Michael Haneke: A Cinema of Provocation

This groundbreaking retrospective – the most comprehensive collection of Haneke’s work ever screened for an English-language audience - was curated by Roy Grundmann, Assoc. Prof. of Film Studies at Boston University and premiered at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in October 2007. This program has been touring through North America since then. A Cinema of Provocation also includes seven of Haneke’s television productions, subtitled by DEFA Film Library, which were never available with English subtitles before. These seven titles are available for rental through the Goethe-Institut in Boston. If you are interested in bringing these TV productions to your institution, please contact Karin Oehlenschlaeger.

About Michael Haneke
About Films for Rental

About Michael Haneke

Known to American audiences mainly through the relatively recent successes of Code Unknown (2000), The Piano Teacher (2001), and Caché (2005), Michael Haneke has been steadily making films since the beginning of his extraordinary career in the mid-1970s. Born in Germany and raised in Austria, Haneke began his career in theater and television, directing for the stage and writing treatments for teleplays. By the time he shifted his creative energies to cinema in the late 1980s, he had already accumulated an impressive body of feature-length television dramas including Three Paths to the Lake (1976), Lemmings (1979), Variation (1983), Who Was Edgar Allan? (1984) and Fraulein (1985). Many of these have now been subtitled to be included with Haneke’s cinematic features in this comprehensive retrospective, for the first time giving American audiences the opportunity to view Haneke’s larger body of work. What emerges is a striking consistency of thematic concerns and a creative vision that transcends the limitations of a given medium. Haneke’s films all deal in one way or another with modern society’s descent into lovelessness, alienation, and lethal coldness that get passed on from one generation to the next and amplified in the process. He conveys these themes through highly restrained cinematic forms and an austerely mesmerizing spectatorial address. Having worked predominantly in France since the turn of the millenium, Haneke has recently returned to the multi-strain narratives of his early TV work to craft stories that analyze first world social anatomies in relation to the legacy of colonialism and issues of citizenship and migration. At the same time, Haneke continues his quest for new aesthetic strategies to use media violence as a tool to critique media violence, most recently explored in his first American film, Funny Games, a remake of his 1997 shocker, which will be released theatrically this fall.

Written by Roy Grundmann
Assoc. Prof. of Film Studies at Boston University and Curator of the film series Michael Haneke: A Cinema of Provocation; October 2007.


Films Available for Rental

All seven titles are available on DVD with English subtitles.

If you are interested in bringing these TV productions to your institution, please contact Karin Oehlenschlaeger.


Fraulein: A German Melodrama
With Angelica Domröse, Peter Franke, Lou Castel
Austria/West Germany 1985, DVD, b/w and color, 113 min., German with English subtitles

Described as an answer to Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, Fraulein tells the story of a German woman and a former French prisoner of war living in 1950s Germany. Instead of playing a role in rebuilding her country, Haneke’s heroine remains preoccupied with her personal affairs. Shot predominantly in black and white (with a color sequence added toward the end), Fraulein asserts Haneke’s place alongside the masters of the New German Cinema.

Lemmings: Part 1 – Arcades
With Regina Sattler, Christian Ingomar, Eva Linder
Austria/West Germany 1979, DVD, color, 113 min., German with English subtitles


Lemmings: Part 2 – Injuries
With Monica Bleibtreu, Elfriede Irrall, Rüdiger Hacker
Austria/West Germany 1979, DVD, color, 107 min., German with English subtitles

This two-part drama examines the fate of Haneke’s own generation which came of age after World War II. The first part depicts the generational gap between 1950s teenagers and their parents while the second shows this same group of characters twenty years later as they have grown up to be dysfunctional and suicidal adults. Regarded as the most significant of Haneke’s early works, Lemmings contains incipient treatments of many of the themes he would later elaborate on in his theatrical features.

Variation
With Elfriede Irrall, Suzanne Geyer, Hilmar Thate
Austria 1983, DVD, b/w and color, 98 min., German with English subtitles

Haneke depicts the emotional story of an adulterous relationship between a journalist and a teacher. The film poignantly explores the difficult dynamics between people who love one another but still can’t keep from hurting one another. Variation has been described by its director as being closer to John Cassavetes than to Hollywood melodrama.

The Rebellion
With Branco Samarovski, Judith Pogany, Thierry Van Werweke
Austria 1993, DVD, b/w and color, 105 min., German with English subtitles

Despite his established career on the big screen, Haneke frequently returned to work on television projects in the 1990s include this adaptation of Joseph Roth’s novel. In it, he explores the fate of a returning veteran in post-World War I Vienna who struggles (like many of Haneke’s protagonists) in an increasingly bureaucratic and technocratic world.

Three Paths to the Lake
With Ursula Schult, Guido Wieland, Walter Schmidinger
Austria/West Germany 1976, DVD, color, 97 min., German with English subtitles

A war photographer faces a moral crisis when she is forced to examine the implications of her work. On one level, Haneke’s dramatization of Ingeborg Bachmann’s prose monologue foreshadows his examination of visual documentation and the media in such films as Code Inconnu and Caché. On another level, Haneke uses Bachmann’s work to deal with the lost ideals of his own generation, who came of age in the 1950s and early 60s.

Who Was Edgar Allan?
With Paulus Manker, Rolf Hoppe, Guido Wieland
Austria/West Germany 1984, DVD, color, 83 min., German with English subtitles

In this adaptation of Peter Rosei’s post-modern thriller made for German television, an art history student who becomes obsessed with and mysteriously linked to an American. Despite the aesthetic limitations of small-screen presentation, Haneke’s sophisticated mise-en-scène fully exploits the film’s stylish Venice locale.

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