Fascinatingly Disturbing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Michael Haneke's Cinema

By Pickwick Publications

Michael Haneke is one of Europe's most successful and controversial film directors. Awarded the Palme d'Or and numerous other international awards, Haneke has contributed to and shaped contemporary auteur cinema and is becoming more and more popular among academics and cinephiles. His mission is as noble as it is provocative: he wants "to rape the audience into independence," to wake them up from the lethargy caused by the entertainment industry. The filmic language he employs in this mission is both highly characteristic and efficient, and yet his methods are open to criticism for their violence toward and manipulation of the audience. The aim of this book is to analyze critically Haneke's aesthetics, his message, as well as his ethical motivation from an interdisciplinary and intercultural perspective. Contributors to the book come from a variety of academic disciplines and cultural backgrounds-European and North American.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Apr 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781621899358

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Acknowledgments

Printed with support of Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung, Wien (Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research, Vienna); Amt der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung, Abt. Wissenschaft und Forschung (Federal State of Styria, Department of Science and Research); Styria Fonds, Kath.-Theol. Fakultät Graz (Styria Fonds, Faculty of Theology, Graz University); Universität Graz, Forschungsmanagement und -service (Graz University, Office of Research Management and Service)

The images used in this volume are copyright WEGA

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Filmproduktionsges.m.b.H, Haegelingasse 13, 1140 Wien, Austria. All rights are reserved by WEGA Film—the images must not be reproduced without permission.

Introduction

Alexander D. Ornella and Stefanie Knauss

Michael Haneke is probably one of Europe’s most provocative and most successful contemporary filmmakers. He has received the Palme d’Or in Cannes for several of his films (including the controversial Funny Games) as well as numerous awards from other national and international film festivals. After his successful career in Europe his films are now receiving more and more attention in North America as well, both in terms of the audience’s interest in his films and the academic engagement with his work. This growing interest in the enfant terrible of European cinema, in his cinematic language and central topics is expressed in both the U.S. remake of his 1997 film Funny Games, Funny Games U.S. (2007), as well as a growing number of publications by North American scholars on his films.

With his distinctive style, Haneke provides a dissection of society and a diagnosis of its malaises in the form of shocking, disturbing images, disruptions of audience expectations with regard to genre conventions, norms of representation, or the cinema experience in general. Haneke’s films are not feel-good movies that might placate the spectators like a dose of sleeping pills, nor are they documentaries of actual situations. Rather, they are an extrapolation of social situations and an artificially concentrated view on what goes wrong in this global consumer and media society, models and archetypes rather than individual cases, even though the individual is never dismissed in his or her responsibility for the state of affairs. It is not surprising that his cold, dissecting view on society has often been compared to a laboratory in which he looks at the pathologies of contemporary society¹ under the aseptic conditions of a scientific experiment. His reduced plots, de-individualized characters and the unnervingly steady look of his characteristic long takes on a subject function like a microscope that permits a close and unswerving look at what goes wrong. Rarely showing graphic or explicit violence, Haneke thus succeeds in shocking the viewers more than the blood feasts of splatter films to which they are quite used to by now through the steady diet of media violence in TV and cinema. In particular in Funny Games or Benny’s Video (1992) he makes it clear that the consumers of such media violence are far from innocent victims of what media force them to watch, but rather accomplices in this culture of violence and contempt of the dignity of the human person.

Haneke is highly critical of the construction of reality through media and thus aims to uncover their strategies in order to enable his viewers to develop a critical perspective on images and on the act of seeing itself. Thus in his films, discourses on media, their mechanisms of representation, the dubious relation between image and reality and the processes of media consumption, the complicity of the act of looking, and the impact media can have on their viewers’ daily lives play a central role, in particular in the little known, nearly experimental film Nachruf für einen Mörder (1991) which consists of nothing but a collage of TV news segments from the day when a young man run amok in Austria, but also in nearly all of his other films. And yet he is careful, in all his criticism of media, not to absolve their consumers from their responsibility in the process.

