On Michael Haneke

The Spectacle of Skepticism: Haneke’s Long Takes

87 John David Rhodes The Spectacle of Skepticism Haneke’s Long Takes Witness two statements by two filmmakers: While the cinema used to make one situation produce another situation, and another, and another, again and again, and each scene was thought out and immediately related to the next (the natural result of a mistrust of reality), today, when we have thought out a scene, we feel the need to “remain” in it, because the single scene itself can contain so many echoes and reverberations, can even contain all the situations we may need. Today, in fact, we can quietly say: give us whatever “fact” you like, and we will disembowel it, make it something worth watching. How can I restore to my representation the value of reality which has been lost? Or in other words, How do I give viewers the possibility of perceiving this loss of reality and their own involvement in the process, so that they can thereby free themselves from being victims of the medium and become its potential partners? The question is not, What may I show? Rather it is, What opportunity do I give the viewer to recognize what is shown for what it is? An emphasis on fact, on duration (“remain[ing] in it”), on reality and the loss thereof and the restoration thereof and the restoration thereof through vision, through looking, through cinema—neorealism, that Esperanto of political filmmaking—is being spoken here. The first quotation is from neorealism “proper,” from Cesare Zavattini , the warm and loveable humanist from the Po River Valley. The second 88 j O H n d A V I d R H O d E S is from Michael Haneke, the “bearded prophet” of “glaciation” from Vienna .1 How can two filmmakers working at such a historical remove from each other speak the same language? Zavattini, a serious filmmaker and thinker, found it possible, in his collaborations with Vittorio de Sica, to conclude his films with a working-class boy silently slipping his hand into that of his father (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) or with the great unwashed and underhoused of Milan flying into the future on broomsticks (Miracolo a Milan, 1951). Both endings might be understood to offer self-consciously feeble or ironically impossible diegetic “conclusions” to problems that would find no such solutions in the real world of Rome in 1948 or Milan in 1951. Can we not, however, at some level, regret, or least note, that both films evaporate from our view leaving behind a slightly sticky residue of either sentimentality or fantasy? Among Haneke’s films’ many memorable endings, on the other hand, we might count a long shot of Isabelle Huppert staggering out of the Vienna Konzerthaus and into the Austrian night, having just plunged a kitchen knife into her breast (The Piano Teacher, 2001), or the ending-and-beginning-again of two tennis-clad murdering teenagers begging breakfast from a family that we know will be their next victims (Funny Games, 1997 and 2007). Surely these are at least different cinematic dialects, if not different languages altogether? Yet, although the contents of a Haneke film may seem ever so far away from those of Italian neorealism, the rhetoric of neorealism persists, and not only in Haneke’s writing and published statements, interviews, and the like; the films themselves participate in the formal rhetoric of neorealism. The use of the long take, that formal gesture most privileged in connection with the neorealist aspiration to capture the space-time of reality as it bodies forth, is one of Haneke’s most persistent traits.2 Haneke’s frequent and paradigmatic deployment of the long take will be the subject of this essay. The long take and its vicissitudes allow for an evaluation of the ethical and epistemological imperatives in Haneke’s filmmaking, imperatives felt most keenly in the formal features of the long take itself. Bazin, the Enforcer A consideration of the long take, of course, means a return to André Bazin, the theorist most responsible for installing it as a kind of summa, not only of filmmaking, but also of moral behavior. Bazin’s investment in long-take/ depth-of-focus cinematography is as well known as it is worth rehearsing. For Bazin the virtues of this form of cinematography are, first, these two: 89 The Spectacle of Skepticism: Haneke’s Long Takes 1. That depth of focus brings the spectator into a...