After watching video footage of his parents kill a small pig on their summer farmhouse, a privileged youth kills a girl, just because he wants to see what it feels like.

A fifty-year old piano teacher at a prestigious Vienna conservatory, who still sleeps in the same bed as her domineering mother, sits on the edge of a bathtub and uses a razor blade to cut her labia, just before sitting down for that routine dinner with said mother.

After a seemingly endless routine of working, buying, eating, and shopping, a family decides to destroy all their possessions and commit group suicide.

Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michael Haneke presents the social failures of middle class Europe and slices them open with a fine blade for audiences to inspect and discuss. Each film deals with how the modern Family is presently unequipped to survive the alienation caused by the growth of technology, consumption, and capitalism.

Haneke consistently uses an abrupt, off-screen violence that derives its strength from sound FX instead of traditionally confrontational visual carnage, creating a distancing, analytical aura of dissection; while watching Haneke’s films, we often feel as if we are watching someone go under the knife in a hospital room. By forcing us to endure visceral depictions without typical Hollywood methods, Haneke asks us to question Western values at large, which he believes deadens the bond between human beings.

To the accusations of his films being pornographic, Haneke posits that what is truly pornographic is not the depiction of sex or violence itself, but the commercialization of sex or violence –it is the film that makes sex and violence digestible and easy to consume that is truly offensive. Haneke instead offers cold, antiseptic truths, where sex and violence always happens off-screen, or in the dark. With Haneke, truth is to be heard, loud and clear, and we are left to our own neurosis to investigate what the film means to each of us.

When a father prefers to watch the stock market rather than talk to his son, destruction follows. When a family can no longer communicate because they are too busy wondering how to keep the summerhouse in tip-top shape, as their daughter suffers from loneliness in the room next door, destruction follows.

One plus one is two. What Haneke states is just as simple. The stylistic skill with which he stages harrowing truths to the film-going audience puts him in a rank with the most important filmmakers of our time.

Kino International has released four titles from the Austrian auteur’s oeuvre: “The Seventh Continent”, “Benny’s Video”, “71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance” and “Funny Games”, for an upcoming box set. Each DVD comes with an informative 10-15 minute interview with Haneke himself.

In addition to “The Piano Teacher”, “Code Unknown”, and “Time of the Wolf”, these seven titles encompass the current spectrum of his material. Please keep an eye out for “Cache”, his latest film, to be made available on DVD soon.

In the meantime, Indiepix.net invites you to enjoy our selection of Haneke’s stunning body of work.
- Jordan