Press: Work provides an important help for the shaping of social order. Stable work means a predictable rhythm of life, and it may also mean a cycle of repetition. Does total known and controllable allow homogeneity to erode everything, leaving possibility nowhere? This may be one of the triggers for the nightmare of middle-class family life, and the singularity of this nightmare is a malfunction, a fork, a desire to implode and obliterate. In the "Working" season, we enjoyed together "The Seventh Continent", one of Michael Haneke's representative works "Glacier Trilogy". For this reason, we selected and translated this long essay by filmmaker Max Milan Le Cain. This article provides a detailed review of eight of Haneke's best works. If you want to start getting to know this director with a stern and distinctive style, this article is enough.
Doing the Right Thing: The Films of Michael Haneke
Do the Right Thing: the Films of Michael Haneke
Author: Maximilian Le Cain
Translation | Edited by Yi Fei & shun | Wang Zhuxin & shun Thanks to the author, Max Millan Le Cain, for the authorization and support of this translation Original link: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/michael-haneke/haneke/this With 10,393 words, 20 minutes to read, The Pia no Teacher (2001) marked a turnaround for Austrian director Michael Haneke. This powerful work of chamber drama is second to none for its virtuoso performances, and it is also a psychological study that brutally but sympathetically sheds light on the catastrophic process of intensely repressed emotional colic whose realization rests on - Sublime, and the transition from the realm of unbearable fantasy to the battle arena of human relationships. Previously, Haneke's personal drama had often served as a searing, floating point of view, projected into a broad social downturn marked by alienation and moral disorientation. "The Piano Teacher" heroine Erica (Isabel Huppert) is in many ways the opposite of Haneke's classic character, or at least her story arrives from the opposite of the director's usual point of view. No doubt she was alienated, but her troubles did not come from wandering in the de-individual nothingness of this modern urban environment, but from being imprisoned in a world of her own creation and dominated by her neurotic sensitivities . Other characters created by Haneke, notably The Seventh Continent ( 1989) and Benny's Video (1992)The families in the family are all trying to retreat or escape reality in their own way, but the external world has always existed as a perceptible emptiness, an inner and unfathomable other, in its indifference Hostile, as deadly as outer space in a sci-fi thriller. This emptiness is absent for the first time in "The Piano Teacher"; Erica's mastery over her environment, and the extent to which it is shaken and intruded by an infatuated student much younger than her, constitutes the the entire more conservative closed world of the film. For the first time, emotional intensity in relationships is able to trump more detached analytical questions about people's disconnection from their everyday reality. This shift in emphasis clearly marks the apparent end of an attractive coherent space and thematic development of the film that can be traced back to every film Haneke has released here—that is, except for the one I His adaptation of Kafka's Castle (Das Sch loß, 1997)Besides, all his theatrical features. From the outset, The Piano Teacher was clearly designed and staged to accentuate its core human emotional drama. "The Seventh Continent," Haneke's first feature film after a long television career, opens up the mysterious allegory of desolation from an opposite perspective, that of objects. This film could be called a war movie, a chronicle of occupation, of the human world being invaded and ravaged by the objects it created—household objects, cars, cash registers, and everything in contemporary consumerist culture. what people want. In the first few minutes of the film, the audience barely sees the face of this main family member: they are the hands that carry objects, or the feet that move on the dry surface of what is theoretically "home." An impressive example of Haneke's harsh and alienating imagery is a breakfast scene where the camera is fixed on a cereal bowl being eaten as the family chats and eats. This paranoid composition is not a casual exercise in presenting objectivity. Instead, it recreates the perspective of the "enemy"—the object of consumerist middle-class life. So there has always been a mysterious distance between the actors and the fragmented film form: the "thing-consciousness" of Haneke's films cannot understand the motives behind the characters, or resonate with their emotions. Human contact is not the human interaction symbolized by the "face", but the contact between people and objects, and the contact between human hands and surfaces. The communicative incompetence that plagues families appears to be the result of an attempt to impose compliance on the mechanically rigid logic of household objects, reducing "people" to their social functions—mother, father, husband, wife, daughter—will be Somehow stifles the feeling of potentially intervening in the expected pattern of behavior required in each situation.
