DRAGON: Michael Haneke

Showing posts with label Michael Haneke. Show all posts

Sunday, August 4, 2019

Michael Haneke / The Piano Teacher

Michael Haneke

Isabelle Huppert

Annie Girardot

THE PIANO TEACHER

2001

Michael Haneke / The Art of Screeenwriting

Michael Haneke

The Art of Screenwriting

No. 5

Interviewed by Luisa Zielinski

Winter 2014
The Paris Review No. 211

Michael Haneke was born in 1942 to an Austrian mother and a German father. He spent his adolescence in Wiener Neustadt in the care of his aunt and grandmother before leaving for Vienna to study psychology, philosophy, and drama. It would be some years before he made his first feature film. Der siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent) (1989) tells the story of a young, well-to-do family and their dreams of immigrating to Australia. Predictably—in retrospect, for viewers familiar with Haneke’s work—that never happens. They flush their money down the toilet. They kill the goldfish and, next, themselves.

Since then, Haneke has maintained impressive consistency both in his choice of topics and in the stark, unflinching visual language of his films. This has earned him critics and admirers of equal ferocity. He is, depending on whom you ask, the minister of fear, a master of horrors, Europe’s greatest auteur, or simply a sadist. Although his films are considered violent, nearly all the physical violence occurs offscreen. His camera omits the brains-on-the-windshield clichés and torture porn of Hollywood. It lights, instead, on the everyday cruelties to which audiences are not yet numb: the petty acts of bullying, the failure to listen, the delusions of class and privilege.

Haneke’s early films, such as Benny’s Video (1992) and 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) (1994), largely escaped the attention of international audiences. Then, in 2001, La Pianiste, his adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes, affording Haneke worldwide exposure. The next years saw the release of Caché (2005) and the American remake of Funny Games (2007), Haneke’s most severely cynical work, whose Austrian precursor had been released in 1997. For both Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon) (2009) and Amour (2012), he received the Palme d’Or at Cannes; the latter also won him the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In addition to his work in cinema, Haneke occasionally directs opera and teaches at the Filmakademie Wien.

Most of this interview was conducted in Haneke’s vast study in the Vienna apartment he shares with his wife, Susi, an antiques dealer. Over
the next ten months, he patiently fielded my follow-up questions: curtly via e-mail, exuberantly on the phone. In person, Haneke was an impeccable—if occasionally strict—host. He floated vague promises of wine on the first night, only to deny me a glass: “We must work, Frau Zielinski!” On the second night, however, I arrived to a bottle of Mayer am Pfarrplatz Wiener Gemischter Satz. We finished it.

Wine or no, Haneke is a spirited conversationalist who carefully weighs his bons mots and can send himself into fits of giggles. He speaks in the drawl of the Viennese haute bourgeoisie, which to Prussian ears sounds opulent and somewhat impenetrable—necessitating, as Haneke quipped, a double translation of this interview, from Austrian into German into English.

—Luisa Zielinski

INTERVIEWER

When you were young—say, a teenager—did you ever imagine that you would become a filmmaker, or was your focus on other arts?

HANEKE

Like everyone in the throes of puberty, I started writing poems. But originally, I wanted to drop out of school to train as an actor. I’m from a family of actors—my mother was an actress and my father was an actor and director. One day I even decided to skip school and flee Wiener Neustadt for Vienna to audition at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. Everybody there knew my mother, and I considered myself amazingly gifted—it never occurred to me that they wouldn’t take me. But that’s what happened. I was livid. In the end, I did have to get my high school diploma. Then, as a student, I became more serious about writing. I also worked for radio and various magazines as a critic—I ended up reviewing literature and films although I didn’t actually know all that much.

Hidden / No 9 best crime film of all time

Hidden: No 9 best crime film of all time

Michael Haneke, 2005

Killian Fox
Sunday 17 October 2010 11.47 BST

idely regarded as one of the finest films of the last decade, as well as Haneke's masterpiece, Hidden opens with a long, static shot of a house on a quiet Paris street. Credits roll. Very little happens. A closer shot shows a couple leaving the house, and the camera pans after the man. We hear a terse interchange. On screen, the film fast-forwards and suddenly – unnervingly – we realise we have been watching a piece of surveillance on video. The tape has turned up, without explanation, at the house of the couple we saw on screen, and they are watching it with us. They are Georges (Daniel Auteuil), a well-known TV intellectual, and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), a book publisher. The video is immediately interpreted as a threat. More tapes arrive, along with crayon drawings depicting scenes of bloody violence. The effect of these intrusions is singularly disturbing, and Hidden unfolds with the fearful air of a thriller, but it avoids most of the conventions of the genre. Dramatic music is absent. The one truly shocking moment of violence arrives without a suspenseful build-up, and the victim is who we least expect it to be.

One tape leads Georges to the run-down apartment of an Algerian man named Majid, who Georges knew as a child. It transpires that Georges bears responsibility for how this man's life has turned out, and his guilt points to the more widespread malaise in French society concerning the Algerian war. The film interrogates western attitudes towards the Muslim world, exposing how fear is also based on guilt and repressed memories. The political subtext never detracts from the film's chilling dramatic effect and the air of intrigue, which intensifies in the very final scene.

THE GUARDIAN