Haneke 71 fragments11/10/2023 Meet the Schobers: Georg (Dieter Berner), a promising engineer on his way to a remunerative promotion, his wife Anna (Birgit Doll), working with her brother as an optician, and their little daughter Evi (Leni Tanzer). Whether or not the snub owed to the film’s depressing storyline (in which an ostensibly normal family of three proceed to destroy all they own before committing group suicide), TV percolates through the film’s aesthetics and themes. And the multiple roles it plays across his body of work helps illuminate his theatrical output in surprising ways-so much so that to revisit Haneke’s feature films through their relationship with TV is to open them up in novel, illuminating ways.Ĭuriously, The Seventh Continent became Haneke’s feature debut only after it was rejected as a television movie. More than a simple leitmotif, television turns into Haneke’s chief vehicle to articulate that critique further. Not only does this pose serious political concerns, for Haneke, it also forfeits “our ability to have a palpable sense of the truth in everyday experience.” Prompted to elaborate by Christopher Sharrett, Haneke has claimed his interest in television lies in its representation of violence, but also as a symbol of what he sees as a “greater crisis” of our “collective loss of reality and social disorientation.” TV shrinks our experiential horizon and eventually substitutes reality, to the point that all we can hope to know of the world is its televised derivative. But their insertion is hashed out as clash, an intrusion into a world and a medium-cinema-with which TV stands in fundamental opposition. Sure, TV sets pop up everywhere in his feature films-from the small screen Alexander gapes at in The Seventh Continent to the larger one Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche's married couple watch in horror in Hidden (2005). Take his two-part 1979 television movie Lemmings as a single project, and the twenty-three films Haneke has directed since 1974 are somewhat evenly split: twelve features and eleven TV movies-the last of which, an adaptation of his theatrical staging of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, only came out in 2013.īut the relationship between Haneke and television is a profoundly conflictive one. Hitler-the “bitter flower of German irrationalism,” as Hans-Jürgen Syberberg once put it-may still lurk beyond the horizon, but the seeds of fascism have already been sown in society’s unquestioning adherence to power structures.MUBI's retrospective " Empowering the Spectator: The Films of Michael Haneke" runs October 17 – Decemin the United Kingdom.Īlexander (Udo Samel) has his eyes glued to a TV screen when he recounts, halfway through Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent, his mother’s last words: “How would it be if we had a monitor instead of a head, where we could see our thoughts?” Released in 1989, The Seventh Continent marked Haneke’s feature film debut, but not the end of a career the Austrian had amassed during the previous fifteen years he’d spent writing and directing TV productions. Not that Haneke displays much nostalgia for the town’s traditions: Life here is dismal, oppressive, and rigidly hierarchical, erected on puritanical morals and reinforced with ritualized punishment. The setting is the small village of Eichwald, a bucolic commune that, presided over by such stern patriarchs as the landowning baron (Ulrich Tukur) and the pastor (Burghart Klaussner), is presented as a 19th-century holdover inexorably giving way to the darkening modernity of new times. Ever wonder about the ancestors of the murderous jocks in Funny Games? In the Palme d’Or-winning The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke time travels to rural Germany on the cusp of WWI to find the answer-or, rather, to make the audience’s collective skin crawl at the question.
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