In the first of three clearly marked chapters in the film, there are two incidents that adversely affect the power of the item: one is the young daughter pretending to be blind, and the other is a dinner scene in which a recently bereaved relative is killed Inextricable grief knocked down. The school had no sympathy for her daughter's faking blindness; her inexplicable rebellious will to become crippled was unacceptable. Yet this incomprehensible plea for help, perhaps inadvertently extreme, is as uncomfortable as its arrogance. The shift in the camera gaze, the claustrophobic avoidance of the face, and thus the avoidance of empathy, are typical of the world around this little girl, a world in which one cannot see themselves or others, reduced to only a series of objects and hands. contact the world. The first close-up of a character in the film is an eye framed in an optometrist's testing instrument, whose gaze is captured and dominated by the machine's instructions.
And a truly loving family also has a vision to touch each other. It is as if the cold gloom of this post-human society somehow mysteriously freezes the form of emotion, rendering them powerless against the larger context of the inner "thing-dominant". According to Antonioni, when he made Red DesertWhen machines worked perfectly, the human mind couldn't keep up with the world opened up by technology, and this was seen as a crisis. By the time of The Seventh Continent, Haneke seems to be telling us that this crisis has become a social order because man's material creation has rightfully controlled his space. Emotional and mental space go the same way as physical space. This dinner scene is a great example of Haneke's formidable skill in constructing unforgettable scenes of emotional pain and violence. Relatives feel sorry for not being able to contain his grief, which makes him out of tune with the false euphoria around him, and the increasingly festering, and possibly intentionally neglected, slump that is eroding their own existence is brought to the fore. Make other family members feel uncomfortable. When the family finally rebels, a startling apocalyptic implosion ensues, as inexplicable as the anxiety that causes it, a tenderly nihilistic answer is born from an optimistic turn in the film: There is an increase in self-evident understanding and communication, which is no longer trapped in the logic of things by avoiding inherently functionalist definitions. Silent coherence escapes the "matter-consciousness" radar, and it is through this means that Haneke meticulously places us in the situation of "incomprehensible problems", calling on the viewer to use his own sensitivity to To understand the perceptions experienced by the underlying protagonists, and thereby transcend the perspective of the above situation - that is, to reaffirm our humanity. In this way, rather than getting to know the family idly and passively, we are called to experience their broadening of our own consciousness. No matter how bleak Haneke's films may seem at first, he rarely resorts to fatalistic immersion - most of his films suggest a way to reverse the negative state of the things they portray, which is often difficult And it is difficult and deep, and it is not obvious from the surface narrative. These videos don't just shed light on the problem, they focus on subtly attacking the problem, diagnosing it and healing at the same time. Their originality and urgency is that the "healing" is about the intelligence of the viewer, not the situation of the characters in the film. The family acted by completely isolating themselves from the outside world, systematically destroying their belongings, and then committing suicide. completely purify themselves from matter. Yet there is no catharsis in this self-sacrifice. Haneke is not proposing that by destroying their bodies, they can release repressed spirits or affirm their long-neglected individual identities. All of this is too late - and even if it weren't, death probably wouldn't be the ideal solution. the deconstruction of their material identities and Each accompanying preconceived notion is a desperate, resounding affirmation of the "dehumanized" state of being, which Haneke equates to mean middle-class consumerism. The unspeakable and the apparent incomprehension are the last refuge of the human spirit.
If "The Seventh Continent" proposes a "matter-consciousness" with which the characters initially join forces but eventually rebel, "Benny's Video" explores the same theme and adds a perfect metaphor for "matter-consciousness": The eye of the camcorder, it enables people to experience and embody "human-consciousness" and "object-consciousness" at the same time. The constant claustrophobic and "object-dominant" spatiality of earlier films is replaced by a highly complex process of spatial alienation and ultimate visualization that powerfully expresses the underlying middle-class normality. A disturbing depth of denial beneath that smooth, metallic surface. The film's focus remains on middle-class families. Teen Benny impulsively murders the girl he brought home and videotapes the killing. His father destroyed the body and let him and his mother go on vacation. After Benny came home, life continued as usual until he told the police what they had done.