Haneke sees his filmmaking indeed as a socially critical, ethical task and does not get tired to emphasize in interviews that his mission is to rape the audience into independence and to wake them up from the state of apathy caused by the entertainment industry. He does not offer easy solutions—or any solutions at all—in his films, nor does he permit a simple identification with the good guys and judgment of the bad ones, because when it comes to the question of who is the victim, who the perpetrator, who is guilty, who innocent, Haneke shows that these distinctions have long lost their validity in the complex structures of today’s society. Rather, in his mission to wake up the audience’s consciousness, he confronts them with these complexities, asks uncomfortable questions in disturbing ways—and leaves it at that. The answers—should there be any—have to be found by the viewers who are forced to engage in the search for them through the shocking, nearly painful quality of Haneke’s images and narratives.

In his most recent film, Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon, 2009),

—which was not released yet at the time of writing of the articles in this volume, but is discussed in detail in Franz Grabner’s interview with Haneke that introduces this volume—Haneke returns to his central topic of guilt and responsibility and investigates the often blurry lines between being a victim and being or becoming a perpetrator. Setting the film in a small German village just before the outbreak of WWI, Haneke explores the lives of the children of the village, i.e., of that generation that will be grown up during WWII. Again, like in earlier films, without distributing blame and responsibility in a clear or easy fashion, he makes the point that victims, in this case the children, who are victims of cruel regimes of discipline, can become perpetrators and vice versa, and that it is impossible to define ideal conditions under which this might not happen. Personal responsibility and social systems, structures and value schemes intersect in this story in irresolvable complexity, showing that Haneke is neither opposing the notion of free will and personal responsibility for one’s actions, nor the part that social suppression plays in individual and collective guilt.

The burning issues Haneke brings up in his films, and his motivation to change something in his viewers through his films is indeed a noble enterprise, that meets equally with praise and criticism. The reactions of both film critics and his audience to the audio-visual violation not necessarily of the characters on screen (since the violence is rarely ever visible) but of the spectators themselves range from fascination to disgust to the rejection of his methods and films. In particular the film he made in order to criticize the ways in which a cinema audience buys into the aesthetical celebration of violence in most action films—Funny Games and its remake Funny Games U.S.—has been received critically and ambivalently. While some critics keep emphasizing that in a world and times like ours, films such as the ones by Haneke are necessary to motivate a reflective process (e.g., Georg Seeßlen),² other critics question Haneke’s methods as being themselves violent and manipulative in their attempt to free the audience from its mediatic conditioning (e.g., Charles Martig in this volume).

Haneke’s engagement with ethically highly important topics, yet using methods that deserve an ethical discussion in themselves makes his work particularly interesting for a detailed and critical discussion from the perspectives of various disciplines, such as film studies, German/Austrian studies, philosophy, cultural studies and theology, and from various cultural backgrounds (Europe and North America) as we present it in the essays collected in this volume. The volume is structured in five parts—Voices, Traces, Off, Dialogue, Constructions—whose titles refer to recurrent topics and motifs in Haneke’s films, to formal means characteristic for his cinema, as well as to the possibilities of reading his films opened up by diverse disciplinary approaches. Nevertheless connections can also be drawn between the papers across the parts making of this collection not just an accumulation of individual essays but a communal engagement with Haneke’s work in a number of different voices. A striking example is the film Caché (2005) which several articles from both European and North American scholars in this volume deal with showing how different approaches to the same film can help to uncover the complexities of this film which deals with a multiplicity of questions that concern all of us, e.g., surveillance, voyeurism, collective history, responsibility, and identity.

The first section, Voices, is opened by an interview of Haneke with Franz Grabner, We Live in a Permanent State of War, in which the auteur talks about his films, covering his whole œuvre including The White Ribbon, about his experiences in the remake of Funny Games, his take on society, his motivations for his filmmaking, and the centrality of interaction with his spectators in order to wake them up from their lethargy and passivity in media consumption. The second article in this section, How Much Haneke Do We Deserve? Against Sadistic-Philosphical Tendencies in Filmmaking by Charles Martig, takes Haneke by his words and expresses concerns about this—certainly noble and important—mission of waking up the audience and forcing them to become conscious of their complicity in media violence. In fact, Martig argues that the concerned spectator should reject Haneke’s aesthetic language for its moralistic cruelty and manipulative intentions. Joining Haneke’s and Martig’s perspectives offers the space for a reflection on audience interaction with film and their role in the construction of the film itself.

