as the Viennese Circle, but without really going very
deeply. Like all artists, I think that Wittgenstein influenced me a great
deal, but not in the sense that one tries to appropriate the world, but
rather that, as he said himself, it is better to be silent than to try to express
the inexpressible. It's the mystical aspect of Wittgenstein's thinking that
especially attracted me.
MC: When did your interest in the various destructive processes that
afflict man begin?
MH: I think that I am someone who is creative and sensitive to every
form of suffering. I can't stand suffering, and that might explain it. Actu
ally, I have difficulty identifying the reasons that have led me to write my
stories. I find myself in the position of the centipede who's been asked
how he manages to walk: he's then incapable of moving! However, that
makes me think of Wim Wenders's film The End of Violence, which
begins by trying to define violence. I myself have asked that question,
and the answer that I found is that violence is the ultimate recourse of
power against the will of others who must then be subjected to it.
MC: One very upsetting aspect of your previous film, Funny Games,
was that the two torturers imposed their power on their victims by means
of a process of making them feel guilty. When a code becomes unknown,
isn't that the same process?
MH: The theme of guilt is present in all my films. Funny Games was
meant as a metaphor for a society that has turned inward and excluded
the exterior world. Men today live in prisons they've created for them
selves. They can't escape, because they're the ones that built the walls
MH:

1 46

Michael H a neke

that surround them. So it's their own fault. This is where the feeling of
guilt that every victim feels comes from . There is no victim in my films
who is completely innocent. But nevertheless, these victims aren't killed
because of their guilty feelings . In Funny Games I was playing with an
ironic contradiction: each one of my victims became guilty of a repre
hensible act before the torturers took over. Of course, they were forced
by the two young men to act that way, like the mother who suddenly isn't
polite any longer, the father who slaps one of the young men, or the son
who is the first to shoot. It was an ironic way of keeping spectators from
siding with the victims right away because they sympathized completely
with them . I was also trying to draw the attention of the audience to
the fact-in terms of criminal violence-that things in the world aren't
so simple. Obviously, there's no connection between the guilt of these
people and their final disappearance. It's not some kind of punishment;
that would be completely idiotic to think that.
MC: In fact, you are exploring the absurd as applied to the world of
violence and noncommunication?
MH: Yes, it's very Kafkaesque. Guilt is the first question in all of Kafka's
works. It's also true of all my films, including The Castle, of course! It's
inherent in our Judea-Christian tradition and especially in Central Eu
rope. Actually, in all of the West.
MC: Your liberal opinions are well known, as well as your opposition
to Jorg Haider [the late Austrian right-wing politician], and yet some
have called Funny Games a fascist film. What is your response?
MH: You can't make a film against fascism using an aesthetic that
is itself fascist. It's the same thing with violence. You can't make a film
against violence using a style that is found in films of violence . For
Funny Games , I therefore had recourse to a fairly large number of
means that allow spectators to be conscious of what is happening, to
understand the actions and the gestures of the characters . The film
could never be fascist or Nazi, because Nazism consists essentially in
violating people to take something away from them. If my film were
fascist, it would violate the thoughts of others . Those who call my film
a Nazi film are those who don't want to understand this phenomenon
of guilt that we just spoke of. Guilt that applies equally, during the
projection, to the spectators . But maybe these people just don't want
to understand!
I nterviews

1 47

"Interview with Michael Haneke:

You Never Show Reality, Just Its Manipulated Image"

Interviewed by Michel Cieutat and Philippe Rouyer, translated from

French by Peter Brunette. (Originally appeared in Positif S36 [October
zoos] : z 1-zs . ) Interview conducted at Cannes, May 1S, zoos.
and PHILIPPE ROUYER : Cache seems to take us
back to an earlier period in your work, after a parenthesis constituted
by The Piano Teacher and Time of the Wolf.
MICHAEL HANEKE : It's true, these two films are a little bit apart,
resurrected from my past. I had written The Piano Teacher for an Aus
trian colleague who wanted to shoot it with an American actress. But
after ten years he still hadn't managed to get the project going, and the
producer finally asked me to direct it. I really didn't want to because it
wasn't a personal story. But because I didn't have anything else avail
able to shoot very quickly, I finally agreed on the condition that Isabelle
Huppert play the principal role. She was ideal for the part. I had written
Time of the Wolf earlier, just after The Seventh Continent. At the time,
it was an hour longer. It started in the city and was a big futurist film .
After September 1 1 , I told myself that the moment had come to pull it
out of the drawer, because the events had given it a new relevance. In
fact, this time I got financing.
MC and PR: How far back does the project for Cache go?
MH: I wrote it after The Piano Teacher. September 1 1 convinced
me to insert the shooting of Time of the Wolf, but I still took the time
to finish the screenplay of Cache first. I would have liked to shoot it in
zoo4, but we couldn't find the money. We had to give up the idea of a
French production and make it an international production instead in
order to get the necessary funds . So I put almost four years into getting
this project finished.
MC and PR: What was its origin? The desire to return with Juliette
Binoche after Code Unknown back to Paris?
MH: No, it was the desire to make a film with Daniel Auteuil. I had met
him through my press attachee, Matilde Incerti, and he had confirmed
that he wanted to work with me. So then I started thinking about what I
could come up with for him.
MICHEL CIEUTAT

1 48

M ichael H a neke

and PR: What did you find interesting in him?

