A Companion to Michael Haneke

A Companion to Michael Haneke

With a new preface addressing the Academy award-winning film, Amour, this new-in-paper edition has established itself as the definitive collection on Michael Haneke—from his early work in television and theater, through his prodigious cinematic output, to his 2009 triumph at Cannes.

A Companion to Michael Haneke brings together essays by leading film scholars, as well as interviews with the director himself, to probe the provocative and controversial themes that have formed the nucleus of Haneke’s work—intergenerational dysfunction and social alienation, colonialism and citizenship, surveillance and pornography, mass culture and media violence. The volume also offers a critical examination of the auteur’s oeuvre, including Three Paths to the Lake, Lemmings, Benny’s Video, The Piano Teacher, Caché, Funny Games, and the 2009 Palme d’Or winner, The White Ribbon.

Notes on Contributors viii

Acknowledgments xiv

Introduction: Haneke's Anachronism 1
Roy Grundmann

Part I Critical and Topical Approaches to Haneke's Cinema 51

1 Performative Self-Contradictions: Michael Haneke's Mind Games 53
Thomas Elsaesser

2 Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams: Vicissitudes of Surveillant Narration in Michael Haneke's Caché 75
Thomas Y. Levin

3 Infectious Images: Haneke, Cameron, Egoyan, and the Dueling Epistemologies of Video and Film 91
Vinzenz Hediger

4 Tracking Code Unknown 113
Tom Conley

5 Michael Haneke and the New Subjectivity: Architecture and Film 124
Peter Eisenman

6 Games Haneke Plays: Reality and Performance 130
Brigitte Peucker

7 Figures of Disgust 147
Christa Blümlinger

8 Without Music: On Caché 161
Michel Chion

9 Fighting the Melodramatic Condition: Haneke's Polemics 168
Jörg Metelmann

10 "Mourning for the Gods Who Have Died": The Role of Religion in Michael Haneke's Glaciation Trilogy 187
Gregor Thuswaldner

Part II The Television Films 203

11 A Melancholy Labor of Love, or Film Adaptation as Translation: Three Paths to the Lake 205
Fatima Naqvi

12 Michael Haneke and the Television Years: A Reading of Lemmings 227
Peter Brunette

13 Variations on Themes: Spheres and Space in Haneke's Variation 243
Monica Filimon and Fatima Naqvi

14 Projecting Desire, Rewriting Cinematic Memory: Gender and German Reconstruction in Michael Haneke's Fraulein 263
Tobias Nagl

15 (Don't) Look Now: Hallucinatory Art History in Who Was Edgar Allan? 279
Janelle Blankenship

