Michael Haneke's Cinema

The Ethic of the Image

Catherine Wheatley

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780857455468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

Existing critical traditions fail to fully account for the impact of Austrian director, and 2009 Cannes Palm d'Or winner, Michael Haneke's films, situated as they are between intellectual projects and popular entertainments. In this first English-language introduction to, and critical analysis of, his work, each of Haneke's eight feature films are considered in detail. Particular attention is given to what the author terms Michael Haneke's 'ethical cinema' and the unique impact of these films upon their audiences.

Drawing on the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Stanley Cavell, Catherine Wheatley, introduces a new way of marrying film and moral philosophy, which explicitly examines the ethics of the film viewing experience. Haneke's films offer the viewer great freedom whilst simultaneously imposing a considerable burden of responsibility. How Haneke achieves this break with more conventional spectatorship models, and what its far-reaching implications are for film theory in general, constitute the principal subject of this book.

Chapter 1

THE LAST MORALIST?

In an essay he contributed to a compendium on the films of Robert Bresson, Michael Haneke describes the reaction of the audience at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival to the decision to award Bresson that year’s Special Jury Prize. As Bresson, called up by Orson Welles, stepped on to the stage, ‘an acoustic battle broke out between those booing and those acclaiming him’.¹

Haneke’s description of the event might just as easily be applied to the audience’s reaction when Haneke himself was called up to receive his prize for Best Director at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival: some audience members booed; others stood for an ovation, but the noise did not subside until Haneke had left the stage. What could have caused this uproar? The bleak vision of contemporary society that Haneke’s films present is not always easy to stomach, but it cannot be the content of Haneke’s films alone that is responsible for the outrage his films inspire. As the director puts it, ‘films that tell of the lamentable state of the world are in abundance at every festival; the more cosily and stylishly they settle themselves in our anguish, the greater the chance the jurors and journalists will thank them for it’.² Indeed, perhaps this is more the case now than ever before: the numerous awards and critical acclaim garnered by La Pianiste, and more recently Caché, have cemented Haneke’s status as one of a new generation of auteurs currently leading European cinema, alongside (amongst others) the Dardenne brothers, Catherine Breillat, Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noé and François Ozon, all of whom have been known to offer dismal – even nihilistic – perspectives on the current state of society. But although these directors have their admirers and detractors, none of them, arguably, provokes the intensity of feeling that Haneke’s films do. Today, he seems to be one of the most contentious directors working in European cinema, and one of its most divisive.

Despite the controversy that surrounds Haneke’s films, there have been curiously few attempts to engage in depth with what it is that makes his films so provocative. This book is in part aimed at trying to redress this imbalance, to counter the visceral responses to Haneke’s films with an intellectual, analytical response, and over the course of this enquiry I hope to legitimise Haneke’s films as objects open to further study, to bring them to the attention of other scholars and theorists. I am of course aware of the contradiction in using a theoretically oriented study to discuss the visceral responses that Haneke’s films give rise to, for in describing these responses, and the aesthetic structures that give rise to them, we deprive them of their immediacy and therefore their power. This reservation is increased by Haneke’s own scepticism about scholarly interpretation – or indeed any interpretation – of film, especially of a biographical or auteurist approach. For instance, in an interview released as part of the pressnotes to 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls, he dismisses the idea of having recourse to the author’s biography in order to explain a film’s deeper meaning, stating that he, ‘provide[s] a construct and nothing more – its interpretation and its integration into a value and belief system is always the work of the recipient’.³ But some understanding of who Haneke is will be essential to an understanding of his unique work as a film-maker and of two essential aspects of his work: the cinematic and historical traditions which influence both the form and the effect of his films; and the apparently accusative stance his films takes toward their spectators. It is for this reason that we shall begin with a brief look at Michael Haneke’s biography.

Haneke, Cinematic Traditions and Historical Contexts

Biographical information on Haneke is very limited. The few published biographical sketches are usually the result of direct demands from journalists and are thus ‘composed’ and schematic, and would require additional contextual support. Fortunately, Alexander Horwath, a prodigious academic but also an acquaintance of Haneke, provides a very detailed account of Haneke’s personal and professional development in his book Der Siebente Kontinent.⁴ I am deeply indebted to Horwath for most of the biographical information concerning Haneke’s personal life that I have reproduced below.

Haneke’s background is that of the left-leaning bourgeoisie. Born on 23 March 1942 in Munich to Beatrix von Degenschild, a Catholic actress, and Fritz Haneke, a Protestant theatre director, the young Michael Haneke was raised by one of his aunts in Wiener Neustadt, a working class suburb of Vienna where he attended the Gymnasium, the Austrian equivalent of a British grammar school. Perhaps naturally in the light of his parents’ professions, his main academic interests were drama, music and literature, and he hoped to become an actor or concert pianist (film and music, he agrees with Tarkovsky, have a surprising amount in common). Lacking sufficient talent for his first and second choices of career, however, he enrolled to study Psychology, Philosophy and Drama at the University of Vienna.

Figure 1.1 Michael Haneke.
Courtesy of the BFI stills department. Permission graciously supplied by WEGAfilm.

His studies completed, Haneke worked as a film and literary critic for various regional newspapers and the national Die Presse. Horwath points out that he was, in many ways, a walking cliché of a young bourgeois intellectual in the early 1960s: interested in philosophy (above all existentialism), in modernist literature (Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Bernhard), and the so-called ‘art cinema’ of Fellini, Bergman, Antonioni, Bresson and the directors of the French nouvelle vague, in particular Jean-Luc Godard.⁵ Like those directors, it was by writing about film that Haneke discovered film-making; like them, he was a cinephile before he became a cineaste. And it is clear that he was very impressed by the films that were being released around this period: his nominations for Sight & Sound’s 2002 poll of several hundred directors’ and critics’ top ten best films include Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthasar (1966), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le centoventi giornate di Sodoma (1975), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Éclisse (1962).⁶ Echoes of these works reverberate throughout Haneke’s own films: as we will see in due course, his early influences evidently stayed with him.