MH: In addition to his great talent, he has something that fascinates
me. It's like a secret, something inside him that pushes us to ask ourselves
what there is behind him . In an earlier time, Jean-Louis Trintignant had
the same hidden thing.
MC and PR: How did you use this secret in terms of his character?
MH: It just worked on its own. I didn't have anything to add. Some
times it's like that, when the casting is good. When people tell me my
actors are always good, I quote Fred Zinnemann, the Austrian filmmaker
who had his career in Hollywood and who said, "In order to make a good
film, there are two things to respect: get a good cast and don't make any
mistakes ! " A good cast doesn't only mean having good actors but having
good actors in roles that have a close connection to them. And I think
that worked very well with Daniel Auteuil in Cache.
MC and PR: Were you thinking of the Algerian War right from the
beginning?
MH: No. I was still in Austria when I had the idea of doing something
about a father and son who were implicated in a sorrowful past. If I
had developed it then, I would have linked the story with the Second
World War. But you can find shadow zones in the past of any country.
In regards to France, I had already opted for the Algerian War when
I saw, just by chance, a documentary on Arte that really shocked me
regarding the events of 196 1 . I asked myself how, in a country in which
discussions regarding political conflicts had always been so open, it was
possible that no one was talking about these two hundred deaths in
Paris. Taking Daniel Auteuil's age into account, everything fit. It was
not indispensable to the plot, but linking the plot to politics kept the
guilt from remaining on the personal level.
MC and PR: Can you tell us about the last two shots that sum up the
whole film? One is a flashback, and the other projects us into the future,
giving us to understand that no one, across time, can ever escape the
feeling of guilt.
MH: We're all the inheritors of sins committed by our parents, and
of their . . . non-sins ! Unfortunately that's how human existence goes .
It's unavoidable.
MC and PR: Why did you actually show the flashback, since it was
already known through the history itself?
MC

I nterviews

1 49

MH:

It's one thing to know something and another thing to feel it. I

find that scene very touching. I didn't put it in earlier because I wanted
to save it for the end: Daniel's character takes his two sleeping pills,
pulls the covers over his head, and hopes to escape, but the reality is
something completely different.
and

MC

PR:

Do you put everything together right after writing the

script?
MH:

I always make a storyboard before shooting. But the choice be

tween a fixed shot and a long-take shot [in which the camera follows the
action] is decided earlier, during the writing. So it was always clear in my
mind that the final two shots were fixed and that they would refer back
in their framing to previous shots (the nightmare with the chicken). It's
often the structure of the scene that demands a certain form, like the shot/
countershot for the argument between the mother and the son. But it also
depends on the locations you find. For this film, I had the luck to shoot
all the interior shots of the house in a studio. We could really do exactly
what we wanted because we had set up the decor to meet our needs.
and

MC

PR:

How did you work with your cameraman, Christian

Berger, regarding the light and the white highlights? Did you give him
specific instructions from the beginning?
MH:

In fact, even if we changed the details considerably, we con

ceived the decor by being inspired by the real interiors of the house
that was shot for the exteriors.I had found that house by accident when
we passed it on our way to look at another house. It attracted me im
mediately because of its situation in the street, almost hidden by the
other buildings that are behind it. In terms of my script, filming this
house amounted to showing the part for the whole because it repre
sents a place where one feels well protected.The white came from its
luxurious 1930s, art-deco aspect. In addition, this very real house also
had an artist's studio that was very practical for diffusing a neutral and
even lighting on the whole decor. As soon as I saw the house from the
outside, I understood what I could get out of it for the lighting.
MC

and PR: The paradox is that this neutral and diffused light creates

an unquiet climate right from the start....

MH:

If you had had a very dramatic kind of lighting, that would have

been too forced. You always have to work against the expectations of

150

Michael Haneke

the audience. And you have to hide what you want to show in order
for it to work.
and

MC

PR:

At the same time, there's no space to hide in this house,

because the light is so pale....

MH:

Yes, but the house claims to protect because there are no win

dows. In an apartment with windows, you can be filmed from outside.

Here, it's impossible.Yet the characters are still being watched.
and

MC

PR:

But the observing comes from the inside. The effect

is obvious in the scene in which Benichou cuts his throat, because the
angle of the shot....
MH:

It's the same as in the shot where he's shown on the television.

It's just a little bit off because the background wasn't really parallel.
MC

and PR: The spectator is even more confused because there's no

space to allow the intruder to film Benichou, taking into account the
closeness of the wall....
MH:

If you could search the frame, you would see that a little camera

has been placed there, against that wall, hidden right in the middle of
all the clutter.A camera put there by anybody.But it's there! You could
even think that the whole suicide is also a trick!
MC

and

PR:

Tell us about the texture of the film, which was shot in

high-definition digital, which allows one to put the real and its repre
sentation on the same level.
MH:

I wanted to have that video texture in order to destabilize his

control of the immediate reality.That caused us a lot of problems with

material because, today, the video cameras, it's horrible: they make noise
because of the fan in the computer, which turns faster as the computer
heats up. We also had problems with the calibration: there are many
fewer colors than with film, and that quickly becomes horrible.I swore
to myself that my next film would not be in video! In Cache, it was nec
essary for the story, but the technical side is not right. Even if I know
that it's the future. In fifteen years, we' ll only be shooting in video!
MC

and

PR:

That said, here, it's thanks to that digital texture that,

after having been tricked from the opening sequence, we become very
vigilant at the sight of the slightest fixed shot!
MH:

You've become poisoned then! So much the better! But this little

game is not something new for me. I did something similar in Funny

Interviews

151

Games. Because all those claims today to want to show reality really bother
me. You never show reality; you only show its manipulated image.
MC and PR: There's also, as in Funny Games, the idea of the absolute
power of images and of the filmmaker who produces them over those
who look at them . . . .
MH: Yes, but to get where? That's the question.
MC and PR: Let's ask you that question.
MH: To make you realize that you are being manipulated. With no
matter what film, you're being manipulated, but people are dishonest
enough never to say it. I, on the other hand, show it to say it. I think it's
the exact opposite position. You can't escape this problematic: as soon
as you make a frame, it's already a manipulation. I just try to do it in a
transparent manner.
MC and PR: However, you leave a little bit more freedom to the specta
tors than your fellow filmmakers, in that you use music less?
MH: Yes, because that really bores me. I love music too much to use
it to cover up my mistakes! In film, it's often used this way, no? Besides,
in a "realist" film, where does the music come from, excluding the times
when it comes from a radio that's been turned on? Now, in my film there
are no situations in which one would be listening to music. And I would
have found it dishonest to try to cover up mistakes.
MC and PR: Why, after Funny Games-which, to our minds, had
already magnificently explored this theme-did you feel the need to
return to the denunciation of the power of images?
MH: Because I think that you have the obligation to do it in every
film. Today, if you are a writer and if you are serious, you wouldn't dare
claim that you can describe reality in all its complexity. That means that
you are thinking in the work itself about the impossibility of descrip
tion. And, in my opinion, the cinema is obligated to do the same thing.
If not, it's still in the nineteenth century. But it's reassuring that even
the current mainstream cinema works and makes its money that way.
Now, if cinema wants to be an art, it must find the means that lead to
other reflections. That's why I love the work of Kiarostami, who pleased
me enormously when he came to see my film and confided to me as
he was leaving, "That's my Golden Palm !" I think that he's the greatest
because he too constantly explores the same subject. And he is pushing
the reflections to the highest levels that one can today.
1 52

Michael H a neke

MC and PR: Your film deals with a unique and difficult theme for
almost two hours . How do you manage to keep your spectators in sus
pense? Do you try to multiply the false digressions, like the story that
Denis Podalydes tells against the background of a set (the real library
in the dining room) , which later will be taken up again (a fake library)
on the stage of the literary show of Daniel Auteuil?
MH: It's like the Russian dolls, the doll inside the doll inside the doll.
For me, making references and going back to things that have already
happened is an artistic pleasure . It's not absolutely necessary, but it
enriches the dramatic construction. It's like a musical fugue. Of course,
one can do the music differently, but the doubling of the theme brings
in more complexity and pleasure.
MC and P R : Where does the story told by Podalydes come from?
MH: I was at a party where someone told it. I liked it so much that I
took notes on it while telling myself that I would use it one day. Here,
it fits well with what's going on because you're wondering if it's true .
All the while realizing, with the black woman who says so aloud, that
it's a stupid question. Besides, Denis tells the story beautifully, which
was very difficult in a single shot. He had two pages of text to say while
raising the comic tension . I had planned to shoot some reaction shots
of the people listening in case he couldn't pull it off. But he's a very
good actor, and he told it as I had hoped. So I was able to stay with
the wide shot.
MC and PR: Did the film change a lot during the editing, especially
in the length of the long-take, moving shots and the [long-take] fixed
shots?
MH: It wasn't possible for the long-take , moving shots , where you
have a certain timing you have to respect during the take. In traditional
editing, you can always change the shots that don't work, even throw
them away. But with the moving long-take shots and the fixed shots, you
can't fix things in the editing. That's the danger. On the other hand, I
edit very quickly, in three weeks . Editing the scenes in shotlcountershot
takes more time because it gives you more options . With the moving
long-take shots as well, you have to choose, but it's always more difficult
because in these five- to eight-minute shots, there are always, depend
ing on the takes, some moments that are less good and others that are
better. So you have to choose between two possibilities, and you always

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1 53

lose something. It's heartbreaking. I adore postproduction, but I hate

having to make these choices !
M C and PR: I n a fixed shot like during the credits , you can still play
with the length during the editing . . . .
MH: No, the timing was very precise for this shot. It's the same prin
ciple as for 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. I know that the
audience has understood the shot after ten seconds and is waiting for
the next shot. But when it keeps going, they become upset, then angry.
You have to plan for all that in advance while working. I have to know
how I would react if I were the spectator. It's the director's job to have
an interior sense of timing to know how it's going to be received by the
audience. If, for example, you have a shot on a house, it's very important
to decide when a car or a person is going to pass in front of it. A little
bit earlier or a little bit later, it might not work as well. It's very delicate
point to explain. It's a question of breathing. So it's very important to
work with someone on the editing who breathes like you. The female
editors that I work with make the cuts at the moments I want them to.
That's why I say that the cinema is closer to music than to literature.
MC and PR: When do you calibrate this timing? During the rehears
als, just before the takes? Speaking more generally, do you do a lot of
rehearsing?
MH: Yes, we rehearse a lot for the fixed shots and the moving long
take shots . It's inevitable. The worst are the moving long-take shots,
because the camera also has to function in relation to the whole, which
is sometimes very difficult for the actors. For example, for the shot in
which Daniel Auteuil returns from the police station and begins to cry
at the end of it: because of the different entrances into the house, it was
horrible because of the digital camera, which is never really in focus. We
had to do it over and over again, for at least three quarters of a day, to get
it to work technically. In addition, we had five actors, and one of them
hesitated. It was much more complicated than if it had been filmed in
shot!countershot. In that case, we would have shot it three times from
that angle, three times from the other angle, and that's all-we could
have gone straight to editing.
MC and PR: How many takes on average are there for a single moving
long-take shot?