The second section of the book reflects on the aesthetic characteristics of Haneke’s films and their implications for a philosophical—but also theological—reading of them. The title of the section, Traces, refers to the hypothesis that traces of the transcendent (a transcendent entity, God, but also the existential human desire to transcend his/her immanent existence in asking ever new questions) can be found in artworks. Thus philosophy or theology or any discipline that reflects about existential questions such as ethics, humaneness, guilt, forgiveness, violence, can profit from the questions asked in artworks, and vice versa. Interestingly, this theological perspective is not something far-fetched as Haneke himself is the first to acknowledge the relevance of his films for religious and theological discourses. The essays in this section therefore also include some fundamental and methodological reflections on how and why theology and philosophy can fruitfully engage with art or cinema in particular. In his essay Theology, Aesthetics, and Film: Theological Prolegomena and their Application to the Work of Michael Haneke, Gerhard Larcher points out that Haneke is part of a broader quest for meaning in art and culture which motivates theology’s dialogue with such art. He discovers in Haneke’s work a critical prophetic and utopian potential that emerges in particular in the glaciation trilogy through Haneke’s engagement with media in the media of film. As Larcher argues, the transcendent is present in Haneke’s films not as a glorious epiphany, but through his careful, critical and attentive view on the banality and threat of everyday life.

Christian Wessely approaches Haneke’s films from the perspective of Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style³ in his Stasis: Walking the Border between Michael Haneke and Paul Schrader. Through a critical re-reading of Schrader’s theory of the emergence of the transcendent through a particular style of filmmaking, he argues that this approach can help shed light on Haneke’s filmic language and aesthetics. Through provocation and irritation, but most of all through allowing a new look at reality in his long takes on unspectacular objects, Haneke opens up a space for the transcendent to enter, not necessarily a transcendent in the sense of a higher being, but in the form of the urge to question the conditions of human existence as they appear in today’s society.

In fact, it is quite legitimate to understand transcendence not necessarily as referring to a higher being, as Michael Hoelzl points out in his paper Guilt and Sin in the Work of Michael Haneke. Using Haneke’s film La pianiste (The Piano Teacher, 2001) and in particular the three scenes where blood is shed in this film, he analyzes the difference between sin and guilt, which are often used synonymously but are, according to Hoelzl’s triadic models of guilt and sin, of a different nature: both rely on a transcendent party or referent, yet this transcendent third is of a different nature in the context of guilt or of sin. However, in The Piano Teacher sin and guilt are symbolically related to each other and their clear distinction is again, narratively and aesthetically, problematized.

The third section of this book is entitled Off, referring to everything that is or happens off-screen and thus to an aesthetic, formal choice in the framing of a film image that is frequent in Haneke’s films. While commercial Hollywood films rely heavily on the showing of violence, sex, etc. on-screen, Haneke employs a different method: in his films most of the action happens off-screen and is hinted at only through sounds, little gestures, or the character’s reaction to what is happening, thus leaving the construction of the image to the spectators. Serge Goriely explores how Haneke represents death, the ultimately un-representable moment of dying on—or rather off—screen in his essay Pieces of Truth for Moments of Death in Michael Haneke’s Cinema. Rather than idealizing or transcending death, as happens often in Hollywood cinema, Haneke tries to show it as it truely is. This means most of the time that he chooses not to show it, leaving it in the off, or when he does show it, as in Caché, he does so either to mock the audience or to underline the theatrical dimension of any representation of death in fiction film. With his particular aesthetics of death, Haneke wants to provoke the viewers to reflect on their ambiguous relationship with death between horror and fascination and how we—as society—try to suppress this ambiguity through a proliferation of images of anonymous death.

The problem of representing that which is not representable is also central to Davide Zordan’s contribution, "Just Like a Prayer: Michael Haneke and the Mise-en-scène of Praying." In a close analysis of Haneke’s filmic language, he analyzes how the filmmaker employs the ritualistic act of praying to confirm the loss of freedom and trust in a higher being in a technocratic society. But are things really as simple? In his paradoxical mise-en-scène of the prayers, the filmmaker opens up—again—the possibility for different and more complex readings that relativize this pessimistic view of prayer.

In his Cat and Mouse: Haneke’s Joy in the Spectator’s Distress, Alexander D. Ornella compares two versions of the off that are intended to be the exact same: the staging of the violent in both versions of Funny Games. On the background of a discussion of the forms of representation of violence in media, Ornella shows that due to what is shown and what is left out, the remake—when compared to the original version—adds a diabolic twist to the film which seems to suggest an answer to the haunting question of why the family in the film is tortured and has to die, and to which end the (non-)representation of violence serves in these films, whereas the first version is more consequent in its ridicule of the audience for even asking the question of the why.

