Haneke Retrospective

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With all the yapping I've been doing about Michael Haneke lately, it's nice to see that somebody else is appreciating him too - The Anthology Film Archives here in NYC are putting on a retrospective of eight of his films through the latter half of July.

Here's the basic schedule.

But since Anthology's website sucks, here's my own rundown of what they're showing and when:

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (July 14-29, 7pm)

"Michael Haneke's death-of- the-soul -of-Europe saga soldiers on with 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, the final entry in his so-called "trilogy of emotional glacification." After x-raying the intestines of the family unit in The Seventh Continent and Benny's Video, the dour Austrian auteur is ready to go global, bringing various other sides of the planet to the miserabilist equation via his favorite trope, the video image that defaces reality. Although Bosnia, Somalia, and Ireland are some of the countries whose upheavals are here glimpsed through the filter of TV news, Haneke grounds the action in Vienna, where, we are told at the beginning, an athletic young jock (Lukas Miko) will suddenly shoot bystanders in a bank before turning the gun on himself..." (Slant Magazine review)

The Seventh Continent (July 14-19, 9:15pm)

"In a way, Haneke's drama records a single process: a day-to-day look at three years in the life of a middle-class family. There is more to it than that, of course, as what he captures is a family in the act of disintegration. Not that eye doctor Anna (Birgit Doll) and husband Georg (Dieter Berner) are aware of anything amiss, at first, as Anna writes in a letter to her in-laws. Her brother, Alexander (Udo Samel), now he's troubled, having spent time in a mental hospital for treatment of depression after their mother died, but Georg, Anna, and young daughter Eva (Leni Tanze) are doing as swimmingly as the fish the family keeps in a lavish aquarium." (Reel.com review)

Benny's Video (July 15, 4:45 pm; July 20, 9:15; July 23, 4:15 pm)

"The title character in Benny's Video is a twisted 13-year-old boy who sees the world as one big video, sometimes starring himself. His bedroom resembles a TV production studio, with a videotape library, monitors, and cameras, including one camera pointed out the window so he can watch a pixilated version of "the view" on TV. Another camera records Benny—he can watch himself watching himself—and a bank of buttons and remote controls allow him to instantly switch from the real-time cameras to television programs to videos. His parents are mostly absent, and not particularly interested in their kid, but they get very interested when they discover that their quiet child has done something unspeakably violent, for no apparent reason. "Why did you do it?" they ask, and the boy just says, "Because." (Reel.com review)

I spoke briefly of BV here.

Funny Games (July 15, 9:15 pm & July 22, 4:45 pm)

"Many pundits have speculated that the mass audience has become so inured to movie and television violence that we've begun to lose our capacity for horror and empathy. But have we really? "Funny Games," a blood-curdling portrait of a family imprisoned in its idyllic summer home by a pair of sadistic killers, puts that question to the test. This beautifully acted and paced German variant of "Cape Fear," which opens Wednesday at the Film Forum, having traveled around the international festival circuit, is tricked out with a number of Brechtian devices to catch audiences in a voyeuristic trance. Twice in a film that is predominantly hyper-realistic, one of the killers turns to the camera with a conspiratorial leer and asks the wordless question: What are you looking at and why?" (Stephen Holden, NY Times review)

I spoke briefly of FG here.

Code Unknown (July 16, 4:30 pm, July 21, 7 pm)

"Austrian director Michael Haneke is a ruthless anthropologist of domestic nihilism, but his first French-language feature, Code Unknown, is also his most humane. It's less eager to implicate the audience in its exhibitions of motiveless savagery as with the amiable psychopath's to-camera asides in Funny Games and more inclined to arrange ordinary people not as isolated terrorist cells but as a frail, knotty web held together by selfish interdependence and clashing grievances." (Village Voice review)

The Piano Teacher (July 16, 9:15 pm; July 21, 9:30; July 23, 9 pm)

"The movie seems even more highly charged because it is wrapped in an elegant package. These are smart people. They talk about music as if they understand it, they duel with their minds as well as their bodies, and Haneke photographs them in two kinds of spaces: Sometimes they're in elegant, formal conservatory settings, and at other times in frankly vulgar places where quick release can be snatched from strangers. There is an old saying: Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it. "The Piano Teacher" has a more ominous lesson: Be especially careful with someone who has asked for you." (Roger Ebert's review)

I wrote about PT here.

Time of the Wolf (July 17, 9:15 pm; July 23, 6:30 pm)

"As in Haneke's offensively high-handed earlier film Funny Games, Wolf begins with a family trip gone suddenly predatory. Confronting a rifle-brandishing family squatting in their vacation home, the movie's nuclear unit (led by mom Isabelle Huppert) is immediately sundered and heads into the countryside, looking for help it never finds. (Haneke's title is from the Elder Edda, referring to the chaos leading up to the Ragnarok.) "You really don't know what's going on?" spits one unhelpful villager, and panic sets in for protagonists and audience alike." (Michael Atkinson, Village Voice review)

Caché (July 18, 9:15; July 22, 9 pm)

"When "Caché" played at Cannes 2005 (where it won the prize for best direction), it had an English title, "Hidden." That may be a better title than "Caché," which can also be an English word, but more obscure. In the film, the camera is hidden. So are events in Georges' life. Some of what he knows is hidden from his wife. The son keeps secrets from his parents, and so on. The film seems to argue that life would have gone on well enough for the Laurents had it not been for the unsettling knowledge that they had become visible, that someone knew something about them, that someone was watching." (Roger Ebert's review)

I spoke briefly of Caché here.

If you're in the city, make time to see at least one of these films; if not, rent them, they're all on DVD. I really believe Haneke is one of the most interesting filmmakers working today.
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