1 54

Michael H aneke

MH: You can end up doing a lot of them. In general, it goes from
three to thirty! It depends so much on little things that you can never
imagine how many takes you're going to need. With the shot I was just
describing, we had a problem that cost us a half a day. The camera was
supposed to enter the kitchen ahead of Daniel, and a tiny little difference
between the tiled flooring of the kitchen and the carpet of the living
room messed us up. To this was added another problem caused by the
door, which we couldn't get the camera through. We had to open it to let
the camera in and, immediately afterward, halfway close it again before
Daniel came in. These are really shitty little things, but necessary for
the shot to work.
MC and PR: During the shooting of a long-take shot, if you notice a
mistake made by one of your actors, do you stop the take or continue?
M H : You don't always know because you have to be attentive to a
thousand things at once . During the take, I look at the actors above all,
and I don't bother about the camera. Then I look at the video record
ing, and sometimes I don't notice something that's gone wrong. So I
look at it several times. For that, video is a real gift! Without being able
to check it on video, I would never have filmed the moving long-take
shot of Code Unknown on the street. Quite simply because you can't
watch two hundred people at the same time to make sure that no one
is looking at the camera. That said, it happens from time to time that
you will interrupt a long-take that has started badly. Especially if you've
already done twenty takes, because it's very tiring for the actors . If I
feel that things are beginning to drag, to lose intensity, I call a coffee
break to recuperate . But most often it's the camera that causes the
interruptions.
MC and P R : Where are you during the takes?
MH: Always in front of the actors, with headphones for the sound,
because if you're far away from them, you can't hear very well. It's only
after the take that I go check to see what's on the computer drive.
MC and PR: Without the actors?
MH: Oh, yes ! From time to time they want to look, but I ask them
not to. If, in spite of everything, they insist on looking at their perfor
mance, I let them. They are professionals, and they know what they are
doing. But with young actors or people with less experience, I never

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155

allow them to watch. That would be too destabilizing for them because
they wouldn't be seeing the film in its entirety, but only themselves. It
wouldn't be right to reproach them for this, because it's only natural. As
soon as you appear in an image, you are looking at yourself.
MC and PR: Why did you opt for widescreen ( 111 .85), which cor
responds to the 16/g ratio of [widescreen] television. Does that interest
you?
M H : I wanted a frame that corresponds to today's television. It wouldn't
have worked with real Scope. But it all depends on the story. I have no
particular predilection for one format over another. I would have loved to
have shot at least once in 1 .33, but that's no longer possible nowadays.
MC and PR: Are you thinking of beginning another film in French?
MH: No, I have a German-language project that I wrote four years
ago. A film on the youth of the years 19 13-14, the generation that would
become Nazis twenty years later. This will be a three-hour film with a lot
of people in it, sketching a portrait of a German village via its nobility,
a grandfather at the head of his company and his little workers. But, of
course, everything depends on the success of Cache. If I can't manage to
get this project going, I have another one that is more modest. Since it's
not yet written, I can't speak about it in detail. All that I can say is that
it's a contemporary subject with few characters and that it's in French.
MC and PR: Are you now perfectly integrated into French cinema
and society?
M H : Yes . Which gives me the privilege of being able to create in
two different countries . That allows me to work continuously, and it's
very nice .

156

M ichael H a neke

Filmography

Note: Only the films extensively covered in this book, those made for
theatrical release since 1989, are listed here.
The Seventh Continent (Der siebente Kontinent,

1g8g)

Austria/Gennany
Production Company: Wega Film
Director: Michael Haneke
Writers: Michael Haneke and Johanna Teicht
Producers: Veit Heiduschka
Cinematographer: Anton Peschke
Music: Alban Berg
Editor: Marie Homolkova
Production Designer: Rudolf Czettel
Art Director: Rudolf Czettel

Costume Designer: Anna Georgiades

Gast: Dieter Berner (Georg), Udo Samel (Alexander), Leni Tanzer (Eva),
Birgit Doll (Anna)
Benny's Video

( 1992)

Austria/Gennany
Production Companies: Bernard Lang and Wega Film
Director: Michael Haneke
Writer: Michael Haneke
Producers: Veit Heiduschka, Michael Katz, Bernard Lang, and Gebhard
Zupan
Cinematographer: Christian Berger
Editor: Marie Homolkova
Production Designer: Christoph Kanter
Set Decorator: Christian Schuster
Costume Designer: Erika Navas
Cast: Amo Frisch (Benny), Angela Winkler (Mother), Ulrich Miihe (Father),
Ingrid Stassner (Young Girl)

Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie

des Zufalls, 1994)
Austria/Germany
Production Company: Wega Film
Director: Michael Haneke
Writer: Michael Haneke
Producers: Veit Heiduschka and Willi Zegler
Cinematographer: Christian Berger
Editor: Marie Homolkova
Production Designer: Christoph Kanter
Costume Designer: Erika Navas
Cast: Gabriel Cosmin Urdes ( M arian Radu, Romanian Boy), Lukas Miko
( M ax), Otto Griinmandl (Tomek), Anne Bennent (Inge B runner), Udo
Same! ( Paul Brunner), B ranko Samarovski ( Hans) , Claudia M artini
( M aria), Georg Friedrich ( Bernie)
71

Funny Games ( 1997)

Austria/Germany
Production Company: Wega Film
Director: Michael H aneke
Writer: Michael Haneke
Producer: Veit Heiduschka
Cinematographer: Jiirgen Jiirges
E ditor: Andreas Prochaska
Production Designer: Christoph Kanter
Costume Designer: Lisy Christl
Cast: Susanne Lothar (Anna) , Ulrich Miihe ( Georg), Arno Frisch ( Paul) ,
Frank Giering ( Peter), Stefan Clapczynski ( Georgie)

Code Unknown Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (Code inconnu: Recit

incomplet de divers voyages, 2000)
France, Germany, Romania
Production Companies: Bavaria Film, Canal + , Filmex, France 2 Cinema, Les
Films Alain Sarde, M K2 Productions, Romanian Culture Ministry, Zweites
Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) , and Arte France Cinema
Director: Michael Haneke
Writer: Michael Haneke
Editors: Karin Hartusch, Nadine Muse, and Andreas Prochaska
Producers: Yvon Crenn, Marin Karmitz, and Alain Sarde
Cinematographer: Jurgen Jiirges
Production Designer: Emmanuel de Chauvigny
Set Decorator: Laurence Vendroux

1 58

Filmography

Costume Designer: Franr;ois Clave!

Original Music: Giba Gonr;alves
Cast: Juliette Binoche (Anne Laurent), Thierry Neuvic ( Georges), Josef
Bierbichler (The Farmer), Alexandre Hamid! (Jean), Maimouna Helene
Diarra (Aminate) , Ona Lu Yenke (Amadou) , Djibril Kouyate (The Father),
Luminita Gheorghiu ( M aria), Bruno Todeschini ( Pierre ) , Walid Afkir (The
Young Arab) , Maurice Benichou (The Old Arab)

The Piano Teacher ( La Pianiste, 200 1 )

Austria, France, Germany
Production Companies : Arte, Bayenscher Rundfunk (BR), Canal+ , Centre
National de Ia Cinematographie (CNC), Eurimages, Les Films Alain
Sarde, M K2 Productions, P.P. Film Polski, Wega Film, O sterreichischer
Rundfunk (ORF), and Arte France Cinema
Director: Michael Haneke
Writer: Michael Haneke, from the novel by Elfriede Jelinek
Producers : Yvon Crenn, Christine Gozlan, Veit Heiduschka, and Michael
Katz
Music: Francis Haines
Cinematographer: Christian Berger
Editors: Nadine Muse and Monika Willi
Production D esigner: Christoph Kanter
Set Decorator: Hans Wagner
Costume Designer: Annette Beaufays
Cast: Isabelle Huppert (Erika Kohut) , Annie Girardot (The Mother), Benoit
Magimel (Walter Klemmer)
Time of the Wolf ( Le Temps du loup, 2003)
France, Austria, Germany
Production Companies: Bavaria Film, Canal + , Centre National de Ia
Cinematographie (CNC), Eurimages, France 3 Cinema, Les Films du
Losange, Wega Film, and Arte France Cinema
Director: M ichael Haneke
Writer: Michael Haneke
Producers : Veit Heiduschka, Michael Katz, M argaret Menegoz, and M ichael
Weber
Cinematographer: Jiirgen Jiirges
Editors : Nadine Muse and Monika Willi
Production Designer: Christoph Kanter
Art Director: James David Goldmark
Costume Designer: Lisy Christl
Cast: Isabelle Huppert (Anne Laurent) , Beatrice D aile ( Lise Brandt), Patrice

Filmography

159

Chereau (Thomas Brandt) , M aurice Benichou ( M . Azoulay), Olivier

Gourmet ( Koslowsla) , B ngitte Rouan (Bea), Lucas Biscombe ( Ben),
Hakim Taleb (Wild Child), Ana!s Demoustier ( Eva)

Cache ( H idden, 2005)

France, Austria, Germany
Production Companies: Les Films du Losange, Wega Film, Bavaria Film,
B I M Distribuzione, France 3 Cinema, Arte France Cinema, Eurimages,
Centre National de Ia Cinematographie (CNC), and Canal +
Director: Michael Haneke
Wnter: Michael Haneke
Producers : Andrew Colton, Valerio De Paolis, Veit Heiduschka, Michael
Katz, Margaret Menegoz, and Michael Weber
Cinematographer: Christian Berger
Editors: Michael Hudecek and Nadine M use
Production Designers: Emmanuel de ChauVIgny and Christoph Kanter
Costume Designer: Lisy Chnstl
Cast: Daniel Auteuil ( Georges Laurent), Juliette Binoche (Anne Laurent),
Maunce Benichou ( M ajid) , Annie Girardot ( Georges's Mother), Bernard
Le Coq ( Georges's Editor-in-Chief), Walid Afkir ( M ajid's Son), Lester
Makedonsky ( Pierrot Laurent)