Film is always dialogical in nature—not only with regard to the audience but also to the cultural context from which it evolves, the aesthetic language it uses or opposes, and the iconographic heritage it builds upon. Thus the fourth section of the book, Dialogue, sketches some aspects of the film historical context from which Haneke’s films emerge. The first paper in this section, The Marriage of Past and Present: Intertextuality in Fassbinder and Haneke by Oliver C. Speck deals with intertextuality in Haneke and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in particular with regard to Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1978) and Haneke’s TV film Fraulein—ein Deutsches Melodram (Fraulein—a German Melodrama, 1986). Speck argues that both auteurs use intertextual quotes from other media as well as from Germany’s collective memory and deliberately alter them to criticize bourgeois society. On the background of Deleuze’s concept of the virtual, Speck shows how these quotations open up the possibility for critical reflection for the audience.

Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann explore the differences and similarities between Haneke and two other auteurs, Lars von Trier, and David Lynch in their Auteurism and the Aesthetics of Irritation: Haneke, von Trier & Lynch. Their discussion of the concept of auteurism and its critical application to these three filmmakers shows that the concept of irritation that requires for the spectator to permanently renegotiate his/her position and self-understanding is central for the understanding of these auteurs and of the different means they employ to elicit this irritation in their viewers. All three auteurs thus represent and embody the idea of the artist as a critical mirror of social, cultural, and mediatic reality.

In her contribution "A Game Gone Wrong or a Perversion? Sex in Haneke’s Cinema and in Dumont’s Twentynine Palms, Stefanie Knauss discusses the representation (or non-representation) of sex in Haneke’s films and compares this presence/absence" of sexual intercourse to that of Bruno Dumont’s. In her discussion of the representation of sexuality in After Liverpool (1974) and The Piano Teacher, Knauss shows that in these films sex becomes a kind of focal point for the social issues Haneke continues to discuss in his later films that do not include the representation of sexuality. The choice not to show sex in these films thus tells much about the state of society as perceived by Haneke.

The title of the last section of this book—Constructions—refers to the fact that in all contexts of human life we are forced to construct meaning, reality, and identity itself from more or less coherent bits and pieces that are used and put together differently. The relationship between reality and how we perceive it through images has become as unreliable as a stable sense of who I am or how I relate to my context. In "On Puzzles and Scores: A Reading of Space in Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments," Monica Filimon shows that not even the solidity of spaces is exempt from this. Haneke shows that public or private spaces are constructed by the persons using them and can be altered in their significance by the individual, but he also leaves his viewers the visual space (e.g., in black screens) to reflect on and redefine the space of his film and their spaces as viewers. The fragmentary way itself in which the filmic narrative is edited requires the cooperation of the spectators in the construction of the film.

As this volume took on form, it became clear that Haneke’s film Caché offers material for the discussion of a variety of questions in relation to the constructed nature of contemporary society and the conditions of human existence. In her essay "Surveillance and Voyeurism in Haneke’s Code Unknown and Caché," Andrea Gogröf-Voorhees argues that in our media driven consumer society the (presumed) need for surveillance is deeply interrelated with the society’s hunger for voyeurism. Through his particular aesthetics, Haneke opposes this hunger which is often catered to by mainstream cinema. Instead of allowing the spectator to assume once again the comfortable role of a voyeur, he more or less forces them to watch what they usually do not see or do not want to see. Both films are critical reflections on the need to reevaluate the dynamics between seeing and being seen, and between constructive activity and destructive passivity in the consumption of images.

In her close reading of Caché on the basis of William E. Connolly’s neuropolitical theory of perception in "Ethical Solicitations and the Film Poetics of Michael Haneke’s Caché," Alyda Faber shows how Haneke’s filmic language aims at constituting an ethical subject through the evocation of infraperceptive responses in his viewers. Faber argues that this film is thus far from assisting the perpetuation of cultural amnesia that it has repeatedly been criticized of doing. Instead, the film solicitates the viewers’ perceptive capacities to cause them to reconsider how deep levels of perception can contribute to destructive social structures, and how this can be changed in constructive ways.

