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To art-house cinema audiences Michael Haneke is either one of the greatest European auteurs currently directing movies or a frustrating bore intent on enforcing his didactic views on Western culture and cinematic violence upon audiences he apparently despises. Merely a week before I began writing this piece the Austrian master won the much-feted Palm Dor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his latest offering ‘Der Weisse Band’ (The White Ribbon, 2009), so the divisive discourse that plagues him is likely to go into meltdown again in the lead up to the film’s release. My personal opinion sides with those who believe him to be a formidable talent, but I can also equally understand the frustrations often voiced towards him. One of the main problems with Haneke in my opinion is his rare yet slightly unwelcome habit of explaining the intentions of his films whenever asked. While most other arty European directors may offer a few clever sounding platitudes, if not oblique silence, when asked to explain their latest puzzling opus, the talkative yet occasionally truculent Haneke is always all too ready to say why he made a particular film and how he wants his audiences to react to it.
The classic example of this would be his terrifying ordeal picture ‘Funny Games’ (1997, later remade by the director himself in 2007). Its sheer unrelenting grimness famously divided the Cannes audience who saw the film’s much talked about premiere. Many walked out but of course just as many journalists stayed out of respect and to give the film a fair chance. However, at a press conference the next day Haneke dutifully explained that those who did walk out didn’t need the film’s supposed anti-violence message, thus labelling those who did watch it, and heaven forbid maybe even enjoyed it, as sick people who get off on screen violence and cruelty. It’s this kind of attitude that has marked Haneke’s subsequent films and provided the most fuel for his detractors, and even I find it a strange standpoint. Is the director’s main intention then that no one ever sees his movies? In a perfect world would everyone walk out at the first instance of threat (after paying for their ticket first of course)? I believe that Haneke needs to understand that certain audiences will see movies like his to intentionally be shocked or made to think, and that it doesn’t automatically make them a sick, submissive audience. In fact, I believe that Haneke’s depiction of violence is one of his greatest appeals, in that its realism is much more visceral and therefore thought provoking than Hollywood movies. In light of this viewpoint, I am going to examine one of the directors’ earlier efforts, ‘71 Fragments in A Chronology of Chance’ (1994), with reference to his well-documented stylistic and formal qualities.
Like many a European auteur, Haneke avowedly uses the long take in order to express prolonged realism. However, he takes this style one step further in that he never uses diegetic music and keeps editing and camera movement to a bare minimum. This results in a strikingly austere formalism that both captivates and frustrates in equal measures. ‘71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance’ sees him punctuating his typical shot style with seconds of black nothingness which seem to symbolise the lack of links between the figures portrayed in the film. These include a young immigrant boy who has illegally sneaked into Austria, a couple trying to adopt a sullen orphan girl, some despondent bank workers, an aging father estranged from his daughter, and a depressed older couple with a new-born baby. Some of these figures find themselves very tenuously interlinked by tragedy later on, albeit in a way far removed from the likes of US counterparts ‘Crash’ (2004) and ‘Magnolia’ (1999). Here the director’s intentions seem rather to highlight the lack of connections and coldness people show to each other in contemporary society. To name the figures here or to even call them characters seems disingenuous as Haneke deliberately withholds as much information as he can from the audience. Clips of TV news reports covering such diverse topics as unrest in Bosnia and Somalia, French Union Strikes, and Michael Jackson’s arrest punctuate the actor-based scenes highlighting how an ever-present media made up of filmed images only serves to alienate the population further. Most of the characters have TV’s playing in their domestic settings, often in the background, while one of the few emotional responses we see from any of them is the childless middle-class couple crying at the sight of the illegal immigrant boy being interviewed on TV. Like his sudden outbursts of violence however the realism used throughout the film renders this emotional moment somewhat shocking and unexpected.
