“I always say that film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.”
~Michael Haneke
A thoughtful and sometimes unsettling alternative to last year’s Oscar® winner Crash, director Michael Haneke’s Caché finds a different way to explore contemporary race relations. Haneke’s ingenious screenplay uses not one racist epithet and confines its violence to one brief but unforgettable moment. Caché’s English title, Hidden, perfectly underscores the insidious nature of racism in today’s world. In fact, all of Haneke’s feature films reveal the hidden motives and fears of his seemingly normal upper middle-class characters. One of the most important directors currently working, Haneke uses a tightly controlled visual style that increasingly draws on clever, but devastating, interactive techniques and allows each audience member to have an individual viewing experience different from anyone else’s.
After 15 years of working in television, the Austrian filmmaker first gained worldwide attention with a trio of features about the banality of violence. Made in his homeland between 1989 and 1994, The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance are centered around average Austrian citizens who ultimately, and often without any apparent explanation, commit monstrous acts.
The trilogy and its cause célèbre follow-up, Funny Games, showcased Haneke’s fascination with voyeurism and its relationship to violence and moviegoing. A movie that teases the basic impulses of the audience watching its story of domestic terrorism, Funny Games in the end refuses to satisfy those impulses. This time, it is us—and not the characters—who are confronted with our dark side. In the multi-character, multilingual thriller Code Unknown, Haneke boldly begins sequences in the middle of actions or a line of dialogue, encouraging the audience to complete a narrative puzzle with numerous potential solutions.
In The Piano Teacher, the first of two collaborations with Haneke, Isabelle Huppert plays Erika, a talented professional musician who is so sexually repressed that she is driven to acts of self-mutilation. Haneke and Huppert’s triumph is not simply showing us Erika’s privately destructive behavior, but in ultimately convincing us to accept her with compassion. Director and actress next gave us Time of the Wolf, a quasi sci-fi study of a world gone amok after an unnamed disaster. Here, Haneke makes his most effective use of lighting, often plunging the screen into near complete darkness that somehow elicits both pessimistic and hopeful responses.
His most acclaimed feature so far, Caché revolves around a successful television host (Daniel Auteuil), whose search for the person sending him mysterious and disturbing surveillance videos taken outside his home leads him to revisit his troubled past. Avoiding conventional suspense methods and traditional dramatic catharses, Haneke nonetheless conveys a true mood of menace.
While we await the completion of his next project, an American remake of Funny Games, join us in the Museum’s Dryden Theatre in November and December for a complete retrospective of Michael Haneke’s feature films. We will also present two very rare screenings of his 1997 European telefilm, The Castle, an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novel. The screenings will include the Rochester premieres of The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments—each in a newly struck 35mm print—as well as the new documentary 24 Realities Per Second, a rare glimpse into the working process of this methodical, provocative artist.
~Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department