In the final essay "The Struggle for Identity, or Michael Haneke’s Ethics: A Study of Caché," Florian Mittl looks at the process of identity construction based on Paul Ricœur’s understanding of narrative identity. Rather than being constituted once and for all, he argues that identity needs to be permanently renegotiated. As Haneke shows in his film Caché, this constitution process is always embedded into a collective memory and draws on a collective repository of signs and symbols, thus having always also a social and ethical dimension.

* * *

This book was motivated by the research interest of the Institute of Fundamental Theology, Graz University (Austria), which has focused on the interrelationship between arts, aesthetics, media, and religion since the early 1990s. Three volumes on the work of Michael Haneke in German have preceded this English language publication, and we are grateful to Gerhard Larcher and Christian Wessely from the Institute of Fundamental Theology for the inspiring research environment provided and their continuing support.

We would like to thank the Styria Fonds of the Faculty of Catholic Theology at Graz University, the Office of Research Management of Graz University, the federal state of Styria, and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research for their financial support of this publication, and WEGA Film for the possibility to include stills from their films in this volume. We also thank James T. Koranyi and Alexandra Koch for their help with the preparation of the manuscript with regard to form and language.

Most of all, however, we thank the contributors to this volume who have engaged in an open dialogue between a number of academic and cultural discourses without prejudices and with great commitment and we hope that the result might encourage further interdisciplinary work in the realm of theology and culture.

1

.

Cf. the title of the anthology: Michael Haneke und seine Filme: Eine Pathologie der Konsumgesellschaft, ed. Christian Wessely, Franz Grabner, and Gerhard Larcher,

2

nd ed. (Marburg: Schüren,

2008

).

2. Cf. Georg Seeßlen, Strukturen der Vereisung. Blick, Prespektive und Gestus in den Filmen Michael Hanekes, in Michael Haneke und seine Filme: Eine Pathologie der Konsumgesellschaft, ed. Christian Wessely, Franz Grabner, and Gerhard Larcher,

2

nd ed. (Marburg: Schüren,

2008

)

11

–

24

.

3. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu—Bresson—Dreyer (Berkeley: Da Capo,

1972

).

Voices

1

We Live in a Permanent State of War

An Interview with Michael Haneke

Franz Grabner

Grabner: One might be inclined to ask What’s become of the positive, Mr Haneke? in reference to a poem by Erich Kästner, which you yourself once quoted. Looking at your films up to now, it is clear that death plays a central role, but also an unnatural role, as it is always brought about by human beings themselves.

Haneke: I believe unliveable life plays a central role in the trilogy. Death, or rather suicide, is merely an outcome. On the one hand, these films make it clear in the way they are structured that these are not merely individual cases, but they do in fact concern us all. On the other hand, the situations depicted in these films are tapered to such an extent that the protagonists in question have no means of acting freely. That ought to make the audience feel slightly nervous. And I think that’s quite a fitting analogy to the reality of our own social reality in the so-called affluent society. It is quite difficult not to recognize suicidal tendencies within this society. I would say this kind of provocation is absolutely necessary. It is necessary to ask questions in an era when the official reaction is to assuage concerns by offering incessant answers. What’s more, these questions are absolutely necessary as the chasm between the questions and the answers has widened to an unfathomable level. Friedrich Dürrenmatt summarized this quite neatly: Nowadays, a story must always exhibit a catastrophic turn for it to be accepted as a worthwhile story. I think it’s very difficult to disagree with this, because every fictional story—irrespective of how abysmal and harrowing it is—is really pathetic in comparison to the horrors of reality we experience. One needn’t be a pessimist to understand this—just being awake should suffice.

Grabner: Your cinematographic work has been mainly defined by these horrors and the often absurd escalation of the stories. But if one looks at Funny Games or Time of the Wolf, one might end up with the impression that society consists solely of violent madmen. You yourself have talked about a civil war. But surely this doesn’t happen in reality?

Haneke: I think it’s difficult to deal with both films in tandem.

Funny Games is a filmic reflection on media representations of violence, and the two lads in the film are not characters as such but rather artefacts, in other words a reconstruction of media archetypes.

By contrast, I did try to replicate contemporary reality in all its contradictions in Time of the Wolf. I don’t agree that there are only thugs and madmen in the film. It’s far more about people trying to deal with each other—successfully to some extent—in a human(e) manner over the course of this story.