When Benny's father asked him why he killed the girl, he replied that he wanted to feel what it was like to kill. Benny is not a demon; instead, he has always been empathetic. His crimes are a product of his background, and while the environment has given him the privilege of material wealth, it has failed to give him the tools for emotional empathy. His bewildered departure is manifested in his fascination with the camera. His encounters with girls carry an emotional curiosity that makes one expect some sort of sexual encounter. When he shot her impulsively, the girl's pain, screams, expressions of extreme emotion were beyond Benny's handling, leading him to take her life. His repeated shots were just to shut her up. The entire murder is a complete one-shot, shown on the TV with Benny's camera plugged in. This indirect presentation of key events in the film can be said to steal Benny's behavior. It objectified Benny's actions, denying the young man the opportunity to develop a full emotional response to his actions, even the moment it happened. This is the beginning of a subtle disintegration of reality, which suddenly loses any anchoring at its ethical core and begins to float in the shadows of its own ghostly fictitiousness, like the space seen through Benny's video. This imposed objectivity continues in his father's calm and pragmatic approach to the crisis - his decision to destroy the body and hide the incident. Not only did Benny go unpunished, this denial became central to his and his mother's existence. After the murder, in the tirade of the father calmly weighing the situation, the mother could not control the hysterical laughter, and was scolded by the father. Later, she takes Benny on vacation to Egypt to forget about his crimes, when she collapses suddenly as she and her son lie in a hotel bed. Benny is disturbed by his mother's loss of control. As is common in Haneke's films, the character's emotions are not articulated to the audience, but it is likely that the character's inherent dilemma involves matching actions to emotions.
Benny's parents appear to be acting out of love, out of a parent's instinct to protect their child. This love, however, is reduced to the "function of love" - the denial of evil at its core, the denial of any process of coping with or overcoming the trauma of evil, except for the most superficial communication, All possibilities for communication are stifled. A love that denies human compassion; love itself becomes part of the materialist model. Fassbender would say that this is true love colder than death. The mother's outburst is perhaps the only expression of true love in the film, with normal panic in shocking situations, and the outbursts that govern the character's behavior - aside from Benny's, of course - are harsh Rationalism runs counter to that. In this respect, it echoes the murder, the spectacle of confronting Benny with the same, perhaps unbearable, uncontrollable pain of a woman, between him and the nature of his already disconnected emotion. The only clue. Visually, "Benny's Video" can be classified as three different images. The first is Haneke's 35mm rendering of objectively alienated spaces, Benny's apartment, his city wanderings, and parts of his vacation. These can be seen as tangible representations of his opulent and icy reality. Second is Benny's warm, mysterious, and sometimes astonishingly beautiful hand-held footage, which plays a big part in the vacation plot. The third, which is not often seen in the film, is the image of the urban night scene in the first half of the film, clearly not related to the objective perspective of Benny's existence or his subjective lens. Instead, these disturbing images of independent existence—like the negative versions of the contemplative tone shots interspersed in Ozu’s films—interfere with the narrative to inspire an outside world of terrifying and objective, inhuman emptiness , an indifferent, unfathomable universe, powerless to provide answers to current questions.
In the first half of the film, the use of photography and video is not much, mostly used to materialize the murder process, showing the incompatibility between its emotional urgency and the surrounding order, allowing the environment to digest and absorb the incident. However, this is the image shown on the TV monitor, not the shot inserted directly into the film. Visually, the icy coldness of the first half contrasts with the warm-toned holiday scene. In the scene of the escape from the murder scene, Benny is first embraced by the visual beauty he captures on videotape. To further accentuate this unexpected atmosphere with a sublime inflection, the images are often accompanied by chorus music, which the film later reveals is a chorus that Benny has joined. The inauthentic atmosphere in this part of the film initially appears to be merely to enhance the contrast between Austria and Egypt, or to highlight Egypt from the tourist's perspective. But as Haneke spends more and more of these scenes, a full-blown reality crisis is clearly underway. If these holiday images are imbued with the dreamy alienation of far-flung lands in memory, the dominance of videotape images in domestic scenes after Benny's return to Austria suggests that in escaping dark secrets, they put their entire existence behind All are dedicated to an ethereal evanescence, like visiting an unfamiliar environment. In short, their life has become a vacation outside of reality. Benny's decision to report his family to the police can be seen as an attempt to rescue reality, to escape the golden twilight of his Egyptian reverie and face the oppressive gloom of reality. In other words, he reintroduces the weight of the moral center into their lives, which are floating from the appearance of pure materialism to the shadow of illusion.
