Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke
Michael Haneke at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.
Born	(1942-03-23) 23 March 1942 Munich, Germany
Nationality	Austrian
Occupation	Filmmaker/Screenwriter
Years active	1974–present
Spouse	Susanne Haneke (1983-present)

Michael Haneke (German pronunciation: [hɑ�nɛkɛ]; born 23 March 1942) is an Austrian filmmaker and writer best known for his bleak and disturbing style. His films often document problems and failures in modern society. Haneke has worked in television‚ theatre and cinema. He is also known for raising social issues in his work. Besides working as filmmaker he also teaches directing at the Filmacademy Vienna.

At the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, his film The White Ribbon won the Palme d'Or for best film, and at the 67th Golden Globe Awards the film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His 2012 film Love has been selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. He has made films in French, German and English.

Life and career

Haneke was born in Munich, Germany, the son of the German actor and director Fritz Haneke and the Austrian actress Beatrix von Degenschild. Haneke was raised in the city Wiener Neustadt. He attended the University of Vienna to study philosophy, psychology and drama after failing to achieve success in his early attempts in acting and music. After graduating, he became a film critic and from 1967 to 1970 he worked as editor and dramaturg at the southwestern German television station Südwestfunk. He made his debut as a television director in 1974.

Haneke's feature film debut was 1989's The Seventh Continent, which served to trace out the violent and bold style that would bloom in later years. Three years later, the controversial Benny's Video put Haneke's name on the map. Haneke's greatest success came in 2001 with his most critically successful film, the French The Piano Teacher. It won the prestigious Grand Prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and also won its stars, Benoît Magimel and Isabelle Huppert, the Best Actor and Actress awards. He has worked with Juliette Binoche (Code Unknown in 2000 and Caché in 2005), after she expressed interest in working with him. Haneke frequently worked with real-life couple Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar - thrice each.

His latest film, The White Ribbon, premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. The movie is set in 1913 and deals with strange incidents in a small town in Northern Germany, depicting an authoritarian, fascist-like atmosphere, where children are subjected to rigid rules and suffer harsh punishments, and where strange deaths occur. The Cannes jury presided by Isabelle Huppert and including Asia Argento, Hanif Kureishi and Robin Wright Penn awarded Haneke's film the Palme d'Or for the best feature film.

Worthy of mention is the fact that most of his films feature a stereotypical bourgeois couple named Anna/Anne and Georg/Georges (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, Funny Games, Code Unknown, Time of the Wolf, Caché, Funny Games US). The identity of the couple, as well as that of the actors portraying them, always changes from one film to another. Their surname is sometimes given as Laurent. His other movies will feature characters with the same names, albeit unmarried and unrelated (such as The White Ribbon).

Stage work

Haneke has directed a number of stage productions in German, which include works by Strindberg, Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist in Berlin, Munich and Vienna. In 2006 he gave his debut as an opera director, staging Mozart's Don Giovanni for the Opéra National de Paris at Palais Garnier, when the theater's general manager was Gérard Mortier. In 2012, he was to direct Così fan tutte for the New York City Opera. This production had originally been commissioned by Jürgen Flimm for the Salzburg Festival 2009, but Haneke had to resign due to an illness preventing him from preparing the work. Haneke is now scheduled to realize the production at Madrid's Teatro Real in 2012, which then will be managed by Mortier.

Quotes

"My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus."

-- From "Film as catharsis".

"Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable."

"Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth."

"My favourite film-maker of the decade is Abbas Kiarostami. He achieves a simplicity that’s so difficult to attain."

"I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it’s totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That’s been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable."

Filmography

Feature films

• The Seventh Continent (1989)
• Benny's Video (1992)
• 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)
• Funny Games (1997)
• Code Unknown (2000)
• The Piano Teacher (2002) Won the Grand Prix (Cannes Film Festival)
• Time of the Wolf (2003)
• Caché (2005) (Hidden) was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.
• Funny Games (US remake) (2008)
• The White Ribbon (2009) Won the Palme d'Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and 2010 the Golden Globe in the category "Best Foreign Language Film".
• Love (2012)

TV films

• ...Und was Kommt Danach? (1974) (After Liverpool)
• Drei Wege zum See (1976) (Three Paths to the Lake)
• Sperrmüll (1976) (Household Rubbish)
• Lemminge, Teil 1: Arkadien (1979) (Lemmings, Part 1: Arcadia)
• Lemminge, Teil 2: Verletzungen (1979) (Lemmings, Part 2: Injuries)
• Variation (1983)
• Wer war Edgar Allan? (1984) (Who Was Edgar Allen?)
• Fräulein (1985) (Miss)
• Nachruf für einen Mörder (1991) (Obituary for a Murderer)
• Die Rebellion (1992) (The Rebellion)
• Das Schloß (1997) (The Castle)

Short films

• Lumière and Company' (1995) (segment "Michael Haneke/Vienne")

Bibliography

• Catherine Wheatley: Michael Haneke's Cinema: The Ethic of the Image, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009, ISBN 1-84545-722-6 review
• Michael Haneke. Special Issue of Modern Austrian Literature. 43.2, 2010.

External links

• Michael Haneke at the Internet Movie Database