As far as the expression civil war is concerned, yes, I do believe that we live in a permanent state of civil war. I don’t mean the war of us rich versus the poor of this world. It’s impossible to deny that war anyway, and I hope that will also be a thorn in the side of each and every one of us. What I was referring to with civil war was the war of carelessness and unkindness, which is something all of us participate in day in day out. The daily wounds from this civil war are perhaps the real reasons behind the so-called real wars.

Grabner: So why invent more harrowing stories?

Haneke: Because we shut our eyes to the horrors of reality in order to endure them in the first place. Suppression is the original sin, both in social and individual terms—we are all powerless against it.

Perhaps we invented art just to have a small weapon against it. The positive you asked about (Kästner actually answered this question in his poem in a very amusing way: The devil knows what’s happened to it. And still you accord the good and the beautiful merely the empty space above the couch. You still can’t get used to the idea of being clever and courageous at the same time.), this positive can only mean the relentless demand of personal truthfulness. Yet, the truth is no longer beautiful. It’s as Nietzsche said in the last century: It’s undignified for a philosopher to say the good and the beautiful are one. And if he were to add: and the true!, one should beat him. Truth is ugly.

But back to the films: I try to make the viewer feel provoked and forced to do something against what I am showing him/her. I don’t offer solutions, I merely pose the questions. It’s the politicians’ job to offer solutions: to offer lies and assurances. If solutions existed, the world wouldn’t be the way it is at present. That is why we must ask the right questions, and if they are not the correct questions, then at the very least they should be productive questions asked in such a pressing manner that they effect something in the viewer: anger, energy, the wish to resist the huge swindle of compromise, to be discontent, to question oneself. Insight is always a shock!

Working in the metier of film, one asks oneself: what are the adequate means to elicit this type of provocation, how do I achieve this productive restlessness in a viewer? The psychological realism of mainstream cinema is utterly useless in this respect. Every escalated constellation and every problem very quickly have their boil lanced, which in turn allows the viewer to reduce the events to the individual character whilst keeping out of it as a passive onlooker. I was made aware of the case with which The Seventh Continent deals through an article in the magazine Stern: the reporting journalist listed anything and everything that could be used as an explanation for the shocking family suicide: the family’s financial situation, the married couple’s sexual problems etc. etc. The effect of this was that the only thing left of the horror of the deed was a voyeuristic, psychological, and perhaps pathological isolated case, which had no disconcerting effect on readers, let alone served as a reason to search for disturbing similarities in one’s own life.

Mainstream cinema uses the same form of narration. Take, for example, Falling Down—the constellation of events is very similar to that of 71 Fragments: a man runs amok, because he cannot cope with the stupor, the brutality, and the mendacity of daily social reality. But what did the Americans do in order to attract an audience? They turned it into an action-packed melodrama about a fascistic unemployed person, who has also got huge marital problems. In so doing, the explosive nature of it all is taken out and every viewer who hasn’t got marital problems or isn’t unemployed can ignore the case as not applicable to his or her circumstances. I’m trying to find a form that will make this impossible and that will place the viewer at the centre of the story with all his/her fears and aggression by including a radical escalation and by avoiding individualized psychological patterns. The viewer thereby fills the empty matrix. S/he has the responsibility for this.

Grabner: This answer is a double-edged sword for the viewer.

Haneke: Give me one example of contemporary literature that deserves to be called literature without offering opposition towards the status quo! And I don’t mean just as far as its content is concerned, but also in its form. The anti-social aspect of art is the definite negation of a certain society—Adorno made this point already half a century ago. Anyone associated with what is vaguely called art-production—writers, painters, musicians, or whatever—will accept that as a self-evident premise of his/her work. I say art-production and not culture-production, because culture means something very different in the age of media-driven mass-democracy. It means an affirmation of the existing status quo. Therefore the question has got to be altered slightly: film, the industrial product of film, which aesthetically-speaking still pretends that we are living in the nineteenth century, is undoubtedly part of the culture industry. It has little to do with the radicalism that still typifies art. Not because its producers are not capable of this, but because the production of a film—the most financially dependent production of an artefact, because it’s also the most expensive form of production—does not grant space to an oppositional position to common sense by its very definition. Film must be marketable.

