On Michael Haneke

Haneke’s Early Work for Television

191 Bert Rebhandl Haneke’s Early Work for Television Most people who are familiar with the films of Michael Haneke know that the director began his career first in the theater, then in television, before focusing his energies on feature-length, theatrically released filmmaking. While the theater productions, by their very nature, cannot be seen again, the films made for television are available for screening—but only if one is lucky enough to gain access to the archives of public broadcasting services in Germany and Austria. Only Haneke’s The Castle (Das Schloss, 1997), an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Franz Kafka, is readily available on dVd for purchase or home viewing. What follows, therefore, are analytical descriptions of and brief commentaries on this seldom seen television work. These accounts are intended to orient readers to an understanding of the consistency of Haneke’s formal and philosophical preoccupations across his work, from television to film. Und was kommt danach? (After Liverpool) Haneke was working mainly as a stage director when the opportunity arose to direct his first film for the German broadcasting station SWR. not surprisingly , he decided to adapt a play for television, After Liverpool (1971) by British playwright james Saunders. According to Saunders, “After Liverpool is not a play but a suite of pieces to be performed by one or more actors and one or more actresses. The order in which the pieces are played is not specified. Using a musical analogy, the script gives some themes, within and between which any number of variations are possible.”1 Saunders’s 192 B E R T R E B H A n d L description might just as easily describe Haneke’s early approach to filmmaking as well as the overall architecture of his entire oeuvre. By arranging “pieces” Haneke always envisions a totality of fragments. In the case of After Liverpool, this totality is the world of a couple in their thirties; the male is a writer of some sort, and the woman’s profession is unclear. They live in a bourgeois apartment, with some modern furniture and remnants of daily life: old newspapers, shelved paperbacks, a poster of jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin, féminin above their small kitchen table. Haneke used a German translation of Saunders’s play by the established writer Hilde Spiel. The complete title of the film is Und was kommt danach? (After Liverpool) (And what comes after it? [After Liverpool]). The title sequence is interesting in itself, since it opens with one of the most famous riffs of rock and roll: Keith Richards’s guitar, followed by Mick jagger’s voice in “(I Can’t Get no) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. Haneke’s sound-image design uses the quintessential popular music of the 1960s, but he deconstructs it simultaneously by using the song to accompany images of a Beatles concert, as if no true authorship, let alone authenticity , inhered in the performance of a superhit like “Satisfaction.” Then comes the first shot, the first “piece”: a man and a woman, in bed naked, obviously post coitum. “Was I good?” asks the man, starting a conversation that leads into the pitfalls of language. The woman replies with another question. She wants him to phrase his question more precisely : Was he good in comparison to other lovers of hers at certain points in her life? “It’s a simple question,” he states. Well, it is not, and neither is this other question that haunts couples: do you love me? The woman and the man go through all the motions of a couple’s daily life. Imprisoned by language, they try to communicate but produce only feedback. Obviously language is not the tool that brings people closer together; instead, it alienates . Only in the long last scene does the man open up the situation to another dimension. For the first time (and in a manner that suggests he has been suddenly inspired) he speaks impassionedly of a third person, a blind man he used to observe on the street. It would seem that the film suggests that it is possible to say something about the stranger precisely because this person remains unknown, while it is impossible to say something about ourselves precisely because we claim to know something about ourselves. Between the pieces, the film returns repetitively to “Satisfaction,” accompanied by images of either the Beatles or the Rolling Stones in performance . Inserted into each of these music clips we find a quotation...