Elsewhere Haneke uses his static long takes to highlight mundane aspects of his figures’ everyday lives. One particularly impressive scene in terms of acting and dialogue sees an old man have a bitter conversation over the phone with his daughter and granddaughter (naturally with the TV blinking away in the background). Some unexplained rift renders their exchange as being antagonistic and it lasts up to 11 minutes. Elsewhere a group of white seemingly privileged students are shown engaged in various tasks. One plays ping pong furiously against a machine that spits balls at him, in a shot that lasts almost 4 minutes. In the DVD extras Haneke as ever offers an explanation as to the shot’s intention and displays an unexpected sense of humour and awareness of the viewers’ reactions - “As a viewer, at first it amuses me then it infuriates me” - showing that he is at least aware of how his sparse style may alienate as many as it fascinates. Another scene amongst the students sees one of them inexplicably buying a handgun but being shot in the same stately yet sparse manner as the rest of the scenes in the film gives it a mundane quality that goes valiantly against the way such a scene would be filmed in any other narrative movie. This moment inevitably prefigures the explosion of violence that occurs at the film’s climax.
Several of the people we have seen throughout ‘71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance’ enter a busy bank on a day in the run up to Christmas, where the blonde male student previously seen purchasing a handgun gets into a fracas with another customer after abandoning his car at a nearby petrol station. He walks back into the bank later and fires indiscriminately off-screen before shooting himself. Like the scenes of violence in his other films its realism and departure from the usual Hollywood norms is what makes it so shocking. Rousing music and fast edits usually accompany such scenes but here it is presented in the same stark, almost mundane, way as earlier scenes of a child stealing a comic or a housewife serving food. However, this matches the way such violence would be encountered in real life – there would be no music, no lead-up, and little time for explanations. The victims of the shooting are not revealed, although earlier we do see various characters encountered throughout the film entering the bank. However as previously explained their anonymity is almost the point of the film, the brief titular fragments of their lives revealed to us make it impossible to have a specifically emotional response, and instead I was left with a strangely empty feeling that probably mirrors what it would be like to experience such a random and pointless act of violence in real life – an un-movie-like mundane tragedy.
This brings me back to the point of Haneke’s representation of violence. Granted the non-graphic qualities of the scene here could never be accused of appealing to horror fan-boy bloodlust – this isn’t gory cinema - but still without the violent payoff it would be hard to justify sitting through the previous fragmentary scenes of distanced realism. Although Haneke rarely explains the motives of violent characters’ actions in his films, he could hardly be labelled irresponsible as he is also always very careful to show the horrific consequences of such actions, even if here they are filtered through the distancing effects of a TV news broadcast now reporting on actions, we have just witnessed in the filmic world rather than worldwide atrocities. With its distancing effects ‘71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance’ feels less like Haneke is hectoring us but it also feels like a somewhat minor work compared to what I would argue to be his two more superior films: the original ‘Funny Games’ and ‘Cache’ (Hidden, 2005). The former is so brutally effective and so opposite to narrative Hollywood cinema norms that it almost resembles the best video art, and its gut-wrenching realism will stay with you forever. ‘Hidden’ meanwhile employs the most brutally basic of thriller conventions whilst exploring themes of guilt and repressed societal and political violence, and deservedly attracted his biggest audience ever. Should that audience feel guilty for enjoying his films though? Taken at face value, that seems to be the point of why Haneke employs such violent shocks in his films. It may seem like a crass over-simplification by me, but perhaps in a perfect world the outspokenly anti-violent Haneke wants people to stop consuming violent films altogether, but then that would put him out of a job. Why would an anti-violence director continually offer such violent films? Probably because he knows that a core audience of white middle-class educated people, much like the victims he often depicts, want to see them, not out of bloodlust, but out of a perfectly harmless curiosity for cinema that raises questions and pushes boundaries. I’ll continue to enjoy Michael Haneke’s brilliant output but will always question his perception of cinema audiences and his much-documented intentions for making movies.
Country: Austria/Germany
Budget: £
Length: 96mins
Filmography:
‘71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance’, 1994, Michael Haneke, Wega Film
‘Funny Games’, 1997, Michael Haneke, Austrian Film Institute
‘Cache’, 2006, Michael Haneke, Les Films du Losange
‘Der Weisse Band’, 2009, Michael Haneke, Wega Film
‘Crash’, 2005, Paul Haggis, Bob Yari Productions
‘Magnolia’, 1999, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ghoulardi Film Company
Pub/2009
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Funny Games, 1997, Michael Haneke
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The Sixth of May (06/05), 2004, directed by Theo van Gogh