71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
(71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls)

Poster
Directed by Michael Haneke
Produced by Veit Heiduschka
Written by Michael Haneke
Starring Gabriel Cosmin Urdes
Lukas Miko
Otto Grünmandl
Anne Bennent
Udo Samel
Cinematography Christian Berger
Edited by Marie Homolkova
Release dates
  • 1994
Running time
 96 minutes
Country Austria
Germany
Language German
Romanian

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (German: 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls) is a 1994 Austrian drama film directed by Michael Haneke. It has a fragmented storyline as the title suggests, and chronicles several unrelated stories in parallel. Separate narrative lines intersect in an incident at the last of the film: a mass killing at an Austrian bank. The film is set in Vienna, October to December 1993. Haneke refers to 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance as the last part of his "glaciation trilogy", whose other parts are his preceding two films.

Cast

Opening

The film opens with intertitles which introduces the mass killing in detail. So it chronicles in flashbacks a last few months of Vienna.

Characters

The drama consists of varied characters in each storyline: a Romanian boy who immigrated illegally into Austria and lives in streets of Vienna; a religious bank security worker; an old man staring at TV screen; a childless couple considering adoption; a frustrated student and so on.

Film division

The film is divided into a number of variable-length "fragments" divided by black pauses, and apparently unrelated to each other. The film is characterised by quite a lot of fragments that take form of video newscasts unrelated to the main storylines. News footages of real events are shown through video monitors. Newscasts report on Bosnian War, Somali Civil War, South Lebanon conflict, Kurdish–Turkish conflict, and molestation allegations against Michael Jackson.

References

    External links