The people who see his films do not see horror films like Saw (ie, me).
As to whether I'm being a dis-ingenue or not (his critical points about Tarantino and Stone sound decent, but then PF and NBK aren't particularly about 'real' violence)...
Minister of Fear
By JOHN WRAY
One evening last November at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, Michael Haneke was struggling with the realities of working in America. It was the second-to-last day of shooting on “Funny Games,” Haneke’s first English-language feature, and the mood on set was approaching mutiny. A seemingly straightforward sequence of shots had become bogged down in technical concerns, and the word was that no additional studio time would be forthcoming. After 12 hours of nearly continuous work, the crew looked glassy-eyed and resentful, especially those among them — hair and makeup, production assistants and grips — whose job at that moment consisted mainly of standing around. Adding to the frustration were the multiple language barriers on set: the crew was American, the cameraman French and the director himself, with his elegant black suit and air of patrician reserve, as Austrian as Austrian can be. Only the children, the actor Devon Gearhart and his stand-in, Gregory Clifton, seemed motivated and eager to please. But by law, the child actors couldn’t work past 10 that night, and 10 was getting closer all the time.
The shot in question was relatively simple, if working with child actors can ever be considered simple: Gearhart, in the role of Georgie, a terrified 8-year-old hiding in an empty house, hears a noise behind him, turns and crosses a dimly lighted room. Once the not-inconsiderable lighting issues were resolved, however, a new problem emerged. Gearhart, who had repeatedly impressed with his ability to call forth strong emotion at will, seemed incapable of looking frightened. Haneke — a tall, owlish man whose neatly trimmed white beard makes him look a little like an haute couture Gandalf — took a grandfatherly approach with Gearhart, speaking to him with sympathy and patience, but his English often failed him. As it grew clear that his actor was running out of gas, the strain on the director became obvious. Then suddenly, Haneke sat bolt upright, stepped quickly over to the boy and began jumping up and down in front of him like a bewildered chimpanzee. In a few seconds the two of them were bobbing up and down together, giggling and panting. Wide awake now, out of breath and not a little startled, Gearhart nailed his performance on the very next take. Returning to the director’s chair, Haneke shot me a mischievous grin.
It’s not a little disconcerting, given the remorselessness of Haneke’s films, to come face to face with the director’s goofy side. Neither he nor Gearhart, who turned 12 in May, seemed the tiniest bit bothered by the presence on a nearby set of a perfect facsimile of the boy’s headless body, artfully arranged against a blood-spattered living-room wall. Later, when I mentioned the tense atmosphere during that day’s shoot, Haneke sighed and brought a finger to his lips. “We have a saying in Austria,” he said, his smile not entirely hidden behind his snowy beard. “The sewage is up to our necks already — whatever you do, don’t make waves.”
Making waves, however, is what Haneke has become famous for. Over the last two decades, the director has developed a reputation for stark, often brutal films that place the viewer — sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly — in the uncomfortable role of accomplice to the crimes playing out on-screen. This approach has made Haneke one of contemporary cinema’s most reviled and revered figures, earning him everything from accusations of obscenity to a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art next month. “Funny Games,” the movie Haneke was shooting in New York and Long Island, is the American remake of a highly controversial film by the same name that he directed in 1997. It was from its beginnings targeted at the American moviegoing public — and no other word but “targeted” will do. “Funny Games” is a direct assault on the conventions of cinematic violence in the United States, and the new version of the film, with its English-speaking cast and unmistakably American production design, makes this excruciatingly clear. More surprising still, Haneke remade this attack on the Hollywood thriller for a major Hollywood studio, Warner Independent Pictures, and refused to alter the original film’s story in the slightest.
The premise of “Funny Games” is simple: a likable, prosperous, well-adjusted family — played, in the version to be released early next year, by Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Devon Gearhart — is visited at the family summer house by two well-dressed young men claiming to be guests of the neighbors. Over the course of the next hour, these two polite, articulate strangers force the family to take part in progressively more sadistic contests, periodically stepping outside the film’s action to speak to the viewer directly. The technique of the “dramatic aside” is nothing new — Brecht made great use of it, Shakespeare built whole plays around it and the ancient Greek chorus served no other purpose — but in the context of an otherwise straightforward thriller, it’s profoundly disturbing. The young men make no secret of their disdain for their victims; but the bulk of their contempt is reserved for the audience. The experience of watching “Funny Games” is not unlike watching snuff-porn clips late at night in your bedroom, only to have your mother or Jacques Lacan switch the light on periodically without the slightest warning. That was my own experience, at least, and Haneke seemed delighted to hear it.
