In the earl stage of Michael Haneke's film Benny's Video (1992), the violence in video media show a more obvious impact to human cognition and behavior comparing to the later film like Caché (2005), but still the recognizable style of Haneke as a cold silent observer to use media as a represent of violence and portrays the alienation of people caused by it. The alienation is generally defined as extension of objectification and materialization, it is the production and products of human's material and spiritual aspects that becomes alien forces, which in turn rule people (Ruihua, 2010). While Georges in Caché(Haneke, 2005) lost in the threaten of video medium, Benny is purely the submissive advocate of it and then even becomes to an executor to violence. The video clip that one pig is shot to death is played multiple times with bigger and slower images enlarged by Benny each time, and the details of death is displayed more clearly.
There is one scene that he falls asleep when the TV is still playing a scene which seem at the climax of the video, which should be the one appealing scene instead. When the violence is looped and observed several times on screen, people will be gradually desensitized and numb to the repeated images, and finally be filled with them inevitably, then use action instead of psychological analysis and value judgment, which induce one imitation to the violence in the media world in reality (Yuan, 2017). Human are in turn controlled by the products they invented.
Benny also is a recorder himself who frequently record the normal happening around him and the video rental store is the place he frequently goes to, too. Through the operation of camera his own, the video medium successfully transforms the reality into a possessable material, which splits Benny's presence from the ongoing reality and then reality becomes closely overlapped with media world. The promises of total visibility that the television and most of media forms can be the “window on world” are repeated by the television technology, as the self-avowed one would have to be understood as the executor of fate, where what appears congeals as what is(Sutherland, 2010). Under the violence of flooded significant, there are the “silent masses”. In the extent of the appearance of simulation with time, in this created hyper reality, simulation eliminates the reality through cloning the replicas of the reality ( Baudrillard, 2000, as cited in Yibing, 2008, p37). On the other hand, does the media world originally constructed by human beings bring the emptiness, alienation and violence, or just bring out and reflect the real essence of human beings?
Recently the concept and implementation of the meta universe is getting closer and closer. In such a relatively more thorough alienation, people can not help but make people recall the most initial form of human beings and think about how the final form of human beings will be .
Word Count: 490
Reference List:
Heiduschka, V. (Producer), & Haneke, M. (Screenwriter/ Director). (1992). Benny's Video [Motion Picture]. Austrian: Bernard Lang etc.
Ruihua, Z. (2010). Media Survival and Human Alienation. Shanghai Journalism Review , 322(2), 29-32. Doi: CNKI: SUN: XWJZ.0.2010-2-010
Sutherland, M. (2010). On Michael Haneke. In B. Price, & JD Rhodes (Ed.), Death, with Television (pp167-189). ISBN: 978-0-8143-3699-1
Yibing, Z. (2008). Baudrillard studies: Simulacrum, Simulation and the Implosion in the Bourgeois World . Jiangsu: Jiangsu Social Science.
Yuan, X. (2017). Michael Haneke's film studies: The sin that be shadowed and highlighted . Wuhan: University of Wuhan.
View more about Benny's Video reviews
