The films of Michael Haneke are difficult to resist talking about, but nearly impossible to pin down. Haneke makes movies that are provocative, ambiguous, intense, infuriating, often haunting and always disturbing. The films lend themselves to multiple interpretations, but they all play ping-pong with our heads while confronting our appetite for destruction.
In movie after movie — from the richly complex Code Unknown, to The Piano Teacher (a depiction of aberrant sexuality so extreme it makes Salo look like Sesame Street), to the recent, award-winning Caché — Haneke burrows straight into the heart of human darkness and throws our own worst fears right back in our faces. Time and again, this director confronts us with violent imagery of the most awful sort, only to question our complicity in what we're watching. Is Haneke testing to see at what point we finally turn our heads away? Is he secretly hoping a few of us will get up out of our seats and leave the theater, or turn off the DVD player?
Some call this Austrian-born, French-based director a sensationalist, a misanthrope or even a raging nihilist, but Haneke is a far cry from any of those things. His films are cerebral, rigorously avoiding conventional ways of telling stories, but they're also plainly moral and painfully visceral, and they're meant to elicit responses in kind. They are movies to ponder and movies to be repulsed by as they illuminate our most unsavory and self-destructive impulses. These are not films designed to comfort, and it is precisely because they are so difficult to watch that they demand to be seen and thought about.
Caché was the film that finally brought the director a taste of international success, but Haneke has been making his own kind of movies for many years, beginning with a remarkable trilogy he directed in Austria between 1989 and 1994. Haneke dubbed these films his "glacification trilogy" — a fancy, overly academic term that the director now regrets, but that apparently signifies emotional sterility — and the entire series, along with 1997's Funny Games, is now finally available on DVD from Kino-on-Video. These early movies showcase Haneke at his prickliest and most stimulating, and in them one can clearly see the roots of Caché and other recent work by this most important and challenging of filmmakers.
The trilogy begins with Haneke's directorial debut, The Seventh Continent, a film that sets the stage for everything that follows. As in all the director's movies, The Seventh Continent depicts a mundane world revealed as horrific when an act of senseless violence shatters the veneer of normalcy and order. For most of its running time, the film simply observes an ordinary middle-class family over the course of several years, a meticulous account of daily routines presented in such an unnervingly clinical manner that the routines begin to appear meaningless.
Along the way, Haneke drops tiny clues alerting us to the human breakdowns bubbling just below the surface (it's always the unseen places that most intrigue this filmmaker) and, finally, almost at random, the movie drops its big bomb on us. What we initially perceived as familiar and friendly becomes unmistakably ominous, replaced by an anti-mantra we see again and again in this director's films: Don't bother seeking safety, because safety does not exist.
Haneke followed this up in 1992 with Benny's Video, a brutal and controversial exercise that has become a minor legend among fans of unconventional cinema. Playing like a minimalist riff on Cronenberg's Videodrome and seizing upon the teenage-deathwish zeitgeist that would boil over at Columbine seven years later, Benny's Video gives us an alienated and dangerously desensitized fanboy (Arno Frisch) living in a self-imposed cocoon of TV, atrocity imagery and basic media saturation.
Haneke picks away relentlessly at the notion of violence as entertainment, zeroing in on his young anti-hero's dangerous obsession with a video of a pig being graphically slaughtered, and following along as that obsession leads to an imperfect imitation of the worst possible sort. As with so many of Haneke's films, the pivotal event takes place largely off-screen, just out of frame, with the most terrible bits occurring in our imaginations.
The trilogy concludes with 1994's 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, a film that masterfully weaves together a series of seemingly unrelated actions culminating in a bloody bank robbery. Haneke presents us with a series of characters — a soldier peddling stolen firearms, a couple with a foster child, a bank clerk, a homeless boy from Romania (whose shoplifting attempts are duly recorded on a mall security-cam) — then nudges us into looking for connections.
71 Fragments shows us the filmmaker in full experimental mode, twisting and reconfiguring the narrative in surprising new ways, deliberately provoking us with jarring transitions, making us work to weed out crucial information from what's disposable. Haneke keeps things open-ended right up until the bitter end, allowing the entire movie to unfold as an agonizing waiting game where accumulated tensions boil over into endless existential dread.
Haneke followed up his trilogy with the Palm d'Or nominated Funny Games, a brilliantly unsettling film that distilled the themes and methods of earlier work to devastating effect. A synopsis — a pair of sadistic psychos terrorize a family on vacation — doesn't begin to do justice to what in lesser hands could have been just your basic home invasion flick. As told by Haneke, this becomes a multi-layered, almost unbearably intense upsetting of apple carts, a stripped-down Straw Dogs where most of the violence plays out on a purely psychic level.
We watch, alternately intrigued and repelled, at the spectacle of family members being terrorized in what might or might not be some sort of inscrutable ritual. Unapologetically brutal but drained of sensationalism, the film becomes even more disturbing when Haneke periodically shatters the fourth wall, putting the movie's ultra-realistic sensibility momentarily on hold while the killers talk directly to the audience or rewind scenes to see if they'll play out differently. Funny games, indeed.
With the exception of Funny Games, none of these early Haneke films have been previously available on home video, making the appearance of these DVD editions something of an event. All of the Kino DVDs boast solid widescreen transfers, enhanced for 16×9 TVs and clear enough to facilitate making out even the smallest details in the backgrounds of scenes (details that were completely lost on the old non-anamorphic Fox Lorber edition of Funny Games).
Extras on the Kino discs are mostly limited to a routine selection of trailers and filmographies, but each DVD does include one very welcome bonus: a 15-to-20-minute interview with the always fascinating Haneke, who speaks passionately about his own films and cinema in general. This is a filmmaker who defies expectations and revels in the nasty bits with a vengeance, and these new DVDs offer a perfect opportunity to understand why.
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2006.