“ ‘Funny Games’ is an anti-genre film,” Haneke told me over lunch on his last day in New York. “It moves like a thriller, it has a thriller’s structure, but at the same time it comments on itself. A movie is always a manipulation, regardless of whether it’s a biopic or a romantic comedy, and ‘Funny Games’ takes this manipulation as its primary subject. So you were perfectly right to feel uncomfortable.” This last statement was punctuated by Haneke’s trademark goofy laugh. Shooting wrapped on “Funny Games” the day before, and any traces of the stress I’d seen on set had vanished. “People in the film industry underestimate their audience,” he continued. “I believe the viewer is fundamentally more intelligent than most films give him credit for, but only if you give him the opportunity to use his brain.”
From the very start of his career, Haneke’s films have been calculated to shatter the viewer’s complacency to a degree rarely seen since the early work of Mike Leigh or perhaps since the politicized days of the French New Wave. Haneke’s characters are adrift in a profoundly dysfunctional world, one in which consolation and insight are equally hard to come by. One of Haneke’s greatest successes, both critically and commercially, was “The Piano Teacher,” adapted from a novel by Elfriede Jelinek. The film, released in 2001, stars Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut, an aging, severely repressed classical pianist who begins a disastrous, sadomasochistic affair with her most promising student. The film won the grand jury prize at Cannes and best acting awards for both of its leads, and it drew packed crowds at art-house theaters across Europe and the United States. As Haneke’s prominence grew, however, so too did resistance to his methods. He has repeatedly been criticized as a purveyor of shock cinema, not so much for the violence in his films (little of which is explicit) as for the often brutal way in which the meaning of that violence is explored. “Violence in my films is shown as it really is,” Haneke has said. “The suffering of a victim. The viewer comes to see what it means to act violently — that’s why the films are often experienced as painful.”
At times, “painful” seems almost an understatement. In an infamous scene from “Benny’s Video,” Haneke’s second feature, a teenage son plays his parents the videotape of a murder he committed while they were away on vacation. The audience has witnessed the murder once already, but this second viewing, with the parents themselves now a de facto part of the audience, is vastly more affecting. Why, I asked Haneke, was the experience so different the second time? “When you see the killing first, you’re too shocked and bewildered to let the fact of it sink in,” he replied. “But the moment that the parents, with whom one naturally identifies, sit down to watch the video, one begins to see the murder in its social context: the discrepancy between the act we are witnessing and normal social behavior becomes clear.” He smiled. “It’s always important to keep in mind who’s watching.”
This question of who’s watching — both within the film and outside of it — is one of Haneke’s chief obsessions. For most successful directors, whether in Europe or America, the audience exists to be entertained; for Haneke it seems to exist to be confronted. Where another director might cut tactfully away, Haneke’s camera lingers. His screenplays, which he always writes himself, have a sense of purpose about them that only polemic works of art can have. The ideology that underlies Haneke’s filmmaking is a deeply personal, idiosyncratic one, but it’s an ideology nonetheless. Haneke is a man very much at odds with the accepted values of the industry he works in, and if you ask him, he’ll be happy to tell you why.
“Political manipulation is rampant in the American media,” Haneke told me over lunch in downtown Manhattan last winter. “It’s present in the movies too, of course. It’s everywhere. I teach filmmaking in Vienna, and I like to show my students ‘Triumph of the Will,’ by Leni Riefenstahl, then something by Sergei Eisenstein — ‘Battleship Potemkin,’ for example — and then ‘Air Force One,’ the movie in which Harrison Ford plays the U.S. president. Each of these films has a distinct political agenda, but all make use of exactly the same techniques, all have a common goal — the total manipulation of the viewer. What’s terrible about the Harrison Ford film, though, especially terrible, is that it represents itself as simple entertainment. The audience doesn’t realize there’s a message hidden there.” Haneke sat back and shook his head gravely.