Take violence as an example—a central theme of our social reality. Due to its means of representation film is probably the most suited of all media to deal with this. And indeed, cinema has made the biggest financial gains precisely in this area: action thrillers are the most profitable genre of the medium on a global scale. How so? By making violence consumable: through aestheticization and dramaturgic legitimization. What we feel in the cinema is the superficial allure of violence, a more and more virtuoso maelstrom of blood and gestures. It is very difficult for us to withdraw ourselves from the speed and allure of this maelstrom, and we can identify with a representative, the hero, who is legitimized through the narration and the plot, and with whom we can kill and shoot and fight, without having to think about the moral hangover. Bad conscience doesn’t sell. We all sit in the helicopter in Apocalypse Now and are firing the guns at the ant-like Vietnamese to the Ride of the Valkyries, firing at what is alien, unfathomable, fear-inspiring, to be extinguished, and we feel as relaxed as having visited the sauna, because we do not have any responsibility for the massacre, because what is responsible for this is communism, the impenetrable political sleaze in Washington, or if needs be the American president, who isn’t even a good friend of us. We all gladly pay seven Euros for that, don’t we?

Grabner: So what’s the difference to the way violence is portrayed in your films?

Haneke: Firstly, violence is never depicted from the perspective of perpetrators. It appears as what it really is: the suffering of victims. Hence the viewer gets to see what it actually means to exercise violence and that is why these films are seen as painful. Where I do show violence being exercized, I try to make it clear to the viewer through particular formal means that s/he is a voyeur, and I try to ruin the consumption of violence for him/her. Take, for example, the murder in Benny’s Video: the viewer does not get to see the murder—it takes place almost exclusively off-screen and we can only hear what’s happening—instead the viewer can only see a TV set and on this TV set, which is showing the adolescent murderer’s room, which he himself is recording with his video camera, there is nothing to be seen: it is only our fantasy—spurred on by the noises—that enlivens the screen. And later on, when the murderer shows his parents the video recording, all we can see again is the TV screen and the parents’ heads, which echo our own horror that we felt earlier. In this manner, the viewer has no real opportunity to enjoy the violence, or rather to participate in it guiltlessly. . .

Grabner: . . . which is a form of narration, which you stick to in other films, for instance, Funny Games . . .

Haneke: Well, I refined the process somewhat for that film. I turn the viewers into the accomplices of the perpetrators and then I accuse them of being just that—in order to make them feel how easy it is to manipulate them, and that their voyeuristic enjoyment is based on self-deceit.

The second point, however, is this: there is never any violence in my films that is legitimized. Normally that is the precondition for any violence in films: the policeman fights for law and order against the criminal, those seeking revenge are doing this only because of something that happened before the film and thus they merely react, a murder inspired by jealousy is the result of sexual humiliation and so on. There is always a deed in the past that legitimizes the violence that now dominates the screen. And the gravity of said deed merely acts as an alibi for being particularly brutal and gruesome when atoning for the past. Don’t forget: the viewer has a right to find out how normality is reinstated (and sometimes must be reinstated) through violence. At least that’s the cynical alibi of those responsible for this. And we’ve internalized this alibi to such an extent that we barely notice the false pretence in all of this.

You won’t find such a form of legitimization in any of my films. What you will find is a puzzle that forces the viewer to query how violence comes to pass in the first place. That’s an uncomfortable process, because it requires the personal involvement of the viewers. The film therefore doesn’t end on the screen, but rather in my head. Hopefully, sometimes even in my heart. Then perhaps I’m able to take the film home where I might notice the similarities with my life and where the pockets of violence are to which I contribute.

I think that’s a fundamental difference.

Grabner: I have to dig a bit deeper: Do you really believe that our society is primarily defined by violence and aggression? Of course the narrative ways in which your films represent violence address something different to what mainstream cinema does. But what I’m questioning is the fact that you constantly concentrate on violence and emotional coldness in almost all your films as if humanity had no other qualities.

Haneke: You shouldn’t accuse an apple of not being a pear. Do you also think that Greek tragedy is one-sided? That genre doesn’t deny that there are nice aspects to life. It’s just that those aspects aren’t under investigation.

The demand for objectivity is quite strange in a medialized world in which the majority is concerned simply with reassuring and glossing over. Why not allow cinema to speak about the neglected areas of reality? Violence and emotional coldness are dominant characteristics of our neoliberal dog-eat-dog society—is it really one-sided to portray them in an exemplary way accordingly?

We are living in a violent world.

Grabner: How does the question of guilt manifest itself for you in The Seventh