“Caché“, like all of my films, is about communication, about the difficulties of communication. (Michael Haneke)
The unsettling is Michael Haneke’s terrain. His protagonists are neglected children, bored teenagers, couples at a loss for words, or families weary of life. All of them feel estranged in their own skin and dissociated from their environment. They always appear a little abashed and out of countenance. Often Haneke takes these alienated characters to the edge of the bearable. His camera observes their stubborn inward-lookingness as calmly as the moment when they cannot sustain their own numbness anymore and fly off the handle.
The films are so construed as to irritate the audience. Only an irritation has any effect on me, says Haneke. If a film upsets and irritates me at all, I have gained something from that. I believe that this is the purpose of any kind of artistic activity, not to confirm our prejudices and certainties, but to promote our questioning.
Born in Munich in 1942, the Austrian director grew up in Wiener Neustadt. His parents were actors. He studied philosophy, psychology and theater, worked at a TV editorial office and as a dramatic advisor for television plays, and then drew closer to cinema in his work as a screenwriter and theatrical director.
Haneke is often asked if and how his childhood and teenage experiences influence his cinematic work. He gives no reply to such questions. Only once he told an interviewer that he stood by and watched as a child how a chicken’s head was chopped off, and how the beheaded chicken then jerked about. Haneke has demonstrated repeatedly that impressions such as these fascinate and inspire him. Comparable moments appear in altered forms in his films. Images like that of the amputated chicken are transformed and applied to Haneke’s characters. He exposes the inaptitude or injury of a protagonist, and then records in minute detail how he or she copes with it. However, Haneke seldom resorts to stark and unambiguous depictions. Instead, he often just hints at a point, revealing the suppressed intentions of his characters, and inserting ellipses in the narration exactly at the onset of escalation. He encourages his audience to fill in what has been left out and left unsaid with their own conceptions.
Michael Haneke only began making films at age 31. In 1973 the Südwestfunk, where he had been working as a dramatic advisor since 1967, gave him the coveted chance to shoot his first film for television, “...und was kommt danach?” (“After Liverpool") Other made-for-television movies followed: “Drei Wege zum See” (“Three Paths to the Lake”; 1976), “Lemminge” (“Lemmings”; 1979), “Variation” (1983), “Wer war Edgar Allan?” (“Who Was Edgar Allan?”; 1984), “Fraulein – ein deutsches Melodram” (“Fraulein – a German Melodrama”; 1986), “Nachruf für einen Mörder” (“Obituary for a Murderer”; 1994) and the Kafka adaption “Das Schloss” (“The Castle”; 1997).
Haneke’s first feature film for cinematic release, “Der Siebente Kontinent” (“The Seventh Continent”), was well received at its 1989 premiere in Cannes “Quinzaine des Réalisateurs” section. “Der Siebente Kontinent” is the first film in Haneke’s “Trilogie der emotionalen Vereisung”, or “trilogy of an icing up of emotions”, preceding “Benny’s Video” and “71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls” (“71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance”). All three films deal with physical and emotional violence. Haneke’s oft-cited dictum on the icing up of emotions refers to people’s tendency to shut themselves off from their environment due to the impermeability and uncontrollability of the world, and to take flight into fear. In many of his films, Haneke has clearly carved out how this freezes up social contacts. There is no threat of this glacier thawing, Haneke believes.
Since the trilogy, Haneke has regularly made films for cinema. In 1997, he directed “Funny Games”. “Code Inconnu”, with Juliette Binoche in the lead role, was released in 2000. Haneke’s all-out international breakthrough came with “La Pianiste” (“The Piano Player”), based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek. Besides other awards, “La Pianiste” earned Haneke the “Grand Prize of the Jury” in Cannes in 2001, and also the “Best Actress” award for Isabelle Huppert and “Best Actor” for Benoît Magimel as the piano student. The film’s success gave Haneke the means to finance and realize his long planned film “Le Temps du Loup” (“The Time of the Wolf”) in 2002. Largely set at night and elaborately lighted, this hardly accessible film is, however, considered to be Haneke’s darkest work to date, and was met with little appreciation from the audience. Nonetheless, this film provides a fine display of the sensory stimuli a director can create using 35 mm film. Its artistically crafted images and mysterious plot lend “Le Temps du Loup” an intensity only well-made films can impart.
“Caché”, which is set in Paris, earned Haneke both the award for “Best Direction” at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005 and the European Film Award.
Haneke, who once intended to become a concert pianist, has staged his first opera, a production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”, to great acclaim at the Paris Opera in January, 2006.
Haneke’s obsessively minute observation of his characters and his inclination to thoroughly probe sentiments should not be equated to coldness. Anyone striving to depict the abysses between human beings and their miserably failing attempts to communicate as accurately as Haneke does, must dare advance deeply into the emotional world and fates of his characters, and sustain the rising heat as he draws closer.
The lead actress of two of Haneke’s films explains the secret of his directorial work. He brings the human weaknesses to light. And he does his work with great precision, with a sharp, analytical mind. Michael is rooted in theater, in a tradition drawing on the power of dramaturgy. He has a holistic perspective that carries his film. The precision in Michael’s work reminds me of that of a musician, says Juliette Binoche. In “Code Inconnu” and in “Caché”, she plays two characters named Anne, as are most women in Haneke’s films unless they are called Anna.
As an experienced dramatic advisor and writer for theater and television, Haneke has mastered the tools of narration. He also never loses track of the interlocking of scenes and their relevance and relation to a work as a whole. It is only these abilities which allow him to construe plots that deviate from and surpass conventions. Haneke leaves blank spots, lets people do inexplicable and inconceivable things, leaves stories open-ended, and blends so-called reality with the fiction of media. He unsettles us.