Left Field Cinema

Michael Haneke, German born modern auteur, best known for his more recent works that have pleased art house crowds the world around. Funny Games and Hidden pushed Haneke’s work to the centre stream of art house and world cinema. His other works around this time, like Code Unknown and Time of the Wolf may have fallen into further obscurity, and his shot for shot remake Funny Games U.S. was arguably pointless. His masterpiece is still The Piano Teacher which will doubtlessly be examined in a future episode of Left Field Cinema, but for this week let us look back at three films he produced earlier in this career, they represent his second, third and fourth feature films as a director. They establish many of Haneke’s rules or visual trademarks, an all encompassing style he has adopted and made his own, they also establish one of the principles of the majority of Haneke’s corpus - to critique a social ill. Haneke’s films often follow anthropocentrism to its most violent, ambivalent and destructive conclusion.

The Glaciation Trilogy comprises of three films, The Seventh Continent released in 1989, Benny’s Video released in 1992 and 71 Fragments of the Chronology of Chance released in 1994. Starting with The Seventh Continent which is arguably the best of the three films, its plot focuses on a family of three who form a perfect picture of the Austrian bourgeois, the patriarch George is an engineer, and his wife Anna is an optician, they have a young gifted daughter Eva. There are no financial worries, no security issues, no sexual or marital disagreements. However there is an indeterminate undertone to their lives, they seem to exist in vacuous construct of materialistic and fiscal concerns. Their lives are rooted in the mundane, centered on the television or the working routine. Through the first hour of the film we are painfully forced to watch as this middle class family goes no where and does nothing of any significance, their lives are devoid of meaning, emotional, physical, or spiritual. They are stuck in a perpetual cycle of monotony and repetition, cleaning, feeding, working, sleeping – this is all life has to offer them. The opening shot of the film acts as a perfect stylistic and thematic example of what is to come, the family in question ride in their car through a car wash, for as long as a car wash takes in reality, Haneke’s camera doesn’t break its coverage of this activity and we are forced to watch time slip away for these three whilst they do nothing but watch their car (a soulless inanimate object) being cleaned by the car wash (another soulless inanimate object). Their lives are fractured and disconnected, they feel no or little emotion for one and other, Eva pretends to have lost her eyesight at school once she’s admitted that she’s pretending Anna slaps her daughter across the face, not considering or not caring about what had driven Eva to embark on such a deception which in all likeliness was a cry for attention. The first half of The Seventh Continent can be quite an arduous experience, however Haneke slowly ratchets up the tension through the mesmerising second half as George, Anna and to a lesser extent Eva, systematically destroy everything which is entrapping them, every connection to the modern world, every tie which binds them to their never ending cycle of unfulfilling activities and superficial relationships. They destroy their post modern house, they break, smash and decimate every object, every material procession they’ve collected over the years. They kill their pet fish, they flush their money down the toilet in an effort to cleanse themselves of capitalism, materialism, and modern life. The second half is engaging but intensely difficult to watch as you’re never quite sure what George and Anna will do next, when or how this path of destruction will end. Haneke is known for brutalizing his characters so that their unfeeling ways lead to acts of sudden and vicious acts of violence. Haneke’s reputation for violence, his lack of sympathy for the outcomes of his protagonists give all of his films an unquantifiable tension which emanates from no where other than Haneke’s own reputation. The Seventh Continent is not immune to this oppressive tension and at times towards the films climax it can become unbearable.

The second film in Haneke’s clinically bleak trilogy is Benny’s Video, probably the most famous of the three it tackles an issue which was thorny at the time, and is still today - violence in the media and how it effects the youth of today, a controversial issue in many countries around the world with school shootings in Finland, and the United States, and the Jamie Bulger case in the U.K, cinema is often the first in a number of scapegoats blamed by the mass media. The glamorizing of violence or simply the constant bombardment of violent imagery are often accused of sparking or inspiring violent behaviour in those marginal or youthful members of our society. Benny’s Video tackles the issue with Haneke’s usual lack of direct judgment; he never spells out the moral message of his film, but instead simply presents the facts of the film and allows you to make your own judgments. The story follows the titular 14-year old Benny played by Arno Frisch who would go on to play one of the sociopathic killers in Funny Games. Benny is alienated by his immediate family, his Father played by Haneke favourite the late Ulrich Muhe and Mother played by Angela Winkler have no time to spare for their son and as a result Benny finds refuge in the world of video. His bedroom is a shrine of video technology but to an unhealthy level. His curtains are constantly drawn closed, instead of looking out the window Benny has a camera do his watching for him, the camera is constantly hooked to a video monitor which acts as Benny’s window. Benny is consumed by violent movies and one video in particular a real life video of a farmer slaughtering a pig, a disturbing video to watch at any age but particularly for a young teenager. Benny continually re-watches the video and becomes obsessed with its content. This obsession leads him to murder a young girl in the same manner as depicted in the video of the pig. What’s disturbing about the scene isn’t just Benny’s casual indifference to the girls cries of pain and suffering, but that he’s secretly captured the whole incident on his own video camera which indicates the distressing prospect, that the entire incident is part of an endless cycle of violence, and someone one day might take the same sort of twisted inspiration from Benny’s Video. Compared with The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video is a more cinematic entity focused on one character whose actions we may consider severely aberrant, but with which we can still recognises an internal logic which is less visible in the family of The Seventh Continent whose actions are harder to reconcile with their circumstances. Haneke’s intended meaning (if there ever was one) is no less opaque. Haneke doesn’t merely pander to the Daily Mail attitude, blaming graphically violent or sensational cinema for Benny’s actions, he doesn’t blame society for alienating the youth of today or casually accepting murder and violence, he doesn’t blame Benny’s absent parents who are presented as morally unscrupulous and far more concerned with how Benny’s violent incident effects them and not in the least concerned with the death of the young girl. Haneke abstains judgment in any of these matters and instead paints a vivid portrait of a distressed and mentally unbalanced youth, how and why Benny committed this invasive crime is a subjective matter and ultimately completely indeterminate.

