Michael Haneke (1942–) is Austria’s most celebrated contemporary filmmaker and one of the most uncompromising, innovative directors working in cinema today. His often austere and formally rigorous work is concerned with some of the key issues facing modern humanity including the breakdown of communication, the alienation and estrangement wrought by contemporary society, the impact of media technologies and the devastating legacy of the historical calamities of the 20th century. Confrontational, disturbing and endlessly thought provoking, Haneke’s cinema seeks to contemplate the alienating effects of our technological civilisation. The Melbourne Cinémathèque presents its second retrospective – following its first 20 years ago – of one of modern cinema’s great moralists, featuring work from his early career in television alongside four of his greatest films of the 21st century. This more recent body of work has cemented his reputation as a key filmmaker for our times and has also seen his scalpel-like vision tackle increasingly complex and nuanced issues and histories. This season includes two of Haneke’s rarely screened TV movies, both of which explore the cataclysmic legacy of war. The Rebellion (1993) is based on Joseph Roth’s novel and follows the downward spiral of a disabled ex-World War I soldier, while Lemmings Tale I: Arcadia (1979) explores the legacy inherited by Haneke’s generation after the devastation of Nazism and World War II. It places these earlier works alongside a selection of Haneke’s most celebrated films, including both of his extraordinary Cannes Palme d’Or winners, The White Ribbon (2009) and Amour (2012), and his bold adaptation of Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel, The Piano Teacher (2001).
7:00pm THE WHITE RIBBON
Michael Haneke (2009) 144 mins – MA 15+
Haneke’s first Cannes Palme d’Or winner focuses on the recollections of a schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) working in a German village in the final days before World War I. An astonishing catalogue of bilious, selfish, destructive behaviours, Haneke’s film methodically details the residue of centuries of feudalism, using Bergmanesque monochrome imagery to frame a polity of unrelenting toxicity, where violence is so deeply embedded in the fabric of community that it seems almost perfunctory to look for a perpetrator. The film’s perfectly calibrated ensemble features Leonie Benesch, Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Tukur, Burghart Klaussner and Rainer Bock.
9:40pm THE REBELLION
Michael Haneke (1993) 106 mins – Unclassified 15+
This television adaptation of Joseph Roth’s 1924 novel captures the existential abandonment that accompanies the societal neglect of a disabled World War I veteran (Branko Samarovski) who experiences a litany of degradations. Haneke’s bleak, Dostoyevskian worldview meshes well with the Kafkaesque indignities inflicted upon the doomed hero, evoking a sense that the long European humanist project is approaching an apocalyptic endpoint, with fascism the inevitable conclusion for a people addicted to obedience. An important companion piece to The White Ribbon.
7:00pm AMOUR
Michael Haneke (2012) 122 mins – M
Haneke brings his characteristically unflinching precision and restraint to this tale of an elderly married couple confronted with pain and illness in the final chapter of their lives together. Like many of the director’s films, the title has a harrowing irony, but also draws from the sublime grace, shared intimacy and emotional richness of the extraordinary lead performances by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. Both gentle and brutally honest, compassionate and unsentimental, this won both the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. With Isabelle Huppert.
9:15pm LEMMINGS TALE I: ARCADIA
Michael Haneke (1979) 113 mins – Unclassified 15+
The first instalment of Haneke’s landmark two-episode drama examines the director’s own generation of Germans who came of age after World War II, depicting the fraught existential gap that developed between this group of teenagers and their parents in the 1950s. This tense Bergmanesque drama was formative in developing the themes that Haneke would go on to explore throughout his filmography and is now generally regarded as one of the most significant works of his early career.
7:00pm TIME OF THE WOLF
Michael Haneke (2003) 109 mins – MA 15+
Haneke’s moody but visually beautiful film is an icy and unsettling portrait of humanity gradually undone by the privations visited by an unspecified environmental catastrophe. Masterfully composed and lit, the film creates a spookily uncanny but almost medieval world sculpted by darkness rather than light. Starring Isabelle Huppert, director Patrice Chéreau and Béatrice Dalle, it is a pivotal work in Haneke’s development as a filmmaker and leads toward the more rounded and human-centred dramas (such as Caché and The White Ribbon) that would define the crucial next phase of his career.
CTEQ ANNOTATION
The Time of the Wolf
by William “Bill” Blick
9:05pm THE PIANO TEACHER
Michael Haneke (2001) 131 mins – R 18+
Haneke offers another of his unflinching depictions of the violence simmering beneath the surface of comfortable bourgeois life in this adaptation of Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel, focusing on the titular masochist (Isabelle Huppert) and her obsession with an initially resistant teenage student (Benoît Magimel). Huppert rightly won acting awards across Europe for her full-blooded depiction of ruthless perversity. Haneke, as usual, creates a dynamic contrast between his dispassionate, unblinking cinematic style and the raw intensity of emotion he encourages from his performers. With Annie Girardot.
35mm print courtesy of The National Film and Sound Archive, Australia.
CTEQ ANNOTATION
The Avoidance of Love: The Piano Teacher as Anti-Melodrama
by Alison Taylor