On Michael Haneke

Haneke’s Stable: The Death of an Animal and the Figuration of the Human

63 Michael Lawrence Haneke’s stable The death of an Animal and the Figuration of the Human I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle. —Alfred Hitchcock Michael Haneke has often described his films as a “protest” against mainstream Hollywood cinema.1 one of the ways his work differs from Hollywood cinema is in its approach to violence. Haneke says: “The society we live in is drenched in violence. I represent it on the screen because I am afraid of it, and I think it is important that we should reflect on it.”2 The representation of violence in Haneke’s cinema, however, largely takes place off, rather than on, the screen: consider, for example, the killing of the teenage girl in Benny’s Video or the shooting of the son in Funny Games. Mattias Frey has suggested that a central aspect of Haneke’s work is “the denial of visual access to acts of violence.”3 similarly, Brigitte peucker notes how “Haneke’s famously ascetic cinema refuses the choreography of violence, the special effects and other aestheticizing means than render extreme violence cinematically pleasurable.”4 Haneke says: “The question isn’t ‘how do I show violence?’ but rather ‘how do I show the spectator his position vis-à-vis violence and its representation?’”5 The difference or distance between “violence and its representation,” however, is frequently collapsed in Haneke’s cinema, when animals are shown being killed. His most widely seen films present scenes in which animals are killed, often (though not always) onscreen, and usually involving real animal death events. re- 64 M I c H A E L L AW r E n c E gina Berecca has suggested that death provides a “structural principle” that separates experience from the representation of experience.6 I wish here to examine how the real deaths of animals in Haneke’s cinema function as “representations” of the deaths of animals in his films’ fictional worlds. Haneke’s representation of animal death is an index of his cinema’s difference from Hollywood. It is predominantly in films produced outside the United states that we watch real animals being killed.7 The American Humane Association has, since 1940, sought to ensure that “no animals were harmed” during the making of feature films.8 This famous disclaimer, Akira Mizuta Lippit has suggested, “reveals a totemic anxiety, one that surpasses the humanitarian concern for animals as living creatures and exposes a unique unease with the death of the animal as spectacle and as such.”9 Whereas Hollywood generally avoids showing violence to animals, it does however frequently show violence done to human bodies. In comparing Haneke to mainstream cinema, the presentation of human violence and animal death is reversed. It would seem that one of the ways Haneke wishes to “show the spectator his position vis-à-vis violence and its representation” is by denying access to the aestheticized spectacle of human violence, and by instead showing images of real animal death. Haneke writes: The boundary between the real existence and its representation has been hard for the viewer to discern from the outset, and it is precisely this which has given film its fascination. The oscillation between the disconcerting feeling of being involved in something genuinely happening now, and the emotional security of seeing the depiction of an artificially created reality, was indeed what first encouraged development of cinema.10 real animal death events in Haneke’s films are disconcerting precisely because they show “something genuinely happening” (despite their position within carefully and “artificially created [realities]”) and thus obliterate the boundary between “real existence” and “representation.” In this essay I consider scenes depicting real animal death in several of Haneke’s films in relation to these films’ representation of, their figuration of, the human. By focusing on the presence of real animals and real actors in the presentation of Haneke’s fictional worlds, we confront the difference in representing diegetic animal and human subjects in films. Animals are killed in (though not always for) these films, which present themselves as serious examinations of alienation, violence, and death characterized by a humanist perspective. Haneke says: “I always try in all my films to be hu- 65 The Death of an Animal and the Figuration of the Human manist, shall we say, because I think if you are truly and seriously interested in art, you...