Michael Haneke’s Alienation Effect

The Seventh Continent begins with an extended sequence of ordinary moments in the life of a family—static shots, framed unusually low, so that no heads are visible: a sedan passing through a car wash, an alarm clock ringing, breakfast being made, a child being awakened and coaxed out of bed. We recognize the world we have entered, almost instantly, as that of the conscientious, comfortable, consumerist middle class. Ten minutes go by before we see our first face: that of the father of the family, his expression at ease if very slightly blank, conversing in an office with his colleagues about everyday affairs. Nothing of any consequence has happened, yet somehow we’re already filled with existential dread. The news item that so horrified and fascinated Haneke was about a well-off Viennese family—a nine-year-old girl and her parents—who in 1987 had decided, for no apparent reason, to commit suicide, but only after destroying all of their worldly possessions: their furniture, their clothing, their photo albums, their LPs, even their mirrors and the money in their wallets. “The suicide is less important,” Haneke told me, “than the events that come before—the attack on the artifacts of one’s own life and identity: ‘I will break the things that have been breaking me.’”

Unlike many of Haneke’s later works, which often interweave multiple narrative strands, The Seventh Continent advances in lockstep, with a kind of nightmarish matter-of-factness: the gruesome end, when it finally comes, feels inevitable, even foreordained. Despite his reputation for brutality, Haneke, like Alfred Hitchcock, prefers to let the most graphic acts of violence occur just out of frame; the implications of those acts, however—both their psychic repercussions and their physical detritus—are presented to us with a white-knuckled resolve. These early works, by design, are neither decorous nor subtle. A close-up of Austrian schillings being determinedly flushed down a toilet holds for an outrageous two minutes and twenty-two seconds; a woman attempts to end her life by swallowing a handful of laboriously crushed pills, waits for them to take effect, vomits, and is forced to take the pills again. It’s difficult not to interpret The Seventh Continent as a savage indictment of the bourgeoisie, à la Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend or Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, but Haneke himself has a different explanation for its setting: “I was careful, in my first few films, to set my stories in a well-to-do milieu,” he told me. “Not for political reasons, as was argued at the time. Not at all. I chose that world because it is the one that I know best.”

Haneke was born on March 23, 1942, smack in the dirty middle of the Second World War, to a theatrical family in Munich, Germany. His father was a successful actor and dramatic director; his mother, an actor in her own right, was a daughter of the local aristocracy. The family eventually moved to Lower Austria, and Haneke attended the University of Vienna, where he studied psychology, philosophy, and—perhaps inevitably—theater. His early dream of a career as a classical pianist soon gave way to an even more intoxicating passion, one that had first hit him like a thunderbolt when he was six years old. “The first film I ever saw was Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet,” he told me. “I remember the slow darkening of the cinema, the somber raising of the curtain, the first bleak images of the sea-battered castle, and the even more somber music that accompanied the images. My grandmother, who had brought me to the screening, later told me that she had to pull me out almost immediately, because I had begun to scream in terror. From that instant, I was hooked.”

His second defining encounter with cinema came more than a dozen years later, when, as a student, he saw Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963). “All at once, a third of the way through the film,” he told me, “the hero, played by Albert Finney, stops short in the middle of a chase scene, turns to the camera, and makes some remarks to the viewer. He says nothing particularly notable, in and of itself—but that simple gesture shocks us into self-awareness.” That small loss of cinematic innocence, innocuous as it seemed at the time, would color every film Haneke went on to make. “After Tom Jones, I began to peer behind the mirror, you might say—to see the art of cinema with different eyes, and to distrust its practitioners, who purported to be serving up real life. I wanted movies that enchanted me without exploiting me.”

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance can, from a purely structural point of view, be considered as Benny’s Video turned inside out: whereas its predecessor was an exploration of the fallout of an arbitrary killing, with consequences spreading outward from a single brutal act, the third film in Haneke’s trilogy follows a number of apparently unrelated story lines and subtly, gracefully braids them together, feeding one into another like the tributaries of a river, only to plunge them over the same narrow cataract in the film’s final moments. The news citation at its start tells us exactly where we’re headed: “On 12/23/93, Maximilian B., a 19-year-old student, gunned down three people in a Viennese bank and then killed himself with a bullet to the head shortly afterwards.”