The difference between Haneke’s agenda and that of films like “Air Force One” was cast into sharp relief at the premiere of the original “Funny Games” in Cannes. “It was funny — funny for me, at least — how the theater reacted to Anna’s shooting of Dickie,” Haneke told me, referring to a scene late in the film when the heroine turns the tables on her captors. “There was actual applause at first — then, when the scene is rewound, making the audience conscious of what it’s cheering for, the theater went absolutely silent. There was a general realization, even though the victim in this case was a villain in the film, that they’d been applauding an act of murder.” Haneke frowned slightly at the memory, but the frown appeared to be one of satisfaction. “I’m hoping for something similar when ‘Funny Games’ shows here.”
The decision to remake his signature work in America with an A-list cast caused considerable controversy among hardcore cinephiles, not least because of Haneke’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s most outspoken critics. Haneke was quick to defend himself. “Of course I’m a critic of the studio system,” he said, as if it were unthinkable not to be. “But that doesn’t mean that one can’t work within that system. ‘Funny Games’ was always made with American audiences in mind, since its subject is Hollywood’s attitude toward violence. And nothing has changed about that attitude since the first version of my film was released — just the opposite, in fact.” When I asked whether the average American moviegoer was likely to appreciate having his attitude adjusted, Haneke-style, the director thought for a moment, then threw up his hands in mock surrender. “I’ve been accused of ‘raping’ the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What’s different about my films is this: I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence.”
Haneke was born on March 23, 1942, in Munich, to a genteel theatrical family — his father, Fritz Haneke, was a respected actor and director, and his mother, Beatrix von Degenschild, was an actress in her own right and a daughter of the local aristocracy. After the war, his family moved to Wiener Neustadt in Lower Austria, a half-hour’s train ride from Vienna. As soon as he graduated from high school, Haneke lost no time in moving to the capital, where he studied psychology, philosophy and — naturally enough — theater at the University of Vienna; if the teenage Haneke had had his way, however, he might never have directed a film.
“Originally, I wanted to be a pianist,” Haneke told me. “But luckily for me, my stepfather was a professional musician, and he took me aside one day and said, ‘Look, Michael, it’s very nice that you’re playing piano all the time, but I have to tell you that you’re never going to make it.’ ” When I expressed sympathy for this setback, Haneke frowned and shook his head. “No, no,” he said quickly. “I’m grateful to my stepfather for his honesty. There’s nothing worse than a moderately talented musician.”
Well meant or not, his stepfather’s intercession freed the young Haneke to pursue his other great passion, one that arrived like a thunderbolt in the winter of 1948. “I must have been 6 years old when I saw my first film,” Haneke told me when I visited the spacious apartment in Vienna’s eighth district that he shares with his wife, Suzie, a dealer in antique jewelry and silver. “It was Laurence Olivier’s ‘Hamlet.’ I remember the gradual darkening of the theater, the slow, somber opening of the curtain, the first bleak images of the sea-locked castle and the even bleaker music that accompanied them. My grandmother, who was sitting next to me in the theater, told me years later that she had to take me out almost at once, because I began screaming in terror. From that moment on I was hooked.” I felt obliged to ask Haneke whether it struck him as odd that a child so easily disturbed by images on-screen would grow up to make movies often described as unbearable to watch. After a moment’s silence, he answered, “Not at all.”
Haneke’s second pivotal moviegoing experience came more than a decade later, when he saw Tony Richardson’s “Tom Jones” as a student. “Suddenly, about a third of the way through the film,” Haneke told me, “the hero, played by Albert Finney, stops in the middle of a chase scene, turns to face the camera — in other words, the viewer — and addresses a few offhand remarks to the audience. Nothing especially racy, but by that simple gesture he shocks the viewer into self-awareness.” Though he didn’t know it at the time, that moment marked a loss of cinematic innocence that would indelibly mark every film he went on to direct. “After ‘Tom Jones,’ I began to look behind the mirror, so to speak — to see the cinema with different eyes, and to distrust the storytellers, who claimed to be serving up real life. But my hunger for stories was stronger than ever — I wasn’t sure what I was looking for from cinema, but I knew it would have to offer the magic of my first moviegoing experiences without turning me into a passive, voiceless victim of the story — which is to say, of the people behind the story. I wanted movies that enchanted me without exploiting me.”