The final shot of the film shows that Benny's redemption of the family is about to give way to a fourth imaging system that may be more sinister than all that came before. When Benny's parents were brought into the police station to meet him, presumably coming out of his cell, Haneke cut to the surveillance camera view of impersonal images to record the meeting. In just one clip, the characters go from being a shadow carrier of ethical movements and fulfillment choices to a representation of their criminal facts. This fact finally put them in jail, thanks to the cold judgment of the camera that finally made them unable to escape the guilt. The sight of the camera denied the possibility of varying degrees of guilt and blame. The black and white of this image is in every sense. in this way. With a visual contrast strategy faithful to the sensitivities of the characters, the immediate brutality of the surveillance images is chilling after an hour and a half of moral inquiry and speculation. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) also deals with a system of images that has become an integral part of society, this time directed to television news coverage Instead of home video. This masterpiece is undoubtedly the most intelligent and powerful work of television research to date. It does not confront the television industry head-on, as Lumet's Network , 1976; instead, it deconstructs the process by which people move from their own reality to media reality. In this sense, it can be seen as an extension and a comprehensive exploration of the perceptual transformation of the ending scene of "Benny's Video". As Haneke always does, he doesn't preach or explain the message he wants to convey. Instead, he puts the message into practice through the use of formal means, with a very rare, uncommonly sentimental trust that the audience will confront his disturbing material, trusting that they will engage in intellectual contemplation .
For the first time, Haneke transcended the boundaries of a single family, establishing contrasts between a series of simultaneous stories that converged into the same tragedy and sparked the same news coverage. As the title implies, "fragmentation" is the key means to construct a quick portrait of contemporary life. Films are broken up into many precise, isolated scenes, often with just a single shot. These ultimately intersecting plots represent distinct layers of modern urban living, each with its own anxieties and ethical issues to contend with, from illegal immigrant boys, to worried security guards, to middle-class people trying to adopt a child. Class couples, to gun-toting students at the confluence that sparked the ultimate crisis. "71 Fragments" is displayed in front of our eyes one by one like a mosaic spliced together, and its inner logic remains mysterious until the final moment of completion of the picture. Society, Haneke argues, is fragmented, and each fragment cuts off the qualities it contains so that they cannot communicate with each other. Even attempts to bridge the gap—such as the couple who decided to adopt the immigrant boy who was on the street and wandering alone, but not the mentally unstable little girl—are motivated by personal motivation, only to be involved in it. can be understood by individuals or groups of people. Sometimes it can inadvertently have potentially damaging consequences, such as rejection of that girl. Interactions between the little girl, the couple, and the boy often take place on the basis of persistent and intertwined purpose, and each character can't really understand the emotional reasons behind each other's actions—for example, a seemingly social Guilt, or the little girl's apparent inability to communicate, triggered the couple's choice to accept the boy, but lurking beneath the surface, perhaps, was their need for a soothing home environment. Their needs may be more than boys' needs. This raises a pessimism about the possibility of any wider communication, and is an extension of Haneke's earlier work on "incommunicability". This "non-communicability" spans the entire social spectrum, not just the microcosm of the family. The story of the security guard is clear once again: in a family, members are powerless to find a suitable enough way to express their love for each other. Perhaps the most harrowing and powerful scene in Haneke's film is the detail of the security guard's dinner with his wife, shot in single-lens medium format, punctuated by anguished silence. Coyly, almost painfully, he poured out his love to her. She first asked him if he was drunk, then she wondered suspiciously what he was trying to do. She responded with such a reaction to his rare attempt at intimacy Yes, causing him to be extremely injured. He slaps her, then backs away hopelessly. Only now did she understand. So his wife reached out and stroked him pitifully. The scene is so movingly portrayed of the true feelings of the desperate search for expression that it stands as an excellent short film in its own right.
In a specific city setting, multiple narratives advance in parallel and sometimes intersect. This structure is hardly original - Kieslowski and Wong Kar-wai were both in this field in the films of the 1990s. There have been excellent and unique works. These directors, however, construct poetically energetic states of subjectivity around their characters who are often looking for some kind of communication, some form of spiritual touch or fulfillment. But Haneke's characters often seem to be besieged by reality. They are not searching for the city, they are fighting against it. Visually, Du Kefeng's shots in Wong Kar-wai's films are sentimental and free-flowing, and Haneke's harsh and narrow images in "71 Pieces" are objective and alienating. The rigid visual structure of Haneke's films places all of his characters on the same plane; although they are trapped within the picture in fragments of their own reality, the constant similarity of these fragments suggests that everyone is in the same predicament , and these visual fragments all originate from the same whole.
