I was working at the Film Forum in NYC when the original Funny Games was released—as in the one starring Susanne Lothar and not the shot for shot remake starring Naomi Watts. This was in 1997 and here in America we were still suffering from a quaint post-apocalyptic ethos in which the world as we know it was bound to end any moment now. We were hopeful that things as they stood couldn’t go on much longer. And then we saw Funny Games.
Funny Games is a perverse vision largely because it presents a human view of persons we at the time could only despise and envision skewered on the meat-hooks of industry. Georg and Anna are upper middle class and middle of the road, off to their summer retreat when two unexpected guests arrive at their door asking for eggs, two youths wearing white gloves who they were introduced to just a while earlier by an oddly anxious neighbor. The youths proceed to break the eggs, and work their way into the home, first through a play-acted buffoonery and then through acts of violence, sadistic games, the family strung up and forced to go along with their captors so as to keep each other alive just a little while longer.
We were those youths.
In our fantasies, we had envisioned all manner of violence upon middle America. It’s true, that this was realized only in and through what works of art we performed in our lofts and basement coffeeshops, in our livid disdain and all-around agonized posturing at the absurd endlessness of it all, but we wanted them ended. For we were convinced at that time that blame for the coming apocalypse would rest squarely on their shoulders and the obscene style of living those shoulders demanded.
This sense of our own complicity—that the two sadistic youths in Funny Games were stand-ins for the audience—was complicated by the film itself, specifically through the sense that the young yuppie intellectuals were in control of the entire world which we were viewing, through, for example, rewinding and then playing back the scene they had just been involved in themselves. As in, it wasn’t all just in our heads. They were clearly meant to be representatives of us as the viewing audience.
Like hitmen sending the recording of their dark deeds back to their employer as per their agreement, they were only putting into practice our desires, but it was more insidious than that. The fact that they were not only in control of the situation, but in control of our viewing of the situation, created a situation where the viewer chose sides. Are we the hitmen rewinding the hit, or are we prisoners in this theater, reviewing tapes of our own execution from the pit of hell?
Haneke was not born in Austria, but Munich. However, he has lived in Vienna since his college days. Beginning as a film critic, Haneke moved on to directing in 1974, but wouldn’t film his first feature film for another fifteen years. The chronology goes like this: The Seventh Continent (1989), Benny’s Video (1992), 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), The Castle (1997), Funny Games (1997), Code Unknown (2000), The Piano Teacher (2002), Time of the Wolf (2003), Cache (2005), Funny Games (the American remake, 2008), and finally The White Ribbon (2009).
“We have a saying in Austria,” Haneke said during an interview with the New York Times, “The sewage is up to our necks already—whatever you do, don’t make waves,” and this is precisely the mindset that he’s been challenging throughout his career, beginning with Der siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent).
The film, based on a news story about a family opting for collective suicide rather than continuing in the present alienated world, takes numerous deceptive turns as we expect the family—which goes through daily life in a set of rote behaviors relentlessly chronicled by Haneke’s highly disciplined camera—using close-ups and slow intercutting forcing the viewer to consider the features of banal activities—we expect the family to leave for the promised utopia of rural Australia, since a lush tourist ad for the country appears at regular intervals in the film, for example, but, even as we are expecting this, The Seventh Continent introduces altogether unanticipated questions about the nature of utopia, suggesting that the quietude of death may constitute its own kind of promised land in the mind of the suicide.
In a sense, what we are dealing with is the question of how to exist in an untenable universe. Our world is no longer viable as it stands, our existence no longer makes sense, yet we still exist. Do we act out against the perceived destructive forces of the middle class european-american lifestyle (Funny Games) or is our response rather to start the process of saving the planet one suicide at a time?
Of course, this interpretation of Haneke (that his films are about how to exist in an untenable universe) does not take into account his film The Piano Teacher, for example, in which a sexually frustrated piano teacher becomes obsessed with a charming young student, and what about his 2000 film, Code Unknown, which follows the lives of four characters after a brief altercation on a Parisian street?
Code Unknown was made first, and seems to me, to be an attempt to give a glimpse of a larger France. In some ways, it seems the logical offspring of Tout Va Bien, the film which ended Godard’s political period. It takes place in a post-political France.[1] But of course, it is a very political film.
IMDB summarizes it like this: “A young man harasses a homeless woman, another man protests, the police arrest both and the woman has to leave the country. What were their various story-lines leading up to this event?”