Funny Games (U. S. , 2007-8)

United States
Production Companies: Celluloid Dreams, Halcyon Pictures, Tartan Films,
X-Filme, Lucky Red, and Kinematograf
Director: Michael H aneke
Writer: Michael Haneke
Producers: Christian Baute, Chris Coen, Hamish McAlpine, and Andro
Steinborn
Cinematographer: Darius Khondji
Production Designer. Kevin Thompson
Art Director Hinju Kim
Set Decorator: Rebecca Meis DeMarco
Costume Designer: David C. Robinson
Cast: Naomi Watts (Anne ) , Tim Roth ( George ) , Michael Pitt (Paul), Brady
Corbet ( Peter) , Devon Gearhart ( Georgie)

The White Ribbon (Das weisse B and, 2oog)

Germany, Austria, France, Italy
Production Companies: X Filme Creative Pool (Berlin) , Wega Film (Austria) ,
Les Films du Losange ( France ) , and Lucky Red (Italy)
Director: Michael Haneke

1 60

Filmography

Writer: Michael Haneke (Jean-Claude Carriere, consultant)

Producers: Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, Margaret Menegoz, and Andrea
Occhipinti
Cinematographer: Christian Berger
Editor: Monika Willi
Production Designer: Christoph Kanter
Sound: Guillaume Sciama and Jean-Pierre Laforce
Costume Designer: Moidele Bickel
Cast: Christian Friedel (The Teacher), Leonie Benesch (Eva) , Ulrich Tukur
(The Baron) , Ursina Lardi (The Baroness) , Fion Mutert (Sigmund),
Burghart Klaussner (The Pastor), Steffi KUhnert (Anna), Maria-Victoria
Dragus ( Klara), Leonard Proxauf ( M artin) , Josef Bierbichler (The
Steward) , Gabriela Maria Schmeide (Emma), Janina Fautz (Ema) , Rainer
Bock (The Doctor), Roxane Duran (Anna), Miljan Chatelain ( Rudolf),
Susannne Lothar (The Midwife), Eddy Grahl (Karli), Branko Samarovski
(The Farmer).

Filmography

1 61

Bibliography

Applebaum , Stephen. "Michael Haneke: The Piano Teacher" (interview). Oc

tober 30, zoo 1 ; December Z7, zoo7. http://www. bbc.co uk/films/zo0 1/10/3o/
michael_haneke_interview.shtml.
Arthur, Paul. "Hidden The Paranoid Universe of Michael Haneke." Film Com
ment 4 1 .6 ( November/December zoos) : zs-z8.
Badt, Karin. "Family Is Hell and So Is the World." Bright Lights Film Journal
so ( November zoos) ; December z7, zoo7. http ://brightlightsfilm. com/so/
hanekeiv.htm.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation Trans . Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1 994.
B runette, Peter. "Michael Haneke and the TeleVIsion Years : A Reading of Lem
mings " In A Companion to Michael Haneke. Ed. Roy Grundmann ( Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming) .
Calhoun, D ave . " Michael H aneke : Intemew." Time Out London. December
z7, zoo7. http://www. timeout.com/film/features/show-feature/36S8/michael
haneke-interview.html.
Cieutat, Michel. "Entretien avec Michael H aneke. La fragmentation du re
gard." Positif 478 ( December zooo) : zs-z9. (Translation reprinted in this
volume. )
Cieutat, Michel, and Philippe Rouyer. "Entretien avec Michael Haneke : On ne
montre pas Ia realite, juste son image manipulee ." Positif S36 (October zoos):
z 1-zs. (Translation reprinted in this volume . )
Combs, Richard. "Movie o f the Moment: The Piano Teacher." Film Comment
38.z ( March/April zooz) : z6-z8.
DeBord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle Trans . Donald Nicholson-Smith.
New York: Zone Books , 1994.
Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Ed. Gerald Graff. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and
Samuel Weber. Evanston, Ill . : Northwestern University Press, 1988.
Edelstein, David. "Audience is Loser in Haneke's Unfunny 'Games."' National
Public Racho, March 14, zoo8; August 30, zoo9. http://www. npr.orgltemplates/
story/story. php ?storyid=88z3o6 19.

Falcon, Richard. "Forbiddmg Cinema. The Discreet Harm of the Bourgeoisie."