This "fragmentation" also plays an important role in how information is delivered by clips from TV news programs. The film begins with a series of current news stories that clearly position the film in the era of its creation, creating a sense of present urgency that Haneke maintains throughout. In Haneke's films, the frequent presence of television images is a constant throughout the film. This very contemporary element corresponds to the problems of communication that he continues to explore, and to the related problems of reality that he continues to interpret, but its presence anywhere else is less critical than here. In the main part of the film, there is a TV image on the screen that suddenly appears in the scene, but its importance is finally realized precisely in the ending scene. After the student has a nervous breakdown in the bank and embarks on a killing spree that ends in suicide, the incident involves most of the characters in the film, after which the film switches to a mock news report on the massacre, witnessing The reporters expressed their fear and confusion in the report. Haneke went on to boldly continue with real news stories, such as the Sarajevo war and Michael Jackson's alleged child molestation. Perhaps the most obvious interpretation of this technique is the most pessimistic one - how easily real life and real people can become "another news story" in the media image binge queue, the real state of their lives becoming Lost because, like the family at the end of "Benny's Video," they become subjects within an incomprehensible, inhuman system of images. In this way, in a world saturated with images, they become just one more image.
Yet the wonderful thing about 71 Fragments of the Chronicle of Opportunity, its "healing", is that this conclusion also has the opposite effect: it rehumanizes other non-fiction news stories to the dilemma they witness Suddenly it became very close and real. As the film develops, the audience becomes emotionally involved with individual stories from one different part of society after another: the smallest unit of narrative. After the banking massacre, these tiny units congealed into one big unit. Haneke trained viewers to be able to empathize with small units and understand their eventual aggregates, and by inserting large aggregate units into the context of a news program, Haneke turned it into a small unit again. unit, that is, to do this aggregation process again, with news programs as new, larger, all-encompassing narrative units. In this way, we can perceive the women interviewed on the streets of Sarajevo, even Michael Jackson, as close to the fictional characters we know and care about. Haneke succeeds in reaffirming the shared humanity of the subjects behind the images that attack us every day, against the insensitivity brought about by the massacres of the media. Just when we think that his mosaic is complete, he reveals that it is actually endless, capable of reaching in all directions, containing all the narrative fragments that make up all life in this world. If the theme of "71 Fragments of the Chronicle of Opportunity" can be regarded as "the hopeless sinking of urban alienation", then the form it takes makes it happen - the most representative of which may be the "Paris Ukiyo-e" ( Code Inconnu , 2000)—making it one of the most compassionate and grim convictions of human fraternity in modern cinema, revealing intimacy that is often overlooked and unknown. , even if it's just to show the fact that we're all in the same perishing boat.
In 1995, Haneke contributed one of the best sections of the uneven film collection Lumière et compagnie (1995). The production consists of a series of one-minute films shot on the Lumiere Brothers' original camera to commemorate the centenary of the film. While a few of the filmmakers involved, such as David Lynch, took full advantage of what might have been a rather enticing assignment, the majority seemed to take it lightly. Haneke pointed Lumiere's camera at the TV screen and filmed a newscast: the first moving-image camera (symbolically at least) witnessed its contemporary successor, every moment that burned after reading it. The Japanese news image thus achieves silence and immortality. Haneke completed the loop closure of the first century of motion pictures.
Among Haneke's other consistently good films, Funny Games (1997) is a truly terrible one. Compared to the sharpness and sophistication of his other family dramas — The Seventh Continent and Benny's Video — the clumsiness of this work is astounding. "Fun Game" places a pure faith in the confrontational power of scenes of sadistic violence that Tarantino has completely tamed and thus weakened in his first two works. By the time Haneke uses it, it's a superfluous gimmick. While his intentions are undoubtedly virtuous, too many less cautious filmmakers have used the shock of extreme violence for sheer entertainment and some grander intentions—such as Kubrick's Clockwork. A Clockwork Orange ( 1971), Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994) - in the most profoundly serious context, they manage to navigate and successfully explore cinematic violence That disturbing surge of joy. In contrast to these, Haneke's well-orchestrated tedious ordeal is an unpleasant labor, tormented by an overconfidence in his inner strength. This overconfidence leads to a fatal error: Haneke sees no need for his heroes and villains to be portrayed beyond their actions. In this regard, Fun Games is far from avant-garde, but one of the most conservative films of the 1990s. We're back in the realm of Griffith-esque melodrama: heroic, beleaguered families fighting for their lives and possessions against an inexhaustible, child-killing Other. If the film makes any sense, it's simply being treated as a moving portrait of family loyalty in the face of all odds. with projects such as Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991), Chabrol's La Cérémonie (1995) or earlier Perkinpa's Straw Dogs, 1971) compared to more or less great contemporary films, all of which in a way show that it is the demons within the family who bring their own destruction from within, and Fun Game for its lack of moral scepticism Instead show positive relief. Ironically, it was Haneke himself who wrote the cycle's most disturbing work, The Seventh Continent, in which the family plunges into self-annihilation without even being catalyzed by the invaders. path of.
