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Haneke essentially tells two kinds of stories: chamber pieces that implode around a family triadówhat the director dubs the ìgerminating cell for all conflictsîóand more expansive medleys involving socially disparate ensembles. They are distinctly urban, and distinctly European in texture. Moreover, the traditional Romantic remedy for estrangements of urban society, the pastoral sojourn, has long ceased to be an option. Nature is governed by brute Darwinian imperatives realized in motifs of dead livestock and desiccated forests. One of his few non-urban endgames, The Time of the Wolf (03), rehearses the dog-eat-dog aftermath of an unspecified national crisis suggestive perhaps of a massive terror attack. When an ineffectual paterfamilias is gunned down by an intruder in a rustic vacation cabin, Mom and two kids scavenge the countryside until they arrive at an improvised refugee center whose social dynamics resemble a Holocaust concentration camp; A Day in the Country it is not.
As is true with brand-name auteurs on both sides of the ocean, Hanekeland is filled with signature stylistic gestures, iconography, and thematic ploys. To be sure, each film nurtures its own discrete episodes and trajectories; given how thoroughly Haneke eschews behavioral explanationsóforget Freudóthere is surprisingly little cross-textual redundancy of character. That said, an almost Hitchcockian bounty of small obsessions (think chicken dinners) lends the oeuvre a dense personal tapestry: solitary women crying; people determined to sleep in the midst of upheaval; people named Anna and Georges; secondary characters with the surname ìSchoberî (a historical figure drawn from the messy life of Hanekeís beloved Schubert); mechanized rituals such as eating or tooth-brushing; supermarkets; reality TV footage as domestic wallpaper; letters spoken in voiceover; fences that occlude entrances to buildings; classical music; darkened bedrooms; pitch-black exteriors; vomit; self-inflicted wounds; blood seeping slowly from beneath inert bodies.
By the same token, no map of Hanekeís grim territory would be complete without
mentioning its emotional ecology, predicaments replayed with slight variations,
by which individual tales unfold. Latchkey children are primed to turn feral,
or worse, given the opportunity. Chance meetings in public places fuel unforeseen
narrative detours but rarely result in illumination for their harried participants
or for us. Guy Debordís Society of the Spectacle is by now thoroughly internalized.
While speed is never a determining factor, auditory leaps from loud to softóor,
as a masochistic woman in The Piano Teacher (01) articulates Schubertís tonal
range, ìfrom a scream to a whisperîópuncture an otherwise laid-back formal syntax.
Since knowledge is always less absolute than situational, it is hard to take
sides in heated cross-cultural skirmishes around gender or raceóa stance that
resembles but ultimately rejects postmodern skepticism. Domestic security is
a mirage, like empathy or filmic subjectivity. The withholding of crucial narrative
information, including flagrant use of ellipses, becomes the formal embodiment
of a reluctant ethics framed largely through negation. According to Haneke, his
films are intended as ìpolemical statements against the [unthinking] American
cinema and its disempowerment of the spectator.î In place of what he sees as
simplistic explanations, a ìclarifying distanceî will transform the viewer from ìsimple
consumerî to active evaluator: ìThe more radically answers are denied to him,
the more likely he is to find his own.î In truth, this prescription for battling
psychic evils associated with the Hollywood systemóslow the pacing, deny subjective
identification, refuse to tie up loose endsóhas had numerous proponents; at times
Haneke sounds like an anti-humanist version of André Bazin, champion of long-take
perceptual ambiguity as practiced by Renoir, Welles, Bresson, et al.
It is no accident that Haneke refers to Bresson as his “idol,” or that
he cites Antonioni’s urban anatomies as inspiration. Kubrick’s morbid detachment
and paranoid outlook on technology spark additional comparisons (as homage, The
Piano Teacher uses the Schubert piano trio featured in Barry Lyndon). Indeed,
an abiding paradox in Haneke’s work is that its hermeticism can also foster copious
links or affinities with wider artistic practices, especially those of postwar
Germanic culture. Yes, Fassbinder’s Why Does Herr
R. Run Amok? looms as godfather
to Haneke’s early trilogy, but so do several of the Straub-Huillet literary adaptations.
There are intriguing convergences with documentary essays by Harun Farocki, in
particular his caustic 1990 rendering of mechanized learning in How to Live in
the German Federal Republic. The flat affect Haneke adopts for even the most
outrageous activities has a literary pedigree that extends from Kafka—whose novel
The Castle was filmed by the director in 1997—to Heinrich
Böll and Peter Handke. In the visual arts, Gerhard Richter’s expressionless
paintings of the Baader-Meinhof gang resonate with several films, and the treatment
of urban exteriors in Hidden and Code Unknown (00) recalls the huge architectural
photo studies of Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky.
The crux of the problem in Hidden, as it often is in the work of Haneke’s
artistic soul mates, revolves around questions of control, of power and emotional
manipulation—more precisely, who is behind the surveillance tapes and what was
their motive in making and sending them. Imagine the scenario of Rear
Windowre-presented from the perspective of wife-murderer Thorwald rather
than voyeur-sleuth L.B. Jeffries (minus the resolution, of course). Except in
this case the plaintive cry delivered by Thorwald when he enters the lair of
his eager tormentor—“What
do you want of me?”óis delivered by guilt-ridden investigator Georges to
a hapless victim, when it should be directed inward at the deceptions propping
up his fatuous sense of self. Once again, this is typical film noir turf implanted
with the fleurs du mal of contemporary crisis. We feel insecure, stressed, threatened
by elusive forces whose connection to us as individuals is obscure. Yet we can’t
quite shake rumbles of complicity, of having acceded to something for which we
will ultimately be held accountable and from which our unprecedented standard
of living cannot protect us. It is this heart of darkness that beats beneath
the icy surface of Haneke’s films. An unwelcoming site, we avoid it at our peril.
© 2005 by Paul Arthur
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