Sight and Sound 8 . 5 ( M ay 1998 ) : 10.
Foundas , Scott. "Interview: M ichael Haneke, the Bearded Prophet of Code
Inconnu and The Piano Teacher." December 4, 200 1 ; December 27, 2007.
http .//www. inruewire .com/article/interview_michael_haneke_the_bearded_
prophet_of_code_inconnu_and_the_piano 1/
Frey, M attias . "A Cinema of Disturbance : The Films of M ichael Haneke in
Context . " Senses of Cinema ( August 2003 ) ; December 27, 2007 . http ://
sensesofcinema. corn/contents/directors/o3fhaneke .html.
--- . "Supermodernity, Capital, and Narcissus : The French Connection to
Michael Haneke's Benny's Video ." December 27, 2007. http //cinetext.philo
.atlmagazine/frey/bennys_VIdeo. pdf
Fuller, Graham . "Shots in the Dark When Directors Tackle Their Own Re
makes, Who Scores?" Interview 38. 1 ( February zoo8) : 64.
Grossvogel, DaVId I. "Haneke: The Coercing of Vision." Film Quarterly 60-4
( Summer 2007): 36--43 .
Grundmann, Roy. "Auteur de Force: Michael Haneke's 'Cinema of Glaciation."'
Cineaste 32.2 ( Spring 2007): 6-- 1 4.
Heidegger, Martin. "The Question Concerning Technology." In The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans . William Lovitt. New York.
Harper and Row, 1977. 3-35.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic ofEnglightenment Philo
sophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans . Edmund Jephcott.
Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, zooz.
Jeffries, Stuart. "No Pain, No Gain." The Guardian, May 24, 200 1 ; December
27, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uklculture/zoo1/may/z4fartsfeatures.
Jelinek, Elfriede. The Piano Teacher. Trans . Joachim Neugroschel. New York:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988.
Kawin, Bruce. Mindscreen Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film Princeton,
N .J . Princeton University Press, 1978.
Le Cain, Maximilian "Do the Right Thing: The Films of Michael Haneke ."
Senses of Cinema ( M ay 2003 ) ; July 13, zoo6. http://archive.sensesofcinema.
corn/contents/o3fz6/haneke .html.
MacNab, Geoffrey "Funny Games." Sight and Sound 1 1 . 4 (April zoo 1 ) : 63
Morrow, Fiona. "Michael H aneke : All Pain and No Gain " The Independent,
November z, 200 1 ; December 27, 2007. http://arts .independent.co uklfilrnl
features/article_ 142oo8.ece.
Parton, Richard. "Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview
with Michael Haneke." Cineaste 3 1 . 1 (Winter zoos) : 50-5 1 .
Pnce, Brian "Pain and the Limits o f Representation." Framework 47.2 (Fall
2006) : 25.
Rhodes, John David. "Haneke, the Long Take, Realism," Framework 47.2 (Fall
zoo6) : 18.

1 64

Bibliog raphy

Scott, A. 0. "A Vicious Attack on Innocent People, on the Screen and in the
Theater. " New York Times, March 14, zoo8 ; April 5, zoo8 . http ://movies .
nytimes .com/zoo8/o3f14fmoVIes/14funn .html?pagewan.
Sharrett, Christopher. "Austria, The World That Is Known: Michael Haneke
Interviewed " Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European Film 4 1 ( March 8,
2004); December 27, 2007. http.//www.kmoeye.org/o4fo 1/interviewo 1 .php.
Time of the Wolf. DVD . Palm Pictures, 2004.
Toubiana, Serge. Interview with Michael Haneke . Benny's Video. DVD . Wega
Filmproduktwn, 1992. Kino International, 2006.
--- . InterVIew with Michael Haneke. Funny Games. DVD . Athtude Films
and Fox Lorber Home Video, 1 998.
-- . Interview with Michael Haneke. The Seventh Continent DVD . Wega
Filmproduktion, 1989. Kino International, 2006.
-- Interview with Michael Haneke. 71 Fragments ofa Chronology of Chance
DVD. Wega Film, Camera Film, ZDF/Arte, 1994. Kino International, 2006.
Vicari, Justin. "Films of Michael Haneke: The Utopia of Fear." Jump Cut 4B (Win
ter zoo6), December 27, 2007. http://www. ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48. zoo6/
Haneke/text.html.
Vogel, Amos. "Of Non-Existing Continents : The Cinema of Michael Haneke "
Film Comment 32.4 (July/August 1 996): 73-75 .
Wood, Robin. " Hidden in Plain Sight: Robin Wood on Michael Haneke's Cache."
ArtForum 44 5 (January zoo6) : 35-37.
Wray, John. "Minister of Fear." New York Times Magazine, September 23, 2007,
44-49
Wyatt, Jean. "Jouissance and Desire in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher."
American Imago 62.4 (Winter zoos) : 453-82.

Bibliography

1 65

I ndex

Adorno, Theodor, 62, 64-65

DeBord, Guy, 33

American Beauty (Mendes), 44

Amores Perros (Ifuirri.tu ), 44

Denida, Jacques, 33, 6g, 84, 1 16

Desperate Hours, The (Wyler), 137n7

Antonioni, Michelangelo, 1-2, 22, 72

Auteuil, Daniel, 148-49

Eclisse, r: (Antonioni), 72

Barthes, Roland, 42

End ofViolence (Wenders), 7

Edelstein, David, 7 1
Baudrillard, Jean, 33
Bazin, Andre, 8

Foundas, Scott, 5

Benny's Video ( 1992), 5, 22-39, 52, 6o,

Funny Games ( 1997), 5, 10, 47, 51-67,

63, 76, 94, 1 14, 1 15; classical music in,

104, 1 14, 1 15, 146-47, 152; audience

25; colors and coldness in, 31; critique

identification in, 57-59, 66; genre mo

of images in, 25, 30, 32; critique of

tifs in, 62; long-take in, 63-64; motif of

media in, 22, 24, 26, 27, 32-33, 37;

play in, 51, 54, 58, 59, 6o-61, 64-65;

political critique in, 25-26; theme

music in, sz; self-reflexivity in, 57-59>

of representation in, 23, 28-z9, 35;