16 Bureaucracy and Visual Style 301
Brian Price

Part III The German-Language Theatrical Features 321

17 Structures of Glaciation: Gaze, Perspective, and Gestus in the Films of Michael Haneke 323
Georg Seeßlen

18 The Void at the Center of Things: Figures of Identity in Michael Haneke's Glaciation Trilogy 337
Peter J. Schwartz

19 How to Do Things with Violences 354
Eugenie Brinkema

20 Between Adorno and Lyotard: Michael Haneke's Aesthetic of Fragmentation 371
Roy Grundmann

21 Hollywood Endgames 420
Leland Monk

Part IV The French-Language Theatrical Features 439

22 Class Conflict and Urban Public Space: Haneke and Mass Transit 441
Barton Byg

23 Multicultural Encounters in Haneke's French-Language Cinema 455
Alex Lykidis

24 Haneke's Secession: Perspectivism and Anti-Nihilism in Code Unknown and Caché 477
Kevin L. Stoehr

25 The Unknown Piano Teacher 495
Charles Warren

26 Discordant Desires, Violent Refrains: La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) 511
Jean Ma

27 Civilization's Endless Shadow: Haneke's Time of the Wolf 532
Evan Torner

28 The Intertextual and Discursive Origins of Terror in Michael Haneke's Caché 551
T. Jefferson Kline

Part V Michael Haneke Speaks 563

29 Terror and Utopia of Form: Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar 565
Michael Haneke

30 Violence and the Media 575
Michael Haneke

31 The World That Is Known: An Interview with Michael Haneke 580
Christopher Sharrett

32 Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke 591
Roy Grundmann

Filmography 607

Index 619

“This makes the arrival of A Companion to Michael Haneke all the more welcome—for supporters like me, who will find ample evidence of Haneke’s intelligence and enterprise, and for open-minded skeptics willing to risk a change of heart by perusing the largest body of critical, theoretical, and historical work on Haneke so far assembled in one volume. The book’s thirty-two essays have been judiciously chosen and edited by Roy Grundmann, a firstrate scholar of against-the-grain cinema...This gives some idea of the breadth, creativity, and intelligence that distinguish this fine collection of essays on a filmmaker I still stand by as one of the most artfully audacious of our day.” (Film Quarterly, 1 April 2012)

Roy Grundmann is Associate Professor of Film Studies, and Film Studies Program Director in the Department of Film and Television, Boston University. He is co-editor of the multi-volume Blackwell History of American Film. Michael Haneke is one of the most notable directors to have emerged on the global cinema scene in the past fifteen years. After gaining international attention in the 1990s with a string of iconoclastic films that analyze the dysfunctional state of Western society, Haneke has since established himself as one of art cinema’s most creative, controversial, and eloquent social commentators.

A Companion to Michael Haneke is the definitive collection of newly commissioned works exploring Haneke's work in its entirety – from his early work in television and theater, through his prodigious cinematic output, to his 2009 triumph at Cannes. The volume brings together essays by some of the foremost scholars in film studies, as well as interviews with the director himself. Considering the themes that have formed the nucleus of Haneke's work – intergenerational dysfunction and social alienation, colonialism and citizenship, surveillance and pornography, mass culture and media violence, the Companion offers a critical examination of Haneke's oeuvre – from Three Paths to the Lake and Lemmings to Benny's Video, The Piano Teacher, Caché, Funny Games, and the 2009 Palme d’Or winner, The White Ribbon. Designed for comparative literature scholars, students of film studies, Germanists, and today's movie lovers, the Companion to Michael Haneke showcases this enigmatic and complicated director with unprecedented depth and breadth.

"A Companion to Michael Haneke represents a major contribution to Haneke studies. It includes essays by leading film scholars on the German and French language films, and essays on Haneke’s newly available Television work of the seventies and eighties. Grundmann’s introductory survey (Haneke’s Anachronism”) will prove definitive in the field." Kirsten Thompson, Wayne State University

"Forcefully tackling Haneke’s moral and philosophical games, stylistic rigor, and critical success, the first-rate scholars of this volume shed definitive light on the art film and television works of Europe’s most fashionably retró director. This is post-auteurism at its best." Giorgio Bertellini, University of Michigan

"This collection’s range of essays offers a comprehensive account of Haneke’s work in film and television, as well as a number of strikingly original critical interventions. Its coverage of Haneke’s television feature films is particularly thorough and will initiate many Anglo-American readers into this body of work. Haneke is surely one of the most important contemporary artists working in any medium. This book is both a testimony to and a testing of his achievement." John David Rhodes, editor of On Michael Haneke (Wayne State University Press, 2010) and author of Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)

"Vacant since the deaths of Fassbinder, Truffaut, Tarkovsky and Bergman, the throne of European cinema is now claimed by Michael Haneke. A seasoned festival favourite, this master of transnational filmmaking would not stop astounding audiences with his thought-provoking close-ups of families, nations, and hushed histories. Roy Grundmann masterfully orchestrates this truly diverse assembly of insightful and up-to-date scholarship on Haneke. The volume not only brings together more than thirty scholars based in the US, Canada, France, Germany, Austria and elsewhere, but also unites generations, from senior scholars to PhD students, for a uniquely interdisciplinary project." Dina Iordanova, Publisher, The Film Festival Yearbook, http://www.dinaview.com/">www.DinaView.com, University of St. Andrews