The French film "Paris Ukiyo-e" is perhaps Haneke's greatest work. It develops the theme of "71 Pieces" further, but no longer has a full-scale formal analogy to television. Like earlier works, it tells several sometimes interconnected stories, all of which raise ethical questions. Whereas each story in his earlier films was contained in its own narrative fragment from start to finish, this one's interaction and coexistence are always prominent. This creates an atmosphere that is less creepy and more oppressive and urgent, a sense of urgency that means taking on or abstaining from responsibilities as situations arise. The urgency of this ethical choice—if not the work of Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing) would be an ideal title for a Haneke film. Formally, it shatters the rigid, claustrophobic feel of 71 Pieces. The use of long takes is particularly prominent, but the frame is looser and, most importantly, it incorporates the movement of the horizontal perspective, which becomes the film's defining formal strategy. "Paris Ukiyo-e" also visually has the anti-fragmentation characteristic of other earlier works. Many static shots in the film contain the potential to always be in the space outside the screen, and several horizontally swept track shots just combine the characters and stories in the unseen space and realize the inflection of space. Actors are no longer prisoners trapped in harsh pictures, but people who are anxiously drifting in a world of endless horizontal torrents - this level of torrents varies from country to country and social background to social background. In between, from war to peace, from village to city, from a family life that is considered prosperous to begging to survive abroad, and from fiction to reality, it is constantly in motion. The dazzling horizontal roll shot that opens the entire film seems to have it all: an actress played by Juliette Binoche hurries out of her apartment. She's going to rehearsal. Her brother, the war correspondent's boyfriend who is still abroad, came up to talk to her. He tried to enter her apartment, but the door code was changed. As he walked, he told her that he had run away from his home on a country farm that his father wanted him to take over. She told him he could stay overnight, but not too long. She gave him the keys to the apartment and said they could talk in the evening. He started walking back to the apartment and eating something. He saw an immigrant female beggar sitting at the door and he threw food wrappers onto her lap. A young black man grabbed him and demanded an apology. They scuffled together. Binoche came back and tried to break them up. Then the police came. When the black man tried to file a complaint, the police took him and the beggar away. The truly outlaws are kept out of the way.
All of this is captured within a single shot that contains two horizontal movements on the same street, one on the right and one on the left. This simple extension of time and space contains so much tumultuous stories, problems, social and racial diversity, opportunities, choices, perceptions, misunderstandings and prejudices, all captured with the same unbiased interest that dictates this The film examines today's centrifugal world from a dizzying and uniquely inclusive perspective. The immediacy of Ukiyo-e Paris is the immediacy of a sketch or a snapshot of our time. There is no necessary connection; there is no unequivocal conclusion. Some choices have been made, some have not. The city is an endless test, a constant stream of decisions about how to interact and whether to intervene. Binoche plays an actress, but it looks like everyone in the film is also trying to change their role, like a young farmer who wants to move to the city, or a well-respected and wealthy man in his hometown who has entered illegally Romanian women who went to work in France and begged for a living. Uncertainty is ubiquitous, and this may be the end of the uncertainty Haneke's characters seek: the so-called "Unknown Code." [The original title of the film "Paris Ukiyo-e" is "Code Inconnu", which literally translates to "Unknown Code" - Translator's Note] It is this uncertainty that binds us together: regardless of social status or race, we are all the same apprehensive.
Michael Haneke is more than just a great director. Like Godard in France and Switzerland, Kiarostami in Iran and Harmony Colin in the United States, he is an essential director whose absence would seriously damage the world's cinematic ecology. His work is a necessary correction to the unthinking regulations of mainstream Hollywood-centric filmmaking. Haneke's films are important because they deal with society; because they diagnose the mental and emotional numbness that has recently been affected by technology, a numbness that - at least in cinema - is often overlooked, or Just scratching the surface. They matter because they reflect the problems, fears, and surroundings of modern man—they try to sense the current state of the world and show that the "now" is not just a matter of conversation. Rather than using film as an excuse to stand on the podium and preach these themes eloquently, he uses each work to create a targeted and appropriate film form that always leaves enough ambiguity for the audience to draw their own conclusions. conclusion. In fact, there is no living director who trusts the audience's intelligence more than he does. In this regard, Haneke's films can never be charged with "pessimism"—in relation to the audience, his work reproduces human communication in action, and urges toward that which is precisely by itself. Diagnosed symptoms of non-communicability, initiate hedging.
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