As with Benny’s Video, however, it would be a mistake to assume that the crime, in and of itself, is this film’s reason for being: it serves its director, first and foremost, as a narrative means to an end. Like the five-hundred-franc note in Robert Bresson’s L’argent, the events at the bank in 71 Fragments permit Haneke to enter the lives of otherwise completely unconnected characters, from wildly different socioeconomic backgrounds, their disparate experiences touching one another’s only at the very end. “My first two films confined themselves, for the most part, to a single social stratum,” Haneke told me. “This time, I wanted to make a vertical cut—a cross section.”

After the disciplined linearity of the preceding films, the parallel strands of 71 Fragments’ narrative feel positively kaleidoscopic: a Romanian refugee sneaking across the border into Austria; a young man stealing guns from a military armory; a couple attempting to adopt a defiant child; a college student, obsessed with games of chance, contending with mysterious inner pressures. The news media demands to be understood as a character unto itself, frequently intruding on (and further fragmenting) the action. Much as the young sociopath in Benny’s Video prefigures the ultraviolent clowns of Funny Games, 71 Fragments anticipates Code Unknown (2000), Haneke’s first film made in France, and thus—by extension—the series of triumphant works that have followed.

71 Fragments includes what may be my favorite scene in all of Haneke’s work: a single unmoving shot, held for three minutes and twenty-nine seconds, that contains, for me, his entire body of work in miniature, like a Bavarian castle carved inside a walnut. Nearly half an hour in, the film cuts—jarringly as always—from a crowded subway station to a pitch-black screen; then to a room in which a young man, poker-faced and shirtless, is practicing returns against an automatic ball machine at a Ping-Pong table. Initially, what we’re witnessing strikes us as comic: the young man’s self-seriousness, the popping of the ball machine, our juvenile associations with the sport itself. This feeling dies quickly, however. Something is wrong here. This is, in fact, the young man who will eventually run amok in the Viennese bank, though we don’t know that yet—in fact, we know next to nothing about him at all.

As the seconds, then minutes, tick sluggishly by, the boy’s repetitive motions grow more mechanical, then more anguished, and the experience of watching them becomes by turns fascinating, then hypnotic, then oppressive, then utterly unbearable, and then—for me, at least—inexplicably beautiful. The mise-en-scène, which couldn’t be simpler, achieves the illusion of reality as perfectly as I’ve ever seen done in a fictional film; then, simply by virtue of the radical choice to hold the shot past the limits of tolerance, it calls attention to its artificiality, to the manipulations inherent in the medium of cinema, even to the nature of watching itself. When I first saw the film, the relief that flooded my mind and body when it finally cut away was enormous. Yet it’s now the shot of his that I replay in my memory most often.

“I’m a realist,” Haneke remarked at one point near the end of our brief time together. “Accuracy is important to me—fidelity to life as I experience it myself, to the emotions I feel—which isn’t necessarily true for everyone. To me, this means fidelity to lived emotion: to all emotions, even those that many people go to the movies to escape. If my movies were cold, as some people insist, I imagine they’d be easier to watch.”

I thought about this as I drove back to Vienna, replaying scenes from his films in my mind as the landscape rolled by: Amour, The White Ribbon, The Piano Teacher (2001), Funny Games, The Seventh Continent. Suddenly, they seemed to me, taken as a whole—for all their austerity, all their intellectual rigor—one of contemporary cinema’s great works of humanism. It struck me that Haneke’s dogged refusal to coddle the viewer, to soften or otherwise massage reality as he understands it, may proceed not from contempt for his audience, as has often been claimed, but from love. Love can be a terrible thing, after all—a frightful, remorseless, near-unbearable thing—as can all the other traits that make us human. A half-remembered line from one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters found its way into my mind: Those we love best are those to whom we tell the truth.