1 The first Michael Haneke film I saw was Benny's Video, the story of a boy who murders a girl without any apparent motive. When asked why he committed the murder, the boy replies, "I don't know... I wanted to know what it feels like... probably." A friend of mine commented that this was unrealistic, but I was impressed by Benny's Video because it seemed to manifest many symptoms of our social life. A few weeks later, we watched Benny's Video again, this time in the company of prison psychologists, because my friend had been commissioned to contribute to a film about the juvenile detention centre in Plötzensee (Berlin). Afterwards, some of the detainees said that this was the first film they had seen which dealt with the problems they faced, whilst others maintained that such subjects should not be dealt with in films, because the cinema is a place where people should be able to relax. Everyone agreed, however, that the film deals with real problems, because crimes without apparent motive are on the increase.

2 Michael Haneke was born on 23 March 1942 in Munich. His mother was an actress, his father was a director. His childhood and youth were spent in a working class suburb of Vienna. His first attempts at pursuing an artistic career as an actor and as a concert pianist failed, so he studied psychology and philosophy at the university in Vienna. In 1973, Haneke directed his first film for television, After Liverpool. Over the next fifteen years, he directed eight films for television and countless theatre productions, from Schiller to Bruckner, from Enquist to Strindberg. In 1989, his first cinema film, The Seventh Continent was released. One of its main themes - the death of emotions, resulting in the increase of violence - had already been present in his 1979 television film, Lemmings, a portrait of the generation to which Haneke himself belongs, and who was born during the Second World War. The Seventh Continent was the first film in Haneke's Trilogy about the Glaciation of Feelings, followed by Benny's Video, in 1993, and 71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance, in 1994. Funny Games, which premiered in Cannes in 1997, was, for the foreseeable future, the last of his films to deal with the subject of violence at the end of the 20th century.

3 The fragmentary has a central role to play in Haneke's aesthetic concept, a fact which he attributes to Kafka. In 1996, Haneke filmed an intelligent, detailed and expressive adaptation of Kafka's novel The Castle. According to Haneke, since Kafka, fragmentary narrative has been one of the basic conditions for an approach to reality. Only the potentially most modern art form - film - generally refuses to take this into account, for commercial reasons. As is the case with Kafka's central character K., the fragmentary narrative must do without 'realistic' figures and classically structured stories. On this subject, Haneke has said, "I can lead a character in a story in such a way that the sum of his behaviour does not give a sufficient explanation for his decisions. The audience will have to find one." His films can, therefore, be seen several times over, but it is difficult to 'switch off' whilst watching them. The incommensurable is not commercial...

Full article published in Filmwaves - Issue 6, Winter 1999. Subscribe now!