Michael Haneke's Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (review)

In spite of the significant status Michael Haneke's films have achieved, the critical analysis is only beginning. After dispersed articles and the edited volume in German Michael Haneke und seine Filme: Eine Pathologie der Konsumgesellschaft (Schüren, 2008) Catherine Wheatley has produced the first monograph in English. Not offering a complete overview of the work of Haneke, Wheatley engages with a selection of films in order to pursue a central question of spectator response to the often explosive and disturbing violence in Haneke's film. She describes this as a question of "ethical reflexivity" (1) that distinguishes Haneke's work from the "modernist modes" (53) of "political reflexivity" (26), which, according to Wheatley, dominated the European New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s. Her discussion focuses on the period of work after Benny's Video (1992) during which Haneke's profile rose to international celebrity and he left Austria for France. During this period European screens were dominated by popular genre cinema—especially in Central Europe—and the Austrian director Haneke offered a type of challenging filmmaking that stood out from comedies and heritage films popular at the time.

In Wheatley's analysis, Haneke renewed an attention to the role of the active spectator in film, creating conditions in which for instance a rapid transformation from artistic images to ultra-violence is not a marketing ploy or genre convention of horror film, but an invitation to the spectators to consider their position vis-à-vis the cinematic apparatus: "How are we complicit with the apparatus? What are the moral consequences of this?" (5). To carry out this analysis she reviews the debates around apparatus theory that were so central to film theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Wheatley seeks to revise these debates, moving away from Althusserian ideology and Marxist politics to questions of personal ethics and Kantian-based morality.

In Chapter One, "The Last Moralist," she develops an analysis of ethical reflexivity through Kantian aesthetics. Chapter Two, "Negotiating Modernism: Der Siebente Kontinent, Benny's Video, 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls," considers Haneke's early Austrian feature films, comparing them to Chantal Akerman and Jean-Luc Godard and the modernist techniques of reflexivity they developed. A distinction is made between their first-generation modernism and Haneke's second generation. Chapter Three, "The Ethics of Aggression: Funny Games," continues the analysis with Haneke's major breakthrough film. Wheatley explores Haneke's turn to genre and genre conventions as a means to convey an experience of unpleasure. Chapter Four, "Emotional Engagement and Narrativity: Code inconnu, La Pianiste, Le Temps du loup," then takes up his French productions. Wheatley sees Haneke in these films as indicating an increasing form of authorial control of the affective experience of the film, but a heightened reluctance to prescribe a proper response to the stories he tells. Chapter Five, "Shame and Guilt: Caché," focuses even more deeply on the question of spectatorial affect. The conclusion, which notes the Hollywood remake of Funny Games, is followed by two useful appendices: a filmography and box-office statistics.

Wheatley's distinction between first-generation modernism of the New Wave and Haneke's second generation entirely brackets post-modernism as a term from the discussion.

The theoretical approach draws on classics of film theory, Bazin and Cavell in particular, acting as a foil to the screen theory of Metz, Wollen, and Mulvey. Deleuze, a frequent point of reference in the Haneke reception, does not appear here. The idea of a second-generation modernism or ethical reflexivity means for Wheatley that Haneke's films can establish a moral reflex in their spectators but there can be no guarantee of a particular decoding. Where apparatus theory once hoped to help the spectator decode "properly" and thereby achieve a certain political position, Haneke's cinema supplies an authorial operation that incites the spectator to a critical response—which one, however, is left open to the spectator.

Wheatley notes frequently that Haneke has a...