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The world that is known: an interview with Michael Haneke.

Article Excerpt
Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has achieved major international prominence with The Piano Teacher, which won a Grand Prize and two best acting awards at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, became both a bete noire and cause celebre for critics, and remained in urban art cinemas through much of 2002. With this film, Haneke fulfilled considerably the expectations produced by all of his early work--which has remained predictably marginal to current film culture--by provoking the viewer with an intelligence of extraordinary seriousness and significance. That many journalistic reviewers focused solely on The Piano Teacher's graphic portrayal of masochism and other sexual acts, ignoring its complex analysis of the family and the politics of repression, is an emblem of the current media's reaction and intellectual bankruptcy. Fortunately, the Cannes awards and a few perceptive critical remarks sustained the film long enough for many to take notice.

With extraordinary performances by Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel (both of whom took best acting honors at Cannes), The Piano Teacher, based on a renowned novel by Elfriede Jelinek, achieves unusual power in its meditation on the interconnections of art and the forces of repression. A middle-aged Viennese pianist and piano instructor (Huppert) lives with her hopelessly possessive mother, able to connect with the sexual/social world only through voyeurism and masochism. Her encounter with a young prodigy (Magimel) of unusual artistic sensibility seem to offer the prospect of romance, until the very notion is exploded as the film explores the assumptions of heterosexual relations and the culture with which it is associated. The questions raised by the film seem very much part of the legacy of artistic modernism and, as handled by Haneke, demonstrate their power to provoke in the postmodern moment. Erika Kohut, Huppert's character rendered by the actor with devastating authority, manages to suggest both the precarious mental health of Western civilization at the end of the millennium and the hopeless state of women in a still-unrealized struggle for sexual liberation at the end of the twentieth century.

Born in 1942, Haneke entered filmmaking rather late in his career, after distinguished work in Austrian theater complemented by seriously engaged, ongoing study of philosophy and psychology. Haneke has established a position as one of the cinema's important provocateurs, a concept lost in an era where cultural/political subversion is often seen as passe, or conceived with jaundiced, antihumanist cynicism. His first feature, The Seventh Continent (1989), is a staggering work based on a news story about a family opting for collective suicide rather than continuing in the present alienated world. Unable to accept the notion that the family took their own lives (could the terrors of daily life override the life instinct2), relatives insisted that authorities pursue the case as a murder, despite all the evidence militating against such a conclusion. The film 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 di sciplined camera (using close-ups and slow intercutting forcing the viewer to consider the features of banal activities), to leave for the promised utopia of rural Australia, since a lush tourist ad for the country appears at regular intervals in the film. The film introduces altogether unanticipated questions about the nature of utopia, suggesting that the quietude of death may constitute a satisfactory promised land in the mind of the suicide. With its many silences, its interest in the alienating features of contemporary urban life, its remarkable sense of architecture as signifier of entrapment, The Seventh Continent introduced Haneke's kinship with fore bears such as Antonioni.

With each film--thus far The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video (1992), 71 Fragments of a Chronology of a Chance (1994), Funny Games (1997), The Casde (1997), Code Unknown (2000), and The Piano Teacher (2001; Haneke's title is La Pianiste)--Haneke affirms his presence as one of the key modernist directors at a time when modernist ambitions seem defunct. 71 Fragments, Benny's Video and Funny Games are among the most unsettling of the cinema's many...

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