65-66; theme of communication in, 54,

use of sound in, 23, zg; violence

64; theme of guilt in, 56, 57; violence

. in, 29

in, 55-56, 58, 63, 68

Bourdieu, Pierre, 5 1

Funny Games (2007), 6, 68-71

Cacht (2oo5), 1 , 23, 30, 46, 72, 76, 1 1330, 148--56; media critique in, 124-25

Godard, Jean-Luc, 1 16

Cannes Film Festival, 1, 2, 19, 67, 130

Haneke, Michael: actors, relation to, 136-

Castle, The ( 1997), 137-38n9, 147

Clockwork Orange, A (Kubrick), 5, 57,

67, 136

Code Unknown, 46, 49, 71-88, 94, 103,

106, 108, 1 14, 1 18, 120, 139-47> 155;

3Jn6; contemporary media, 2, 129--30 ,

140; critique of Austria, 4, 34; critique
of middle class society, 3, 10; early
career

of, 3; film as art, 7, g-10, 5o-s1,

146; focus on body parts, 13-14; focus

ambiguity in, 72,78; communication

on objects, 13, 14-15; formal techniques

motif in, 71, 72, 77, 78, 81, 87-88; frag

of, 2, 7--9, 1o-1 1, 12; fragmentation and,

ments in, 75, 77; long-take in,73-75;

8, 13, 143; guilt, 36; long-take, use of,2,

self-reflexivity in, 76, 79, 81, 84; theme

8--g, 36, 1 13, 132, 142-43, 153, 154-55;

of photography in, So, 81, 82-83, track

manipulation of spectator, 9, 45, 129,

ing shot in, 73

142; modernism, 8; music, 2, 20, 43, 45,

136113, 138n11; narrative devices, 10;

responsibility of audience, and the, 7;

Scott, A. 0., 6, 7e>-71

Scream (Craven), 6g

sound, use of, 144; sudden violent ges

Seidl, Ulrich, 4

ture, use of, 27, 85-86, 125; television,

Seventh Continent, The ( 1g89), 3, 5, 1e>-

3, 8-g; violence in films and media, 2,

5-7, 1 1 . See also specificfilms
Heidegger, Martin, 47-48
Horkheimer, Max, 62, 64-65

22, <J.4, 25, 39. 46-47 52 53 6o, 1og,

125, 144; media critique in, 16, 21--22;
motif of seeing in, 15-16, 17; motif of
viscera in, 18-19, 53

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

Jelinek, Elfriede, 4, 88

( 1g8g), 5, 39-5 1 , 52, 53, 139, 154;

chance in, 4e>-41; chronology in, 40;

Kawin, Bruce, 1 19

critique of images in, 49-50; media cri

tique in, 48; theme of communication

Lacan, Jacques, 54, g6

in, 39; use of fragments in, 40, 42-45;

Lane, Anthony, 70

use of intertitle in, 40

Le Cain, Maximilian, 46
Lemmings ( 1979), 3, 130, 135

Signs (Shyamalan), 40

Magnolia (Anderson), 44

Ttme ofthe Wolj (2003). 103-13, 148;

Sharrett, Christopher, 5

images in, 105-6, 1 10; lighting in, 104;

Natural Born Killers (Stone), 58-59

media critique in, 103; narrative tech

niques in, 109; theme of humanism

Once Were Waniors (Tamahori), 56

Piano Teacher; The (2001), 88-103, 1 10,

1;j8;

as

literary adaptation, 88-g1, 92,

93-94, 95-g6, g8, 1oo, 1o2, 138n9;

as pornography, go; shift to character
psychology in, 91

Red Desert (Antonioni), 14, 1o6

in, 106-7

Waiting/or Godot (Beckett), 1o8

Watts, Naomi, 70

White Ribbon, The

(zoog) , 3-4, 5, 7,

critique, 135
2dnnemann, Fred, 144-45, 149
Zorn, John, sz, 67, 69

Sade, Marquis de, 136n5

Schindler's List (Spielberg), 6

1 68

Index

13e>-

36, 156; images in, 131; sociohistorical

Books in the series Contemporary

Film Directors
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Darlene J. Sadlier
Abbas Kiarostami
Mehmaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan
Rosenbaum
Joel and Ethan Coen
R. Barton Palmer
Claire Denis
Judith Mayne
Wong Kar-wai
Peter Brunette
Edward Yang
John Anderson
Pedro Almod6var
Marvin D'Lugo
Chris Marker
Nora Alter
Abel Ferrara
Nicole Brenez, translated by
Adrian Martin
Jane Campion
Kathleen McHugh
Jim Jarmusch
Juan Suarez
Roman Polanski
James Morrison

Manoel de Oliveira
John Randal Johnson
Neil Jordan
Maria Pramaggiore
Paul Schrader
George Kouvaros
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Elizabeth Ezra
Terrence Malick
Uoyd Michaels
Sally Potter
Catherine Fowler
Atom Egoyan
Emma Wilson
Albert Maysles
Joe McElhaney
Jerry Lewis
Chris Fujiwara
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Joseph Mai
Michael Haneke
Peter Brunette

Peter Brunette is the

Reynolds Professor of
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