Austrian Director Michael Haneke's Latest Film
- Producing Organization
- WBEZ
- Contributing Organization
- WBEZ (Chicago, Illinois)
- AAPB ID
- cpb-aacip/50-79573xz9
If you have more information about this item than what is given here, or if you have concerns about this record, we want to know! Contact us, indicating the AAPB ID (cpb-aacip/50-79573xz9).
- Description
- Description
- " Michael Haneke Michael Haneke is a strange guy. He looks grandfatherly, a professor with longish white hair and full beard. But Haneke is not the kind of grandfather who would take you on his knees and tell you bedtime stories. The world of Haneke is disquieting, full of anxieties and unresolved personal histories. It is a world of voyeurs and those who want to be watched a universe of prisms and reflections where nothing is truly real, everything exists as an artifice, a mirror. It is a world always on the edge of violence. Underneath it all lies a deep sadness, but we are powerless to reach it, much less change it. Haneke's characters are puppets, their lives controlled by an invisible puppet master, who resides inside their soul. Haneke is best known for his most recent film, Cache , which starred Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche as a middle-class couple who are being watched and videotaped. At the root of the surveillance is a dark childhood secret. The Piano Teacher , with an incredible performance by Isabelle Huppert was Haneke's first foray from his native Austria into films which were French co-productions. Huppert, the conservative piano teacher in Vienna who lives with her mother, has a secret perverse streak, frequents porno shops and exposes her masochism through self-mutilation. All of this can theoretically be explained by Haneke's origins in Vienna: the city of palaces and the haute bourgeoisie, but also the city of Wittgenstein and Freud, of Adolf Hitler, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, of extreme conservatism and excess co-existing side-by-side. Unlike some of the other interesting directors of the new Austrian cinema Ulrich Seidl, Jessica Haussner, Michael Glagower and others Haneke makes films which replace the social and political with the personal. His films are filled with characters whose basic existence is one of unhappiness and always on the edge of violence. In the 1992 Benny's Video , the main character is 14-year-old Benny, a loner and a killer, who fills his life with video. When Benny kills a classmate, he hides the body but keeps the camcorder running. This obsession with video becomes a leitmotif in Haneke's later work, like Cache , which begins with our watching video surveillance footage unaware of its lethal potential. In 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, snippets of TV news segments of war in the former Yugoslavia are the backdrop for a group of disparate characters. This includes a couple struggling with a newly adopted daughter, a homeless Romanian boy living on he streets and an Austrian university student who becomes a sniper and goes on a shooting spree. In Funny Games, a family that moves in to a new house is visited by two young men dressed for tennis and wearing white gloves. After asking to borrow some eggs, they terrorize the family for no discernible reason except their own enjoyment. Their cruelty is performed with a disconcerting cheerful demeanor. Then we realize the two tormentors are consciously performing for a camera. They wink. They talk directly into the camera, addressing the viewer. When a family member begins to gain an upper hand in the struggle between torturer and victim, the tormentor grabs the remote control and rewinds the action. The focus of Haneke's cinema is to make the viewer complicit and a participant in these cat-and-mouse violent games. But this is no gentle invitation. Instead Haneke is a master manipulator, a diabolical chess player toying with our preconceived realities. As much as his characters indulge in sado-masochistic games with others or with themselves Haneke, too, plays this S/M game, but with his audience. When Ingrid Thulin crushes glass between her thighs in Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers, the horrifying act is an ultimate scream into the abyss of pain and loneliness. We gasp as the scene unfolds. The image will remain embedded inside us, for the rest of our lives. When, in Haneke's The Piano Teacher , Isabelle Huppert presses shards of glass against her sex, there is no scream. It is as if we were observing an insect devour itself we, as the entomologists, are made to understand the process, but are powerless to stop it, to alter its course. The Haneke universe is a dark and hopeless universe. It is Kafka stripped of his humanism. Haneke is the cinematic vivisectionist, making us watch the autopsy of his characters who still live, not knowing that they died inside a long time ago. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio's Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. "
- Media type
- Sound
- Credits
-
-
: WBEZ
Editor: Drew Hill
Producing Organization: WBEZ
- AAPB Contributor Holdings
-
Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ-FM) and Vocalo.org
Identifier: (unknown)
Format: audio/mpeg
If you have a copy of this asset and would like us to add it to our catalog, please contact us.
- Citations
- Chicago: “Austrian Director Michael Haneke's Latest Film,” WBEZ, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed April 27, 2025, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-50-79573xz9.
- MLA: “Austrian Director Michael Haneke's Latest Film.” WBEZ, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. April 27, 2025. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-50-79573xz9>.
- APA: Austrian Director Michael Haneke's Latest Film. Boston, MA: WBEZ, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-50-79573xz9