Michael Haneke

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Michael Haneke

"A feature film is twenty-four lies per second." -- Michael Haneke, Cannes (2005)

Michael Haneke (born March 23, 1942 in Munich, Bavaria, Germany) is a controversial Austrian filmmaker and writer best known for his bleak and, for some, disturbing style. His films often document problems and failures in modern society. Haneke has worked in television‚ theater and cinema. He is also known for raising social issues in his work.

1 Biography
2 Themes
3 Filmography
4 External links

[edit] Biography

The son of actor and director Fritz Haneke and actress Beatrix von Degenschild, Haneke was raised in the city Wiener Neustadt. He attended the University of Vienna to study philosophy, psychology and drama after failing to achieve success in his early attempts in acting and music. After graduating, he became a film critic and from 1967 to 1970 he worked as editor and dramaturg at the southern German television station Südwestfunk. As a dramaturg, he directed a number of stage productions in German, which included Strindberg, Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist in Berlin, Munich and Vienna. He made his debut as a television director in 1973.

Haneke's feature film debut was 1989's The Seventh Continent, which served to trace out the violent and bold style that would bloom in later years. Three years later, the controversial Benny's Video put Haneke's name on the map. Haneke's greatest success came in 2001 with his most critically successful film, The Piano Teacher. The film won the prestigious Grand Prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and also won its stars, Benoit Magimel and Isabelle Huppert, the Best Actor and Actress awards. He has worked with Juliette Binoche on two occasions, after she expressed interest in working with him. [1]

[edit] Themes

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus. From Film as catharsis.

Rejecting what is considered to be standard conventions of timing, the build up of suspense and logical plotting, Haneke is not worried about inducing boredom, irritation and frustration. His films are considered to be very immediate without being simplistic. Arguably concerned with a society that no longer knows how to love—or for that matter how to hate—his films are in many ways an attempt to resharpen the audience's feelings and responses to the world.

Recurring themes include:

the introduction of a malevolent force into comfortable bourgeois existence, as seen in Funny Games and Caché;
a critique directed towards mass media, especially television, as seen in Funny Games, where some of the characters are aware that they feature in a movie, and Benny's Video, in which the main character is driven to kill an innocent girl after seeing a pig slaughertered on TV.

[edit] Filmography

1989 Der 7. Kontinent aka The 7th Continent
1992 Benny's Video
1994 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls aka 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
1995 Der Kopf des Mohren aka The Moor's Head (screenplay)
1997 Funny Games
1997 Das Schloß aka The Castle (U.S. title)
2000 Code Inconnu: Recit Incomplet De Divers Voyages aka Code Unknown (U.S. Video title)
2001 La Pianiste aka The Piano Teacher (U.S. title)
2003 Le Temps du Loup aka The Time of the Wolf (U.S. title)
2005 Caché aka Hidden
2007 Funny Games (remake) (filming)

Movies by Michael Haneke
Der 7. Kontinent • Benny's Video • 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls • Der Kopf des Mohren • Funny Games (1997) • Das Schloß • Code Inconnu: Recit Incomplet De Divers Voyages • La Pianiste • The Time of the Wolf • Caché • Funny Games (2007)