The third film in the trilogy is the most ambitious but also the most difficult to watch. 71 Fragments of the Chronology of Chance is a misanthropic examination of an endemic lack of empathy and humanity. The film follows a number of different characters over short, simple episodes, the characters are loosely connected by location but their stories and actions remain separate for the most part. The characters include a young illegal immigrant from Romania who slums it in the streets of Vienna, a bank security guard, a couple who can’t have children, an old man whose main activity in life is watching television, and a frustrated student. They’re all brought together for the films violent climax (in a rare choice the film depicts how fast a semi automatic weapon can really be fired rather than the slowed down versions Hollywood prefers). Each story is presented in brief fragments or episodes. Each episode varies in length but are in the majority entirely static and presented from one fixed camera position with no editing. As with Code Unknown, the visual style of 71 Fragments of the Chronology of Chance is like most of his work, coolly singular in its approach, Haneke never gives in to the temptations of jump cuts, montages or other dazzling attention grabbing cinematic techniques, instead he allows his camera to meditate on a single person, object or action and lets the audio do the rest. Often abstracted from the arc of the scene, Haneke will sometimes present an incident through the reaction of an onlooker or a reflection in a nearby shop window. Like the opening scene of The Seventh Continent this style can be infuriating at times, an extended game of table tennis in the middle of the film for example pushes the viewer’s tolerance as far as it will go. But this how Haneke constructs most of his films, they’re stripped of what makes cinema so engaging, the manipulative devises that other film makers rely on so often are totally removed from just about every Haneke film, there is no score, no non-diagetic sound, the only music you’ll here in a Haneke film is being played on the radio or TV set, his long takes sometimes last up to ten minutes, but unlike Andrei Tarkovksy or Bela Tarr, Haneke’s takes are often entirely static and more closely resemble the work of Yasajiro Ozu. Haneke isn’t the only film maker to attempt such a style, the later work of Robert Bresson is very reminiscent of Haneke, but unlike Bresson, Haneke has always held onto his simple style from The Seventh Continent through to his latest film Funny Games U.S. 71 Fragments represents Haneke’s style at its most extreme, it is easily the most testing of the trilogy, its moral question won’t become clear until the final minutes of the film when the climatic violence is reported in the news, and is over shadowed by molestation allegations against Michael Jackson which the news focuses on, condemning the media’s priorities and also exposing how ineffectual even the most violently desperate amongst us can be when we cry for attention or try to make a point of any significance.

The slow pace and high tension of The Glaciation Trilogy will test the patience of most cinema goers; his work can be as infuriating as it is intellectually stimulating. Others may accuse Haneke of elitism, making films which tackle issues relevant to everyone in modern western society but in such a manner that only world and art house cinema enthusiasts ever read them. If this is true for The Glaciation Trilogy it is an artistic infraction he’s later corrected with Hidden and Funny Games which are far more accessible than any of the three films examined here.

The Glaciation Trilogy’s primary focus and theme is alienation, and it is explored in three very different manners, as with Werner Herzog, Haneke can also be accused of focusing too often on marginal characters and his emotionally uninvolved subjects and methods help him avoid the trickier emotional context of violence. But we can see much in the Glaciation trilogy that is reflected in his later works, films where alienation is not the central theme and soulless detachment is not a unifying quality. Yet these works are all emotionally exhausting, The Seventh Continent’s motiveless violence is mirrored in Funny Games, Benny’s Video is similar to The Piano Teacher as it deconstructs and explores the off-kilter mentality of its protagonist and of course 71 Fragments of the Chronology of Chance brings together a larger cast loosely connected through geography and blind luck much in the same way as Code Unknown. The Glaciation Trilogy examines inhumanity, materialism, mans lack of compassion, violence in the media, and news editorialism. Each film will haunt you long after you’ve finished viewing them, and Haneke’s detached protracted style is more distinct and impact driven than a million generic montages or standardised narratives. His work transcends modern conventions, or new tricks of the trade which lends them a future proof quality, The Seventh Continent has the same visual consistency as Time of the Wolf or Funny Games U.S. The trilogy is worth seeing for The Seventh Continent by itself which I personally rank as one of best films of the 1980’s, a film which sums up the morality of the pervasive trends of that decade perfectly, but appears technically not to have aged a day.

M.Dawson