At certain moments, a conversation with Haneke can feel like a clandestine meeting with the leader of the Cinematic Liberation Front, and this was one of them. Even the word “exploitation” has taken on a kind of lurid appeal — blaxploitation, sexploitation — in the current cultural landscape, and his argument struck me as both romantic and dated. When I said as much — tactfully, of course — to Haneke, he simply nodded. Then I realized that was exactly his point.
Haneke may have become serious about movies early on, but decades would pass before he would direct his first feature. After attending the University of Vienna, he returned to Germany in 1967, where he spent the next four years working for Bavaria’s equivalent of the BBC as a producer before becoming a freelance screenwriter and director. His first theatrical feature film, “The Seventh Continent,” made at the age of 47, was released on the big screen only after having been rejected by a German television station. It’s not hard to guess why the network passed. The film follows the final days and hours of an archetypal middle-class family who have decided, for no apparent reason, to destroy all their possessions and commit suicide. Many of the hallmarks of Haneke’s style are already in evidence: the deliberate pacing, the static, unflinching camera, the dominance of blue tones over red, and the placement, à la Hitchcock, of the most grisly violence tantalizingly out of view. Two equally stark studies in violence and alienation — “Benny’s Video” and “71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance” — followed “The Seventh Continent,” and the three films together, which have since come to be known as “The Glaciation Trilogy,” earned him a measure of admiration outside the German-speaking world. It was his next film, however, that made cinephiles the world over take notice. That film was “Funny Games.”
“Funny Games” occupies a unique place in Haneke’s body of work, not least because of his decision to shoot it twice. “Originally, I approached Michael about optioning ‘Funny Games’ for some other director,” Chris Coen, the film’s producer, told me. “And Michael’s reply was that he’d do it himself, but only if I could get Naomi Watts for the lead. I hadn’t thought about him wanting to do it, to be honest. But he said very clearly that ‘Funny Games’ was the one film of his that he’d allow no one else to direct.” Hollywood has a long and hallowed tradition of buying the rights to art-house hits and refashioning them to suit its own ends — in fact, the director Ron Howard recently acquired the rights to Haneke’s “Caché” — but Haneke’s decision to remake his own film surprised fans and colleagues alike. The peculiarity of the project seems to have been part of its appeal. “To my knowledge, no one has ever remade his own film so precisely,” the director told me in Vienna, with an unmistakable trace of boyish pride. “The new version is the same film superficially, of course, but it’s also very different: a different atmosphere, different performances, a different end result. That in and of itself is interesting.”
Interesting and potentially nightmarish. Having Haneke at the helm seems to have led, perhaps inevitably, to conflict with Warner Independent, the studio that is distributing “Funny Games”: the film’s release date was repeatedly delayed, possibly a result of disagreement over whether the film should be positioned for the horror market or for a wider audience. “He had panic attacks about how the film was going to be received and problems with the crew, and language problems,” said Brady Corbet, who plays Peter, one of the two wisecracking, self-reflective killers in the remake. “It was a nightmare for him, and I doubt he’ll ever try to work here again.”
When I asked Haneke if he would return to work in the U.S., he took an uncharacteristically long time to reply. “I enjoyed many things about the shoot,” he said, clearly choosing his words with great care. “I enjoyed working with the actors especially. The actors were wonderful.”
Haneke has always had a gift for eliciting extraordinary performances from his actors, an absolute necessity in films that otherwise refuse to cater to the audience. “The Piano Teacher” seems to have been unthinkable for him without Isabelle Huppert; “Code Unknown” was written specifically for Juliette Binoche; and without Naomi Watts, it seems very likely that “Funny Games” would never have been remade. Watching both versions of “Funny Games” back to back is especially revealing of Haneke’s skill. Though the dialogue, framing and sequence of shots are identical, the end result is remarkably different: Michael Pitt, the other of the family’s tormentors, brings a disconcerting sweetness to his role; Tim Roth emotes where Ulrich Mahe endured stoically; and Watts herself infuses her character’s suffering with a sexuality that Susanne Lothar, perhaps intentionally, kept at a definite remove.