That’s all you need to know. France is a place where you are either French or you are not, and a nation that is conflicted between its ideals and its terror at the collapsing world order.
That having been said, both Tout Va Bien and Code Unknown are films that want to strip cinema free, to bring us back to reality as opposed to taking us to the edge of our dreams at 30 frames per second. However, Haneke’s method is simpler than Godard’s, and less politically charged. He focuses on no particular character, and shows our most mundane moments with the same sympathy as moments charged with intensity. This is something you see throughout his work, but no more glaringly than in Code Unknown.
On the whole, however, the film loses the audience specifically because it refuses to give us any kind of narrative thread, remembered only as a collection of snap-shops, which, although it may have been his intention (a string of stills both near the beginning and the end suggesting the larger world that this is only a sample of), but this humanity disembodied from the story of their lives is too clinical and estranged, which brings us to The Piano Teacher and it’s overly clinical and estranged main character.
The film was based on a novel by the same name and written by another Austrian, Elfriede Jelinek, a Nobel Prize winner who has been accused of “executing ‘hysterical’ portraits of Austrian perversity,” but is not Austria full of the hysterical and the perverse? We could unravel a long list from Wittgenstein to Egon Schiele, and from the amusing to the macabre, but regardless of Austrian perversity, her piano teacher fits nicely in Haneke’s world.
This is a simultaneously mundane and brutal film, something like a cross between Funny Games and Code Unknown. The main character, Erika Kohut, lives in an oppressive environment with a domineering mother—is abrupt with her students and is an exacting performer. Early in the film she talks of the twilight of the mind as regards to Schubert, another Austrian; that moment when you know you are losing your mind, and you are determined to hold on just a little while longer. The film itself exists as a document to this process.
It starts with little things. Kohut on the edge of her bathtub cutting herself between the legs with a straight razor. Kohut slipping into a booth at a porn shop and sniffing a crumpled kleenex while she watches a woman performing fellatio. But escalates when an angelic young man becomes enamored of her, and is accepted by the conservatory to study with her.
His expressions of affection are ignored with what seems an arrogance, but once Kohut opens herself up to him, her semblance of disdain rapidly deteriorates into a self-willed subjugation. Her fantasies only disgust him, and his disgust only propels her further into neurotic obscenity. He claims to love her, but loves only the face she has presented to the world her entire adult life, and not her secret world, which is sick and turns him into the monster she has been harboring in her sexual fantasies, a creature that will ultimately undermine her sanity.
In both of these last two films, Haneke is turning a sympathetic eye on the ignored and unloved. Rather than venting his rage at the dilemma of the bourgeois, and nihilist youth as he did with Funny Games, he is attempting to bring into the light the forgotten, politically and emotionally, which brings us to his most recent film, The White Ribbon, in which it is precisely the forgotten who are exacting their revenge, expressing their parents’ secret desires like pre-adolescent sentinels of the unconscious.
In White Ribbon, the most obscene and disturbing acts happen offscreen. In some cases, they’re acts of brutality that the entire village are desperate to solve, or it could be a father caning his children behind a closed door at the end of a hallway, or a jerking motion abruptly stopped that we realize was a half-hearted attempt at sex, or a small child opening the door to his father’s office just after some abuse has occurred. It is an eerie film, full of misguided goodness and jolly perversity, all as witnessed through the narrator’s eyes. Although, he points out that much of what he has to say is purely conjecture, and cannot be proven, the entire film is in essence within his mind, is his view of what happened behind the closed doors of the town where he worked as a schoolteacher in the summer of 1913.
What we have with Haneke is the dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots, between real experience and mediated experience, between the ostracized other and the coddled self, between pampered upper class and illegal immigrant, suicide as homicide, homicide as suicide, the underlying dark edges to our contemporary post-industrial utopia, and the accompanying dark edges of our everyday polite intentions.
What makes Haneke so fascinating is that he is unleashing the violence that normally exists only as a fantastical violence, the violence we do to our neighbors, our hidden secret animosities, showing us the human faces of those who have to suffer through these atrocities, whether the persons suffering are everyday Austrians or Americans (as in Funny Games) or whether it is the good-natured narrator himself who comes into question, the one who sees violence and perversion behind every shut door. “Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable,” Haneke once said to Kinoeye (Vol 4, Issue 1, 8 Mar 2004 ), “Propaganda is far more pornographic than a home video of two people fucking.”
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[1] Meaning France at the turn of the millennium, a time when the world was less political. It has obviously become more political since.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
