On Michael Haneke

The Message and the Medium: Haneke’s Film Theory and Digital Praxis

153 Mattias Frey The Message and the Medium Haneke’s Film Theory and digital Praxis In the 1990s, Michael Haneke cultivated a reputation as one of Europe’s most controversial and radical feature filmmakers. His first theatrical releases , The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, and Funny Games, shocked audiences with their reflexive levels , distanced aesthetics, and treatments of violence. Haneke delighted at disturbing. Swiss authorities initially banned Benny’s Video. Wim Wenders was one of the many celebrities to publicly exit the screening of Funny Games at Cannes. At the time, critics often saw Haneke as part of an emerging explicitness in continental filmmaking that included Rémy Balvaux’s C’est arrivé près de chez vous (Man Bites Dog, 1992), Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (Hate, 1995), Virgine despentes’s Baise-moi (Rape Me, 2000), and Gaspar noé’s Seul contre tous (I Stand Alone, 1998) and Irréversible (2002), not to mention much of Catherine Breillat’s work. The European cinema of violence surely has many roots and antecedents. It speaks most immediately to (or reacts against) the allure of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), Hong Kong and other Asian action flicks, and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994). The European directors test the limits of spectatorship and the boundaries between “legitimate art” and exploitation, voyeurism, and complicity in violence (and, often, violent sexuality). Where Haneke departs from the others, however, is the sophistication with which he has theorized his own work in interviews, public appearances , and writings. Appearing on Alexander Kluge’s television program, Haneke kept up with the most intellectual filmmaker Germany has ever 154 M A T T I A S F R E Y produced. In conversation with journalists, Haneke betrays his bourgeois upbringing and classical training in music and philosophy with élan. He cites Theodor Adorno, recites Bertolt Brecht, lauds Blaise Pascal, and alludes to jean-Louis Baudry. Commentators have written persuasively on how Haneke mobilizes and recuperates European high culture in his literary adaptations (Bachmann, Rosei, Roth, Kafka, jelinek) and use of music (j. S. Bach versus john Zorn).1 Haneke’s pronouncements on the Hochkultur are often downright romantic. “If one deployed music as a means of communication,” the director of a 2006 engagement of Don Giovanni at the Opéra national de Paris says, “we would be able to solve conflicts much more easily.”2 despite protests to the contrary, Haneke seems to fear and loathe technology: “I have nothing against technology nor computers . They make life much easier, even if the computer is a Trojan horse. If the systems crash, the so-called civilization is paralyzed. It could become a reason for war, destroying the other’s systems. The more technological the world, the easier it is to be destroyed.”3 Europe’s most radical director is in crucial ways its most conservative. His Austrian “glaciation trilogy” is classic Zivilisationskritik (civilization critique), portraying lives deformed by media, technology, and generational disconnect. This thinking runs through Haneke’s film theory, expressed programmatically in his essay “Violence and Media.”4 According to Haneke, violence has belonged to the motion picture since the time of its origins, and this subject matter defines the major genres, such as the horror movie, gangster pictures, war films, and adventure stories. Because of film’s special connection to reality, furthermore, the filmic representation of violence is judged by other criteria than literature or painting. Formal matters are critical. Whereas photography and painting show the result of violence, film portrays it in action. The movie’s relentless temporality, its simultaneous assault on eye and ear, and the cinema’s “larger-than-life” proportions realign structures of sympathy. The still picture encourages an identification between the spectator and the victim. The motion picture, however, connects spectator to perpetrator. Therein begins a normative critique of how film represents violence. Mainstream forms exaggerate or aestheticize violence. Otherwise, they make it ironic or seem unreal. According to Haneke, three major tactics serve to render violence acceptable: 1. disassociation. By this, Haneke means portraying violence in a setting or time far from the spectator’s normal life (for example, the Western, 155 Haneke’s Film Theory and Digital Praxis science fiction, horror). 2. Moral justification. Providing situations in which violence is the only logical choice—for instance, in war, rape-revenge, and vigilante films—excuses violence. 3. Embedding violence within...