Haneke’s directing career, however, began not in cinema but in the theatre, in Germany. In 1967, after staging several plays as a student, he began working for the Südwestfunk Television Company. In the meantime, he continued to write as a critic and as a screenwriter, although he saw more success with the former: having been subsidised 300DM by the Austrian equivalent of the Film Council to write his first screenplay Wochenende/Weekend, no producer was willing to option it, and it eventually fell by the wayside. Frustrated, he left Südwestfunk at the beginning of 1970 and began to direct plays independently. First was a production of Marguerite Duras’s Ganze Tage in den Bäumen/Whole Days in the Trees at the Stadttheater Baden-Baden. There followed engagements in Darmstadt (for example Kleist’s Der zerbrochene Krug/The Broken Jug) and Düsseldorf (Hebbel’s Maria Magdalene, Strindberg’s Der Vater/The Father), then later throughout Germany – in Berlin (Bruckner’s Krankheit der Jugend/Sickeness of Youth) and Hamburg (Enquist’s Die Nacht der Tribades/The Night of the Tribades) – as well as Austria (such as Goethe’s Stella in Vienna’s renowned state theatre).⁷ By the early 1970s he had established a name for himself as a talented and capable director, and envisioned a long lasting career within the theatre.

Then in 1973 Südwestfunk contacted him again, offering him the chance to direct his first television film for them. After Liverpool, from a screenplay by James Saunders, marked the beginning of Haneke’s career as a cine-televisual director, and he went on to write a total of twelve more television films, of which he directed ten, including an adaptation of Josef Roth’s Die Rebellion/The Rebellion (1993). In fact Haneke continued to make films for television right up until the end of the 90s, when he adapted Kafka’s Das Schloß/The Castle, although Haneke’s producers, Wegafilm, also gave the film a cinematic release, an attempt to cash in on Haneke’s increased profile as a Euro-auteur, much to his apparent displeasure.⁸ Since I am concentrating here on the films made for cinematic exhibition, I do not intend to treat Das Schloß or any of these television works in much detail.⁹ However, as mentioned in the introduction, clear precursors of Haneke’s mature style exist in the television work: the reflexivity of After Liverpool (1974); the sparse, cool, adaptation of Drei Wege zum See/Three Ways to the Lake (1976); the intensely personal appraisal of a generation in Lemminge/Lemming (1979); in Wer war Edgar Allen?/Who was Edgar Allen? (1984), a game of reality, cinematic reproduction and identity; in Fräulein/Madam (1986), a demythologising of 1950s melodrama. Already Haneke’s early cinematic influences can be perceived in the television films: Andrea Lang, for example, describes the collective works as demonstrating a concern with ‘isolated individuals and understated relationships’, portrayed, ‘in a style reminiscent of Robert Bresson’.¹⁰

Der Siebente Kontinent, Haneke’s first cinematic feature, was released in 1989 to a warm reception. It was selected for presentation at Cannes, shown in the 1990 New Directors/New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and selected that year as the official Austrian entry for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ at the Academy Awards. Following this success, Der Siebente Kontinent became the first part of a trilogy, followed by Benny’s Video (1992) – winner of a Felix, the European Film Award, for Best Film, and shown in competition at the New York Film Festival that year – and 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (1994), again a Cannes Film Festival selection and winner of a Golden Hugo award. Over the course of these three films the director developed the formal style that had come to characterise his work,¹¹ a very precise, controlled aesthetic that minimises cutting and camera movement, introducing, in Lang’s words, ‘a new aesthetic paradigm into Austrian cinema’.¹² Haneke followed the trilogy with Funny Games (1997), another German language film. The last film he was to make in the German language (although not in Austria – the film was shot in Italy), the critical response to Funny Games was much more mixed than for previous films, as it was attacked for exploiting the violence it supposedly deplores. But doubtless as a result of its controversial nature, the film was a commercial success and brought the director international recognition. Haneke was subsequently courted by actress Juliette Binoche and producer Marin Karmitz to make a film in France, which became Code inconnu (2000). Returning to Austria, but this time with (predominantly) French backing, he then made La Pianiste (2001) – set in a Vienna where the inhabitants speak French and starring acclaimed French actress Isabelle Huppert. The film garnered prizes at Cannes and numerous other festivals, and Haneke was to work with Huppert again for the less successful (in both commercial and critical terms) Le Temps du loup/The Time of the Wolf (2003) – a ‘surprise’ non-selection at Cannes¹³ – before collaborating once more with Binoche on Caché (2005), which won him the Best Director prize at Cannes and has been by far the most profitable of Haneke’s films to date.¹⁴

This biographical material – taken, as I mentioned above, mainly from Horwath – opens out onto two fields of contextualisation that inform our understanding of Haneke’s films. The first is particularly prominent in Horwath’s own reading of social and political concerns in Haneke’s films, having to do with Haneke’s status as an Austrian director, raised in a specific national cultural climate. The second is historical, relating to Haneke’s formative artistic influences and the cultural debates that surrounded them. I have already commented on the influence of Bresson, Antonioni and Pasolini, amongst others, on Haneke’s film style, and indeed, in his sixties at the time of writing, Haneke seems to belong in temperament and spirit with this earlier generation of European film-makers. In the pages that follow, I shall treat each of these influencing factors in turn, starting by placin...