“What makes Michael different from other directors,” Corbet told me, “is his absolute specificity — there’s one way to make this movie, period. He’s a total dictator. Before this shoot started, I spoke to a number of actors who’d worked with him, and all of them told me the same thing: ‘Brace yourself.’ ”
There’s an element of paradox in the task Haneke has set himself: in order to make films that confront the use of violence as titillation, it’s necessary to make violent films and even, to some extent, titillating ones. In the course of each of his productions, Haneke has had to navigate these ethically and conceptually fraught waters anew, with varying degrees of success. His films have by no means earned him unanimous praise: moviegoers and critics alike have often resented the missionary quality in his work, and accusations of self-righteousness have dogged him throughout his career. Reviewing the original version of “Funny Games,” the critic J. Hoberman wrote: “His movies are founded on the denial of catharsis and, to compound the creepiness, Haneke insists he is occupying the moral high ground. . . . The wheel is rigged so only Haneke can win.” One of the great paradoxes of Haneke’s position is that the methods he despises are the only methods at his disposal, and the criticisms his own films garner are often not so very different — on the surface, at least — from comments he himself has made about films that he hates.
His most widely seen film in the U.S., “Caché,” released in 2005, won Haneke his second major prize at Cannes and is perhaps the director’s most delicate balancing act. By turns both Hitchcockian thriller and cool morality play, “Caché” follows a Parisian haute-bourgeois family as it unravels in the face of a harassment campaign that is chilling in its simplicity: each morning a videocassette containing footage of the family’s house is mysteriously dropped off on its doorstep, showing the comings and goings of each family member but giving no clue as to the maker of the tape. No overt threats are made, and no explanations given, but the family — Daniel Auteuil, Lester Makedonsky and Juliette Binoche, in her second starring role for Haneke — do the rest of the harasser’s work for him. By the end of the film, a devastating secret has come to light, a man has been killed and the family is damaged beyond repair.
“Caché” is simultaneously the most conventional and the most opaque of Haneke’s films, and arguably the most effective. While one of the central mysteries of the film — the question of who is making the tapes — is never resolved, why the tapes are being made soon becomes clear. The father of the family, to all appearances a model left-leaning intellectual, is a man with a crime in his past: as a boy, during the time of the Algerian conflict, he betrayed a young Algerian ward of his family, resulting in the ward’s abandonment and eventual suicide. Though Haneke resists being represented as a political filmmaker, it’s hard to avoid seeing a message here: namely, that the comforts of the bourgeoisie have been paid for in blood, and in the case of France, that blood was largely North African. In our talks, Haneke repeatedly criticized films that summarize or explain themselves to the viewer — that do the audience’s work for it, in other words — but “Caché” comes dangerously close to doing just that. Yet, just as “Caché” seems about to supply the viewer with any number of conventionally satisfying solutions, it slyly — some would say maddeningly — refuses to choose between them, closing with an intriguing final shot that may or may not hold the answer. The fact that the film ultimately succeeds is no small tribute to the director’s considerable talent as a juggler of audience expectations.
Largely because of its preoccupation with violence as entertainment, “Funny Games” has been compared with Stanley Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange.” Haneke himself, however, views “A Clockwork Orange” as a noble failure. “I’m a huge Kubrick fan, but I find ‘A Clockwork Orange’ a kind of miscalculation, because he makes the brutality so spectacular — so stylized, with dance numbers and so on — that you almost have to admire it,” he told me. “I read somewhere — I’m not sure if it’s true — that Kubrick was completely shocked when he saw how the public reacted to ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ and that he even tried to have the film recalled. It became a cult hit because people found its hyperstylized violence somehow cool, and that was certainly not what Kubrick had intended.” Haneke shook his head slowly. “It’s incredibly difficult to present violence on-screen in a responsible manner. I would never claim to be cleverer than Kubrick, but I have the advantage of making my films after he made his. I’ve been able to learn a tremendous amount from his mistakes.” Whether one of those mistakes was to make a film that actually had popular appeal was a question that Haneke left unanswered.
