Michael Haneke Films on DVD and Blu-ray

Michael Haneke Films

The Bavarian director Michael Haneke is one of a small number of contemporary filmmakers whose project involves restoring the European cinema to the high-minded seriousness of its 1960s and 1970s model.

Haneke became a film critic after studying philosophy, psychology and drama at the University of Vienna, and his work retains a strongly academic, critical edge: he�s often regarded as the stern professor of world cinema, casting a steely eye over his audience with an aim to spotting society�s hypocrisies and correcting its worst excesses. Gone is the light touch of Haneke�s Viennese predecessors; this is a moralist with two hands very firmly on the camera.

Haneke had been working steadily in TV since the 1970s, but his work first began being showcased internationally in the 1990s, with two films that chimed with the panic emerging around new technologies and violent entertainments. Benny�s Video (1992), a tough, unblinking study of a teenager�s descent into sociopathy, was topped by Funny Games (1996), a ruthlessly taut home-invasion scenario that sought at every turn to deny us the standard-issue Hollywood thrills. The inspiration for countless symposium papers, Funny Games remains a fascinating exercise, and an entirely self-defeating work: a film that implores the viewer to walk out or switch off rather than enjoy the characters� protracted suffering.

So fierce was Haneke�s belief in our growing passivity as consumers that he would later remake the film in the English-language as Funny Games U.S. (2007), but � faced (or rather threatened) with a thriller telling them off for enjoying precisely these things � this time hardly anybody showed up to walk out. However, the Funny Games project kickstarted a run of films involving couples named Georg (in the director�s later Francophone films, Georges) and Anne, Haneke�s signifiers of haute-bourgeoise complacency, who�ve generally sealed themselves off from the rest of the world, secure that nothing bad could possibly happen to a couple with their wealth, and bearing these names.

In 2000�s searching Code Unknown, one of the very best of that decade�s many mosaic films, the marital discord of well-to-do Parisian couple Georges (Thierry Neuvic) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) comes to be overwritten by scenes from lives that go unnoticed, and don�t quite fit together. The pair were there again in 2003�s grimly post-apocalyptic Time of the Wolf, in which Haneke sought to channel our worst millennial fears through the darkest Bergman-esque lens. And they were centre-frame in 2005�s icily gripping, endlessly debatable Hidden, now a high-flying media couple (Binoche and Daniel Auteuil) oblivious to the images of destruction playing out on the TV in their perfectly furnished apartment, until they�re forced to watch a tape that changes the very course and meaning of their existence.

The ongoing Georges-and-Anne saga has fed into Haneke�s other work, most notably 2001�s The Piano Teacher, a brilliant adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek�s novel, with its terrifying culture clash between a repressed, self-harming pianist (Isabelle Huppert) and her young prot�g�/lover (Benoit Magimel).

But Haneke�s vision has expanded, and arguably grown more compassionate with age, as two recent Palme d�Or triumphs have shown. 2009�s The White Ribbon, a period mystery-drama that ventures an origin story for Nazi Germany, serves as the director�s most physically beautiful work, and finds a touching frailty in the schoolmaster-narrator�s nervy courting of a local nanny. The threat facing the Georges and Anne in 2012�s Amour, meanwhile, is old age and death. What, finally, could be more human than that?
Mike McCahill [-]

Michael Haneke Film Listing