Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke (born March 23, 1942, Munich, Germany) is an Austrian director and screenwriter whose stark and provocative films made him a leading figure in European cinema in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Much of his work examines tendencies toward social alienation and brutality within contemporary middle-class milieus.

Haneke, who was born to a German theatrical director and an Austrian actress, was raised primarily by an aunt in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. In 1967, after studying philosophy, psychology, and drama at the University of Vienna, he found work developing screenplays for a public television station in Baden-Baden, West Germany. Three years later Haneke began directing for the stage, which led to an opportunity to direct small-screen films as well. Ten such productions, nearly all of which he also wrote, aired on German or Austrian television between 1974 and 1997; they range from original stories of late 20th-century life to adaptations of novels by Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka. In particular, the two-part Lemminge (1979; Lemmings), a study of his generation’s coming of age, established Haneke as a rigorous observer of social malaise and dysfunction.

Haneke’s career in cinema began with Der siebente Kontinent (1989; The Seventh Continent), his screenplay for which had been rejected for television. Based on an actual event, the film depicts the tedious routines, and eventually the joint suicide, of a middle-class Viennese family. The first installment in what Haneke would call his emotionalen Vergletscherung (“emotional glaciation”) trilogy, it was followed by Benny’s Video (1992), in which a movie-obsessed teenager commits a murder out of idle curiosity, and 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (1994; 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance), a fractured mosaic of mundane moments that culminate in an incident of random violence. Although some critics deemed his films mere exercises in nihilism, Haneke considered them attempts to attune viewers to the ways in which the structures of modern bourgeois society inhibit moral empathy and interpersonal communication.

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With Funny Games (1997), in which two young men sadistically torture a vacationing family for sport, Haneke offered a scenario evocative of popular horror entertainment. His refusal to leaven the grim narrative with titillating thrills or moments of catharsis, however, signaled a deliberate critique of Hollywood practices. In part through the controversy it provoked, Funny Games expanded Haneke’s international audience. He cast French star Juliette Binoche in Code inconnu (2000; Code Unknown), which episodically traces the fates of several lives that intersect on a multicultural Parisian street corner. Next, Isabelle Huppert evinced a middle-aged woman’s psychosexual frustrations in La Pianiste (2001; The Piano Teacher), which Haneke adapted from a novel by Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. Both films attracted substantial praise.

Continuing to work in French, Haneke filmed Le Temps du loup (2003; Time of the Wolf), an elliptical tale of postapocalyptic chaos. He found greater success, though, with Caché (2005; Hidden), in which the mysterious appearance of surveillance videos on a family’s doorstep sets in motion a voyeuristic thriller that doubles as a meditation on postcolonial tensions. The film won three prizes at the Cannes film festival, including one for best director.

In 2007 Haneke, acknowledging that Americans had always been his target audience for Funny Games, released a shot-for-shot English-language remake of the film; however, it failed to make a significant impression at the box office. Haneke subsequently explored the roots of fascism in Das weisse Band (2009; The White Ribbon), which depicts a series of inscrutable cruelties and mishaps within a northern German village shortly before World War I. The film, shown in austere black and white, captured the Palme d’Or at Cannes and earned Academy Award nominations in the categories of foreign-language film and best cinematography. A second Palme d’Or went to Amour (2012), an uncharacteristically affectionate—though decidedly unsentimental—portrait of an elderly couple facing mortality. It received five Oscar nominations, including those for best picture, best director, and best original screenplay, and it won the award for best foreign-language film.

After directing the TV movie Così fan tutte (2013), Haneke returned to the big screen with Happy End (2017), which he also wrote. The drama centres on a wealthy dysfunctional family in France.

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