Haneke’s sudden prominence, and the unfailingly extreme subject matter of his films, has led to comparisons with Quentin Tarantino, with John Woo and with the directors of the so-called Asian Extreme movement, but Haneke himself sees little common ground. “I saw ‘Pulp Fiction,’ of course, and it’s a very well done film,” he said. “The problem, as I see it, is with its comedy — there’s a danger there, because the humor makes the violence consumable. Humor of that kind is all right, even useful, as long as the viewer is made to think about why he’s laughing. But that’s something ‘Pulp Fiction’ fails to do.” When I mentioned Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers,” another film that “Funny Games” has been compared with, Haneke shrugged. “Stone made the same mistake that Kubrick made. I use that film to illustrate a principle to my students — you can’t make an antifascist statement using fascist methods.”
Haneke has his own theory for the divergent routes taken by Hollywood and Europe, one in which, perhaps not surprisingly, the darker side of German and Austrian history plays a central role. “At the beginning of the 20th century,” he told me, “when film began in Europe, storytelling of the kind still popular in Hollywood was every bit as popular here. Then the Nazis came, and the intellectuals — a great number of whom were Jewish — were either murdered or managed to escape to America and elsewhere. There were no intellectuals anymore — most of them were dead. Those who escaped to America were able to continue the storytelling approach to film — really a 19th-century tradition — with a clear conscience, since it hadn’t been tainted by fascism. But in the German-speaking world, and in most of the rest of Europe, that type of straightforward storytelling, which the Nazis had made such good use of, came to be viewed with distrust. The danger hidden in storytelling became clear — how easy it was to manipulate the crowd. As a result, film, and especially literature, began to examine itself. Storytelling, with all the tricks and ruses it requires, became gradually suspect. This was not the case in Hollywood.” At this point, Haneke asked politely whether I was following him, and I told him that I was. “I’m glad,” he said, apparently with genuine relief. “For Americans, this can sometimes be hard to accept.”
Over the last decade, a new group of Francophone filmmakers has come to prominence in Europe, one less bedazzled by the Hollywood genre films that so influenced the New Wave directors than by the work of French auteurs like Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson. The Belgian-born Dardenne brothers, for example, favor dark, naturalistic studies of working-class life, while Bruno Dumont, a former professor of philosophy, makes violent and sexually explicit films that tend toward parable. But both share a preference for long, intricately composed shots, a resolutely anti-Hollywood aesthetic and a Bressonian aversion for spelling things out. Haneke feels at home in their company: “I wait for each new film by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denis and Bruno Dumont. I enjoy all sorts of films, but those are the people that really interest me. I admire the Dardenne brothers tremendously, but I feel closest, in my work, to Dumont. Dumont’s films are basically existential works, philosophical films, not political ones. I think of my own films that way.” There are other notable similarities between Haneke and Dumont: both directors make violent films that focus on the consequences of the act of violence, rather than on the act itself; both have won the coveted grand jury prize at Cannes; and both were booed there when their awards were announced. When I mentioned this to Haneke, he grinned. “Some of my fondest professional memories are of upsetting the audience at Cannes.”
“I had a dream last night,” Haneke told me toward the end of our lunch in New York. “A nightmare, to be exact. Maybe you’ll find it useful for your piece.” For a moment he was uncharacteristically quiet. He finally said: “I was sitting in a bus, and suddenly it went out of control. For some reason I was responsible for everybody’s safety, but I couldn’t get the steering wheel to work: perhaps it was broken, perhaps someone else was preventing me. People were wandering up and down the street, and the bus ran them over, unavoidably, one after another. Somehow I was responsible for this, but I was helpless to prevent it.” He took a slow, thoughtful sip of his coffee. “A pretty terrible dream, but to me it seems representative of our current situation in the world. All of us are responsible but unable to change the direction of the bus — everyone in Europe, everyone in the so-called first world, is in that same position. A horrible predicament, almost unbearable if you think about it, but the bus keeps right on rolling.” He laughed again. “Maybe I’ll use that in one of my films.”
John Wray is the author of the novels “Canaan’s Tongue” and “The Right Hand of Sleep.” He last wrote for the magazine on heavy-metal bands.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
― Dr Morbius, Tuesday, 25 September 2007 15:03 (eighteen years ago)
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