Last weekend, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Harvard Film Archive welcomed Michael Haneke, one of Europe's most celebrated filmmakers, for the Boston leg of his North American tour.
The retrospective, entitled "Michael Haneke: A Cinema of Provocation," has effectively doubled the writer/director's body of work available to American audiences by including subtitled versions of his earlier television films. Haneke, who was present for the screenings of "The Rebellion" (1993) and "Funny Games" (2008), eagerly discussed his career with a room full of fans.
Born in Germany and raised in Austria, Michael Haneke was the "child of actors," he explained by means of a translator. "I left school at 17 to take acting lessons; they rejected me," said Haneke. He went on to study philosophy and psychology in Vienna, where he began writing literature and film reviews for Austrian newspapers. He quickly immersed himself in the world of television, but it wasn't until the mid-1970s that he began directing TV movies. Reminding the audience, Haneke said, "I worked for 20 years in theatre." When he first started staging plays, he "learned the whole thing from scratch."
Haneke 'rebels' against TV
In the 1970s and '80s, Haneke directed a number of films made for Austrian and German television stations. With only limited funds available for feature films in his home country, he had little choice but to start his career in TV. When the dynamics in television shifted in the mid-1980s, limiting his creative control, he eventually turned to cinema. In television, "you have to be more pleasing to a more general audience," Haneke said.
The filmmaker expresses his bitter feelings about TV in many of his full-length features. In "71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance" (1994), "Funny Games" (1997/2008) and "Caché" (2005), the television is an ever-present antagonizing force. "Television everywhere is pretty awful," said Haneke, "I watched [American TV] in my hotel room and thought it was quite awful."
"The Rebellion" (1993), one of Haneke's last television movies, was screened at the MFA last Thursday, followed by a question-and-answer session with the director. The film, based on the book by Joseph Roth, depicts an amputee's struggle adjusting back to civilian life in post-World War I Vienna. The movie reflects many of the same themes and stylistic devices used in Haneke's later, more well-known works. The protagonist, Andreas Pum, must face his own disillusionment and alienation stimulated by the coldness of modernity.
Alienating the audience: an exercise in style
After 15 years of experience making movies for television, Haneke directed his first theatrical film, "The Seventh Continent" (1989), followed by "Benny's Video" (1992) and "71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance" (1994). His first three works are referred to as "the glaciation trilogy" for their sober portrayal of the banality of existence in the modern world. All three films portray their characters in their everyday lives until a jarring act of violence disrupts their monotonous routine. "I hear this word 'coldness' often, but I do not think of it that way," said Haneke. He's right - even referring to his movies as "glacial" is an understatement.
Haneke uses a variety of techniques to emphasize the bland nature of his protagonists' lives. The sound is almost always diegetic, meaning it is directly part of the story. Music only accompanies a scene when one of the characters turns on the radio or plays an album. Because of this, his movies are relatively quiet. Haneke supplements the sparseness of music by making use of other sounds, such as the noise from televisions or ringing telephones.
His long shots sometimes drag on for several minutes without any action or dialogue. In "71 Fragments," the camera focuses on Max (played by Lukas Miko), a disaffected university student, for what feels like forever while he trains at table tennis by mechanically hitting ping-pong balls over and over. Though it may seem unnecessary to dwell on such a simple action for such a long time, the repetitive motions convey a lot about Max's character.
Eviscerating Hollywood violence, without blood and gore
In most of Haneke's films, the camera angles refuse to show what the audience wants to see, showing only what no one wants to see. The violence usually happens right outside the frame of the camera. Instead of giving his audience the sadistic pleasure of watching a murder, he forces them to deal with its destructive aftermath. The director spends much more time filming the suffering caused by violence than the actual scene of violence. "If you want to make a film about violence, you should give the spectator a sense of what violence is," Haneke said.
When he does decide to show violence on-screen, he never uses cinematic tricks that glorify the bloodshed by making it aesthetic; he simply fixes the camera on one establishing shot, and then bluntly proceeds with it. "Benny's Video" begins with the home video Benny made of a pig getting slaughtered on a farm. After watching it for the first time, the tape rewinds and the spectator is forced to watch it all over again.
Playing games with the spectator
When it comes to violence, Haneke refuses to follow the rules of Hollywood. His goal is to "turn mainstream cinema on its head." In "Funny Games" (1997), two young men take a family hostage to their vacation home and torment them for a night. This isn't, however, your typical home invasion movie. The filmmaker brilliantly manipulates the viewer's expectations by setting up, and then breaking down every convention of the horror genre. "The whole film is a reaction to horror/thriller films," he said. "This film is about Hollywood cinema."
Ironically, his latest project is a shot-for-shot remake of "Funny Games." This time, it was produced in the United States and stars Hollywood celebrities Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Michael Pitt. This American version of an anti-Hollywood movie is an ingenious contradiction. "Funny Games" (2008) premiered last Friday on the East Coast with an advanced screening at the Harvard Film Archive. With a mid-February release date, it is one of next year's most highly anticipated films.
Haneke spoke on the process of making a movie in America after the screening. "Working in Hollywood was painful," he said, because of a limited budget and a tight schedule. The fact that he isn't a fluent English speaker and has never worked outside of Europe before certainly presented its own set of problems as well.
Remaking his own film in English, however, gives Haneke a much wider audience. With the growing popularity of torture porn - a subgenre of horror that thrives on pushing the envelope of gratuitous violence - "the pertinence of this project has increased in the past 10 years," Haneke said. "Violence in mainstream cinema is a consumer item," a fact more disturbing to the director than any of the scenes from his films.
Several screenings of Haneke's works will be held at the HFA through Oct. 29 and at the MFA through Nov. 3. Proceed with caution: The controversial director is a provocateur who masters the art of disturbing his audience, but not without purpose. His movies encourage reflection on social issues without preaching a specific message. Above all, Haneke describes himself as a "passionate filmmaker. I like to raise the bar."
